Help identifying cause for total rank loss
-
Hello,
Last week I noticed one of my pages decreased in rank for a particular query from #8 to #13. Although I had recently made a few minor edits to the page (added an introductory paragraph and left-column promo to increase word count), I thought the reason for the decrease was due to a few newly ranked pages that I hadn't seen before.
In an attempt to regain my original position, I tried to optimize the meta title for the singular form of the word. After making this change, I fetched and rendered the page as Google (status = partial) and submitted the page for indexing (URL only, not including on-page links). Almost immediately after submitting, the page dropped from #13 out of the top 50.
I've since changed the meta title back to what it was originally and let Google crawl and index the page on its own, but the page is still not in the top 50. Could the addition of the page description and left column promos tipped the scales of keyword stuffing? If I change everything back to the way it was originally, is it reasonable to think I should regain my original position below the new pages? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
-
I'll certainly bring it up. Maybe we can use the general concept and agree on a page title that accomplishes the same goal without sacrificing brand consistency.
Thanks again for the great suggestions.
-
lol... I understand.
Still, I would toss something like that out at the next meeting and tell them that it could be a Rocket Fuel. :0
-
That's a very interesting approach! I like the idea, but although it may be effective in gaining clicks and thus positively impacting our rank, our organization is very focused on maintaining a high level of professionalism, so informal title tags may not be suitable for us. I appreciate the suggestion, though!
-
We don't even think about singular or plural any more when writing title tags.
Here is a suggestion. When you visit a news site and see the content promotion ads from Taboola, Outbrain and others, read their captions. Those captions are designed to elicit clicks often to the point of being spammy, suggestive, explicit or vulgar. The people who write those title tags are experts. They know how to get the clicks and getting the clicks, I believe, is a huge ranking factor in the organic SERPs.
I have learned a lot from them and although I really dislike a lot of their ads they can give you an education. So, if I was selling foam rollers, I might consider title tags like...
Foam Rollers - Get yo' bones straight
Foam Rollers for when you back is out of whack !
Those are just very quick efforts and you can certainly do better because you know the product and how people use it. If there was a lot of money to be made selling foam rollers I would be spending a LOT of time to get a great title tag that makes people want to click into your webpage.
-
Awesome Joel! Keep me posted if you need anymore help!
-
Thanks for answering. Luckily we have other pages that rank on page 2 for that term. They are not really optimized for that keyword, but I'm reluctant to make any changes at this point!
Focusing on a readable message makes the most logical sense. We second-guessed this strategy based on the decreasing rank and thought we might be losing out by not including the singular form of the word, which is searched about 10 times more often than the plural.
-
^ This is a great practice.
-
is it reasonable to think the page would return to a similar position next time it is indexed?
I can't give you a confident answer. I know of situations where people made a lot of title tag changes in a short amount of time and the pages went deep into the SERPs and did not recover to any reasonable rankings for a long time.
At our office we rarely tweak title tags, when we do, we enter the details into our SEO log and wait a month or more before trying something new. Also, when we write title tags today we focus on a very readable message that is enticing instead of gunning keywords as was common a few years back.
-
Hi there,
Thank you for the quick reply! I am actually getting my ranking from a keyword tracker I have configured in Moz as I realize performing a search would yield inaccurate results from personalized search.
As for the sitemap, it has been properly submitted and is updated on the first of each month. Canonical tags are also set up correctly and have not been recently modified.
I'll take a look at some of the other links to see if I can find any helpful information there.
Thanks!
Joel
-
Hi there,
Thanks for the reply. I thought the same thing about an adjustment to the title tag making a small difference. That is why I was so surprised when the page dropped in rank so significantly. Unfortunately the multiple changes to the page make it impossible to isolate the detrimental factor, but if I revert all of the changes, is it reasonable to think the page would return to a similar position next time it is indexed?
-
You made a number of changes in a very short time. Keep in mind that google has lots of different servers, delivering SERPs pulled out of different data bases, with experimental algos running all of the time, new data going in, old data going out, and normal daily flux overprinting all of that.
To determine what is really happening, make one change and wait at least a couple of weeks before you make any judgement.
Also, for a query like "foam roller" there is going to be some competition, enough that a small tweak to a title tag is unlikely to make a huge difference.
If you change "Foam Rollers | OPTP" to "Foam Roller | Shop Premium Foam Rollers | OPTP".... that is a really small tweak that does nothing but make it a little repetitive. I would, instead go for something that.....
