Substantial position drop? - Urgent
-
Have been looking at WMT and discovered that on 10 October there was substantial average position drop, from around 14 to 20.
Does anyone have any ideas why this may have happened?As far as I know there's nothing that we have done could have impacted.
-
Hi,
Do you have both http and https active on the site? You can use something like siteliner.com to check this. I've noticed rankings, clicks and impressions drop off in Webmaster tools on a client site before, and it was actually just registering on the http webmaster tools property instead of https, due to a change made by the developers. Has your traffic also dropped off in Google Analytics on the same day? Or has it remained the same? I notice you say that orders dropped off also, but if traffic hasn't, I'd investigate any dev changes which might have occurred and test through your order process in different browsers/setups. You could also segment your Google Analytics data by browser/OS and check conversions, compared with the previous period, to see if any particular browser has stopped placing orders.
Is your website fairly new? I definitely notice more fluctuation in newer websites, and websites with less traffic.
Hope this helps,
Zoe -
I'd take a look at Analytics and compare the periods before and after the drops, looking at landing pages filtered by traffic medium organic. This should show you which pages have seen the biggest loss, which in turn should give you an idea of what keywords have been effected.
If there are just a few pages then run through a technical audit checklist on these pages to make sure no errors have been introduced - for example a page hasn't accidentally been set to "no index" (I've seen it happen).
You could also compare average position of keywords between two periods in WMT to see where the biggest drops are.
-
I do have Moz Pro, however I won't necessarily be tracking the keywords/pages that is dropped off. At this stage I don't know which they are.
According to the last crawl there had been several substantial increases, I just don't know who to believe!
I've just had an idea I should be able to use a export from WMT and Excel with a few formulas.
-
Difficult really unless you already use something to track your keyword positions, such as Moz Pro or SEMrush.
-
There does seem to have been a traffic drop, or more specifically a drop in orders which would tie up nearly directly to that date.
How is the best way of comparing positions between two dates?
-
Have you double-checked the accuracy of this?
I would first look to see whether traffic has been impacted by the drop, and then go on to check my main keyword rankings. Then I would try to figure out which search queries and pages I've dropped position for, and see if I can spot any patterns.
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
-
SEO Drop
Over the last few months my rank has dropped by around half and for the life of me I can’t see why. There are no warnings on Google Console. Am I missing something? Website: thespacecollective.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
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 -
Drop in indexed pages!
Hi everybody! I've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/ for a little while now. Until recently, everything was great - good rankings for the key terms of 'bird hides' and 'pond dipping platforms'. However, rankings have tanked over the past few days. I can't point my finger at it yet, but a site:thewilddeckcompany.co.uk search shows only three pages have been indexed. There's only 10 on the site, and it was fine beforehand. Any advice would be much appreciated,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code?
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code? http://naturespremiumpestdefense.com/ Thanks, Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ULTRASEM0 -
Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?
Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces) A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since. Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season. Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability. I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog. I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT. Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword. The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users. So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty? Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scott.lucas1 -
Sudden drop in ranking for major search terms
Site bumpbabyandbeyond com au. Help! We have been operating for six years and had steadily built up our ranking for major terms like maternity clothes, maternity clothing, maternity wear, reaching highs of 6, 8 and 10 respectively for AU sites AU wide about six months ago that we have steadily maintained. All of a sudden we have dropped away. A week ago I noticed we had dropped from 6 to 12 for maternity clothes. This morning we are 21! I can't see any obvious reason for this, but believe the eCommerce module of our inventory/pos software has had a recent update - I'm awaiting answers on this. We haven't actively had anyone link building or working on SEO after being badly bitten and shelling out a small fortune for an AU company to do very little over six months - rankings improved rapidly when I sacked them and did some on page minor work myself. But I don't have the time or knowledge to look after the seo, and am on the hunt for reputable white hat assistance. Is there anything obviously wrong that I need to fix ASAP? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catfree0 -
Drop in Traffic on Friday April 20th.
Just curious if anyone noticed a drop in traffic last friday. I got hammered with about a 20% drop overall. Didn't know if there was an update or what. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110