Ranking drop
-
Hello there,
Based on Moz's rank tracker our keywords ranking have been dropping in ranking.
Does anyone know what might be the cause?
We have been building quality "white hat" links which are very relevant to our niche
Thanks,
Robert
-
Keep it easy man. If it is a one position drop, monitor your CTR and whether there are new competitors in your SERPs that have maybe just pushed you down.
-
Hi Robert,
I recommend this all the time, but one thing that may shed some light is the Full SERP Report in the Keyword Difficulty Tool in Moz Pro. It can give you a sense of what your competitors on the SERPs are doing that's helping them pull ahead.
Cyrus Shepard made a quick video on it here.
-
Hi Robert,
It sounds to me like you might just be getting out-competed. Gradual declines in rankings in the absence of content changes or penalties are typically the result of competition. If it had something to do with your link profile, you would expect to see large-scale drops - ditto for Panda-related issues.
I can't see any problem with your anchors, so my guess is that you just have to get back on the link-building grind and perhaps add some new content to freshen up the site itself.
Sucks, but that's the game!
Best of luck moving forward,
Rob
-
If unable to see a sharp drop - unfortunately it is back to basics. SImply have to work through the below. Make differential diagnosis's along the way. Do not discount anything until you are 100% certain.
1. https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
2. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit
3. https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
4. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit
5. https://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial
Hope that assists. Though it is the long way home.
-
Robert
Panda 4.2 rolled out on the weekend of 19 July. It is going to be very difficult to track Panda 4.2 the way google is rolling it out.
Can you go to your WMT's and in search analytics and run a comparison on all 4, but the result I am after is page position from 20 july to date and pre 19 july as far back as you can go. ie run a comparison on page position. The green line.
Is there a difference in page position?
If that is not clear ask and can clarify.
-
It has happened in the last few months. Nothing major but most keywords appear to drop one position down regularly.
-
Hi Robert
When did you start to see the ranking drop and was it for all your terms?
Thanks
-
Yes I have run the site through OSE. Our spam score is 0 out of 17.
Anchor text for our root domain is as follow:
|
wallpapered
|
61
|
258
|
52
|
137
[no anchor text]
|
10
|
92
world map wallpaper
|
9
|
13
|
8
|
15
here
|
8
|
25
|
7
|
38
http://www.wallpapered.com/custom-map-wallpaper
|
6
|
19
wall murals
|
5
|
388
wallpapered
|
4
|
25
[no anchor text]
|
4
|
5
custom map wallpaper
|
4
|
10
www.wallpapered.com/custom-map-wallpaper
|
3
|
4
executive world map
|
3
|
3
source
|
2
|
2
2
|
2
|
8
standard world map
|
2
|
2
i sell on wallpapered
|
2
|
4
old map wallpaper
|
2
|
2
bryant park wallpaper
|
2
|
2
1
|
2
|
8
custom area map wallpaper
|
2
|
3
921653 wallpapered com
|
2
|
4
black white world map
|
2
|
2
classic spring wallpaper
|
2
|
2
vintage map wallpapers
|
2
|
5
|
2
|
5
design blog
|
2
|
6
|
2
|
3
wallpaper maps
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
5
elizabetholwen rootsandpods
|
1
|
5
find out more at the wallpapered com website
|
1
|
1
|
-
Hi Robert,
It is hard to help you with this without having more details on your site itself. There are many things that could cause a ranking drop. Have you run your links through Opensite explorer to gauge their spam score? What sort of anchor text do these links have? What changes did you make around the time of noticing the ranking drop? How long has it been going on?
Sorry to answer your question with more questions but there are so many factors that can cause a ranking drop, so establishing more detail will help the community help you further.
Best
Matt
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
-
Why am i ranking better in canada?
hi, some of my keywords with high volume are ranking on first page in canada, but in the states i am on 3rd pages first result. what factors are contributing this disparity. what can be done here in this case. is it because of my links and tld distribution or some server location thing. what should i do to rank better in the US? i have shared hosting server in singapore.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Upgarded woocommerce 2 to 3 and saw a large drop in rank
Hi guys, I recently upgraded from woocommerce 2 to v3 and rankings have been plummeting. I have double checked all of the schema, markup, technical, speed, etc and it all seems to be the same. The on thing that I did find is that while there used to be about 400 images (products) there are now over 1500 images in the index as all of the thumbnails are not in the sitemap. Would / could this cause the issue? Can i remove all the thumbs from the sitemap? if so any suggestions on how (google returns very little to nothing regarding this). Should i alt text every thumbnail..... Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plahpoy0 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
2 pages ranking for the same term
Hi everyone, I have had two pages ranking on page two of Google for a while now for the same term. I have tried dedicating a page to it but as the other has a url with the search term in Google is ranking both it seems. How can I without deindexing one of the pages help better tell Google which one to rank? I imagine if it only ranked one page I would get a higher result rather than 2 weaker ones? On-site has been done and so has links to the homepage, but the innerpage still ranks also as it has the search term in its url. Would a canonical tag be worth it here? the page is however getting some traffic itself for other terms so I am reluctant to do that. Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdigital0 -
New URL Structure caused virtually All rankings to drop 5 to 10 positions in latest report ?.. Is this normal
Hi All, We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' ) and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago. We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions i.e from 3rd to 10th etc... Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells. I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?.. Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated... thanks Pete .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0