*** adds a value proposition like "free shipping"
*** elicits clicks such as... "over 100 varieties"
*** or broadens your keyword reach such as.... "for therapy and massage"..... "for painting and texture finishing"... depending upon what type of rollers you sell.
-
Hi there
One of the best ways to track your positions is to pay attention to your Average Position in Google Webmaster Tools. Reason being, with Google Personalized Search, the rankings you see while doing a search are going to be completely different than the search I would do. You can learn more about personalized search from this Whiteboard Friday. What Google Webmaster Tools does here is takes keywords and queries across multiple factors (location, device, browsing/search history, etc), and returns an average position for your site.
You can also look into Moz Keyword Tracking and SEMRush.
Before you change things, check the resources you have to see if in fact you are really losing positions, or if it's just a fluctuation.
A couple of suggestions I do have for you:
Product Schema.org
Check your sitemap and make sure it's properly submitted to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools I would also check your URL structures and canonical tags Check your information architecture
Lastly, check this KISSmetrics ecommerce SEO resource and this one for Search Engine Land Hope this all helps! Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My rankings are not stable. Do I need to be worry about it
Hi, My client has an ecommerce website. He is ranking on top for many strong keywords. However with two prime keywords he is unstable. My client's business is in UK. Hence we are checking in Google UK. We are noticing that from 4rth Dec that our single keyword is unstable and home page at times ranks in top 10 and at times out of the picture. Please help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Help! Is this what is called "cloaking"?
Friend asked me to look at her website. Ran it through screaming frog and BAM, instead of 4 pages i was expecting it returned HUNDREDS. 99.9% of them are for cheap viagra and pharmaceuticals. I asked her if she was selling viagra, which is fine, I don't judge. But she swears she isn't. http://janeflahertyesq.com I ran it through google site:janeflahertyesq.com and sure enough, if you click on some of those, they take you to canadien pharmacys selling half priced blue pills. a) is this cloaking? if not, what is going on? b) more importantly, how do I we get rid of those hundreds of pages / de-indexed She's stumped and scared. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all in advance and for the work you do.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TeamPandoraBeauty0 -
Duplication Effects on Page Rank and Domain Authority
Hi Does page rank and domain authority page rank drop due to duplication issues on a web domain or on a web page? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy10 -
Does showing the date published for an article in the SERPS help or hurt click-through rate?
Does showing the date published for an article in the SERPS help or hurt click-through rate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
How do I make a content calendar to increase my rank for a key word?
I've watched more than a few seminars on having a content calendar. Now I'm curious as to what I would need to do to increase ranking for a specific keyword in local SEO. Let's say I wanted to help them increase their rank for used trucks in buffalo, NY. Would I regularly publish blog posts about used trucks? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Website that lost ranking and now starting to recovery
Hello guys,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WayneRooney
About a month ago we got in the webmaster tool a message that saying that we have unnatural links to the website.
We got drop from 200 keys that was in page 1-2 to pages 5-8.
We check our links and notice that someone links more then 1000 links to our site. We apply for reconsideration request plus we send the file with the links to Google to ask to remove. Yesterday we got message from Google that say : Manual spam action revoked.
We check today the ranking and we saw that from 3 keys that was in the first page, now we are with 24 in the first page. Very good improvement but still very far from the 130 keys that was in the first page a month ago. I wanted to ask, what can we expect ?
Are we gonna get the lost ranking now ?
Is this happen overnight ?Maybe the big change will be in the next penguin update ? Bottom Line, what is the chance to get back the ranking as we had before ?
This is the most important thing right now... Thank you0 -
Do rss feeds help seo in 2013?
I have seen answers for this back in 2012 but as we all now things have changed in 2013. My question is Do rss feeds help seo in 2013? Or does google see it as duplicate content (I see that the moz site has RSS ...)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero0 -
Big loss in Google traffic recently, but can't work out what the problem is
Since about May 17 my site - http://lowcostmarketingstrategies.com - has suffered a big drop in traffic from Google, presumed from the dreaded Penguin update. I am at a loss why I have been hit when I don't engage in any black hat SEO tactics or do any link building. The site is high quality, provides a good experience for the user and I make sure that all of the content is unique and not published elsewhere. The common checklist of potential problems from Penguin (such as keyword stuffing, web spam and over optimisation in general) don't seem relevant to my site. I'm wondering if someone could take a quick look at my site to see any obvious things that need to be removed to get back in Google's good books. I was receiving around 200 - 250 hits per day, but that has now dropped down to 50 - 100 and I fee that I have been penalised incorrectly. Any input would be fantastic Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ScottDudley0