Why a drop in certain keyword but not others?
-
Hi.
I am looking into a potential clients SEO issues and reasons why their rankings for specific keywords that they ranked for have dropped but others stayed the same or sometimes have improved.
They received a manual spam action that was revoked after some disavow and so on. In May of this year they noticed a huge drop in more generic terms.
The main keyword that was ranked 6th, dropped to 35th yet other keywords rose slightly.
I have noticed this issue for another potential client as well. They ranked 1st for their brand name, then received a spam action that was revoked. Now they do not rank for their brand name but do for other long tail keywords?
Any ideas the best way to investigate this or root out the issue and build to improve rank for more generic keywords?
Thanks
-
Thanks for your response.
Anchor text is where my thoughts lie.
I think there could be something here as they do have lots of exact match anchor terms for their brand name. plus one of the dropped keywords is that term. Not phrase but one word term.
Say their brand name is Gym Shack. They have dropped considerably for the term Gym whilst maintaining or improving for Gyms in England or MMA Gyms.
This is where I am leaning towards.
What can be done here if Google is devaluing the term Gym? Is it the links that need removing or does the focus need to shift somehow?
Thanks
-
These type of scenarios are very hard to diagnose without specific details such as the text of the penalty and what the site is but let me give you a few reasons:
-
Anchor text way over done for the brand or for a main keyphrase. This can result in lowered rankings on that keyphrase while maintaining authority on others.
-
Specific penalty addressing these anchors, particular links that have now been devalued totally, etc. If you had a lot of links to "keyphrase 1" anchors and then Google devalued & penalised those links, you'd rank for other terms but not those.
If the brand name is fairly generic, overcooked anchors would be my first guess - but again, it's just a guess. There are probably 6-10 different potential causes of this.
-
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
-
Massive Drop in Users
A client of mine is seeing crazy drops in users. Feb. 2018 was an all-time high in organic users, over 38,000. However, there has been a steep drop off since then. In November 2018, the number of organic users was at a little over 1,000. The client said there have been no major changes to the site. I have no idea what is happening. Below are things I have done already: - Submitted a disavow file- Fixed URL parameters- Performed an entire site audit. Fixed all site errors and re-wrote new metadata. - Made sure no main pages have been deleted. 301 redirects are in place where necessary. - Started to consolidate low-quality pages. If I had to guess, I would assume this is an E.A.T. related drop. I have no way of knowing though. This is a YMYL site, so we are working to increase E.A.T. However, any insight would be helpful. Rankings are dropping off so quick I'm not sure what else I can do. Please comment if you need more context. PLEASE HELP!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0 -
I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
Hi there, I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc.. however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week. The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good? Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now. Thanks for reading! duGeW
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binkez321 -
Sudden drop in ranking
Hi, I have been on page 1 (around 5-7th) for an area specific phrase (liverpool wedding photographer) for most of last year. I wrote a 2500 word article which was about documentary wedding photography which was meant for a landing page of its own, I decided to put it on my home page. A week later I was second position page 1. This was last November and within a week or at most 14 days I was suddenly dropped to bottom page 1 (9th 10th), then a week later half way down page 2 (14th, 15th) and ending at the bottom of page 2. I had a bad SEO company a few years ago who got me a lot of spammy links so I ended up disavowing a lot of links I had. What are peoples opinions on links now? Do I disavow all directory links, and non wedding or photography related links? Did something major happen to the google algorithm in November? The only other thing I can think of which might cause a penalty is using the keyword "Liverpool wedding photographer" as a link from at leat 10 blog posts back to my home page which is optimised for those keywords. This was something I copied from someone who was ranking nationally for phrases. Just looked at their site now and they are still using this technique and are No1 nationally for their chosen phrase???? I do try and get as many 'good' links as I can (featured weddings on wedding blogs and credits for photography work) but I am totally confused. I thought google likes a lot of content? Very gutted as it could not happen at a worse time as January is the busiest month for bookings and I have been nowhere. any help will be greatly appreciated. Best wishes. David.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WallerD1 -
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
HOW!??! Homepage Ranking Dropped Completely out of Top 100 on Google....
So I'm competing for a very competitive keyword, and I've been on the bottom of page 2 for a while now, ranking for my homepage, which is very content rich and has GREAT links pointing to it. Out of nowhere, last week I dropped completely out of the top 100 or so, yet one of my article posts now ranks on page 6 or so for the same keyword. I have great authoritative links, my on-page is spot on, all of my articles are super super high quality, I don't understand how my homepage, which has ranked for the main keyword for months on page 2, can just completely drop out of the top 100 or so.... Can anyone help provide some insight?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
70% organic traffic drop in October?! Algorithm change?
I oversee content for a client and this past month there was a 70% decrease in traffic. We noticed the hit start on September 29th, and has never rebounded. Any suggestions what this could be (i..e latest Google algorithm update) and or tools I should use to look into it? Nothing is showing up as an alert on Moz analytics and need to address with my client asap.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Why is this Page Ranking for such a competitive keyword?
Hello MOZ Community! I have a question, I am hoping someone can help me understand. I am looking at this URL: http://goo.gl/BkSish ...it is ranking for this Keyword: POS Systems Now, this seems to be a pretty new URL, with few links being generated to it, as seen here: Open Site Explorer: http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/comparisons?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopkeep.com%2Fpos-system Majestic SEO: https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/link-profile?folder=&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopkeep.com%2Fpos-system&oq=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopkeep.com%2Fpos-system&IndexDataSource=F&wildcard=1 QUESTION: Can someone help us understand how or why this page is ranking so well, so quickly, for such a competitive Keyword? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mstpeter0 -
My Site having a drop in traffic with eash passing month
Hi, I'm running a text message site mixsms.com from 2009. It was performing good till Oct 2012. In the end of Nov 2012 I noticed a drop in traffic and then with each passing month I'm getting 1500-2000 unique visitors drop. In Oct 2012 my daily unique visitors were 15000+ each day and now it is just having 2000 after Feb end. I've done several things to improve my site. I changes the template, removed all unnecessary html elements, changed seo structure (optimize with all modern seo techniques). Stop backlinking from Nov 2012 but instead of getting improvements I'm continuously having a drop in traffic. I'll highly appreciate your time if you look into site deeply to findout exact issues that are causing for this drop. I'm even ready to hire any seo consultant if he is pretty sure to get 100% results. Thanks in advance for your support
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | intelmixx0