Drop in SERPS and little movement after redesign
-
I took over a project in mid-March 2015. Rankings went from 5th page to roughly #11 - #13 (but never into first page).
Launched a redesign on August 15, 2015. Rankings dropped from #11 - #13 down to #20.
Weird part: On 3 different Mondays since Mid-August, I have noticed that the rankings shoot back up to about #11 in the morning, then drop back down to #20 by the evening.
Three questions:
1. Has anyone seen a drop like this after redesign? (Assuming you kept the same content, just different layout).
2. Did it seem like the redesign resulted in some sort sandbox effect, where the rankings wouldn't move for a period of time?
3. Any advice on how to get it moving again? Or is this just a function of time?
Ps. The interior pages are moving well.
domain: getinjuryanswers.com
KW: San Diego Personal Injury Lawyer, Personal Injury Lawyer San Diego
I understand these are hyper-competitive terms. What puzzles me is how calcified the rankings appear to be.
-
Hi,
Thank you for your response. I did make some slight changes, and that may have been enough to trigger a drop.
For tracking I use Moz, AHREFs, SEMRush, and also Google Incognito using a VPN (I'm overly thorough).
I like your idea about maximizing the areas I'm ranking well for. In fact, that's what I started doing this past weekend. Really focused on getting every interior page on the first page.
Thank you again for your detailed response. I really appreciate it.
-
Hi There
A redesign can definitely impact rankings. I also notice some slight architectural changes? The removal of "Cases" from the main navigation, among other things.
The trick is, there's tons of moving parts in any ranking situation like this.
Also, what rank tracker are you using? There's going to be a lot of localization/personalization/fluctuation in effect. Google is likely greatly varying rankings by location, user metrics, search history etc. Are you using a de-personalized rank checker? I like Authority Labs or Advanced Web Ranking for daily rank checking.
FYI, I just ran it through the Firefox Rank plugin and got #19 and #18 for your two keywords (I'm in Massachusetts).
Also, for all sites I track I tend to see way more ranking fluctuation for page 2 and beyond in general.
I would really focus on best practices - like great UX, local SEO efforts, CTR optimization - all the "known" things you can really control.
Something you can do - go to Search Console - and make sure all the queries you are ranking well for have the best title/descriptions and snippets for those SERPs to improve your user metrics for the site overall.
-
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback. Yes, we debated a lot about whether that pic would be a good choice. I think I'll try something else.
I appreciate your feedback on the Pagespeed. I used Autoptimize. PM me and I can send you some great info about how to get the PageSpeed in the 90's for both mobile and desktop.
Thanks again.
-
I looked at the current site and the previous one in the wayback machine.
Just my opinion but the image of the two attorneys would put me off. I liked the one of the happy couple on the old site. I'm sure they are wonderful guys but they look pissed.
Site is very nice and fastest WP I've seen in Pagespeed.
Nice job. I'd change that pic... Respectfully!
-
Hi, thanks for the response. That could be it. This new design is a lot nicer than the old one, but maybe something about it doesn't sit right with people.
Thanks for the feedback.
-
Visitor engagement has become a very important ranking signal. If the design of the pages has changed, is it possible that visitors don't engage the site as strongly as they did in the past?
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
-
Review stars not longer appear in SERPs
Our healthcare directory which directs visitors to clinics lost it's review stars in SERPs. Looking for any guidance on how to get this back. https://www.healthyhearing.com/hearing-aids/31312-hearing-improvement-center-llc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephaniemeyers100 -
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
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.0 -
Is our Third Party Subdomain hurting our SERPs?
Hello! Our Moz report under the root domain godelta.com displays 696 high priority issues that we cannot control that are all caused by a third party subdomain. promotionalproducts.godelta.com We don’t have any control of the SEO on the third party website. Our blog posts link to the third party subdomain from our blog subdomain. blog.godelta.com Is the third party subdomain affecting our SERP and should we replace the subdomain with its own domain name? Hopefully we can clear this up and end the debate with our internal team and our HubSpot account manager. David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wakadaca0 -
Site dropped after recovery
Hi everybody! I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp". This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now. Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK. Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
What to do after a sudden drop in traffic on May 8?
Hello, I own Foodio54.com, which provides restaurant recommendations (mostly for the US). I apologize in advance for the lengthy questions below, but we're not sure what else to do. On May 8 we first noticed a dip in Google results, however the full impact of this sudden change was masked by an increase in Mother's Day traffic and is only today fully apparent. It seems as though we've lost between 30% and 50% of our traffic. We have received no notices in Google Webmaster Tools of any unnatural links, nor do we engage in link buying or anything else that's shady, and have no reason to believe this is a manual action. I have several theories and I was hoping to get feedback on them or anything else that anyone thinks could be helpful. 1. We have a lot of pictures of restaurants and each picture has its own page and these pages aside from the image are very similar. I decided to put a noindex,follow on the picture pages (just last night) especially considering Google's recent changes to image search that send less traffic anyways. Is there any way to remove these faster? There's about 3.5 million of them. I was going to exclude them in robots.txt, but that won't help the ones that are already indexed. Example Photo Page: http://foodio54.com/photos/trulucks-austin-2143458 2. We recently (within the last 2 months) got menu data from SinglePlatform, which also provides menus to UrbanSpoon and Yelp and many others, we were worried that adding a page just for menus that was identical to what is on Urbanspoon et all would just be duplicate content so we added these inline with our listing pages. We've added menus on about 200k listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeVH
A. Is Google considering this entire listing page duplicate content because the menu is identical to everyone else?
B. If it is, should we move the menus to their own pages and just exclude them with robots.txt? We have an idea on how to make these menus unique for us, but it's going to be a while before we can create enough content to make that worthwhile. Example Listing with Menu: http://foodio54.com/restaurant/Austin-TX/d66e1/Trulucks 3. Anything else? Thank you in advance. Any insight anyone in the community has would be greatly appreciated. --Mike Van Heyde0 -
Xpath to scrape date from google serp
Anyone managed to scrape the date from a google serp? I can get title, link etc. but the date just eludes me...please help! Here's an example of the kind of code google is returning: Latest UK News Headlines - Mirror.co.uk <cite>www.mirror.co.uk/news/</cite>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaspalX
Cached
-
Similar
You +1'd this publicly. Undo
13 Jan 2011 – Get the latest News and Headlines from the Daily Mirror newspaper. Read breaking bulletins, front page reports, daily articles and celebrity ...1 -
SERP Experience After You Resubmit Your Site to Google
Hello Everyone, We suddenly noticed that our keywords fell off the map and discovered that porn had been placed (via.htaccess redirects and masking) on our site. The porn links caused Google to drop us.We scrubbed our .htaccess file and asked Google to reindex our site 3 weeks ago.Does anyone have experience with reindexing?If so, how long were you down and did your keyword positions return eventually?Thanks,Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | impressem0 -
Google isn't displaying the www. for my site in the SERPS
I noticed that every other site url in the serps for my main keywords has a www. on their display url except mine. I have the site set to display the www. Can this potentially hurt my SEO and what can I do to fix this? Thanks Aaron. www.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | afranklin0