Webpage has bombed outside of Top 50 for search term in one week. What's the cause?
-
I've been monitoring the performance of some pages via the email Moz sends every week, and until this week two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected.
What could be the cause for this? I've looked at Google Webmasters for an indication of a penalty of some sort but there is nothing glaringly obvious. I've no messages on there, and I haven't bought a load of spam links at all.
What else could I check?
-
"two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected."
Sometimes, if you have two pages that are ranking for the same search query it's not uncommon for Google to decide that only one of the pages needs to be presented to the user. If both are serving the same user intent then essentially Google may consider it (semantically) duplicate content, despite the fact that both pages may be worded differently, etc.
From my experience of having multiple pages ranking for the same keyword, the pages will keep battling it out in the SERPs bouncing up and down. One week, there'll be a cluster of 3 ranking terribly. The next week one will shoot up, while the other is nowhere to be seen. Personally I've found that Google seems to prefer it if there's only one page ranking for the term (it's an easier decision for Google to make and it won't get so confused which one to rank as more relevant to the query). By merging similar pages, I find that it ends up being stronger in Google as it's not having to compete in the SERPs with similar pages on your website.
I hope that helps at all, even if it's only from anecdotal evidence.
-
Hi Mick,
The first thing to do is always verify the ranking change. Open up an incognito window in Chrome, search the term and see if it has dropped there as well. Google fluctuates quite a bit and sometimes ranking shifts are ephemeral and will return.
Second, we do find that there is far more fluctuation beyond page 1. Whether this is due to cruder metrics, lack of stabilization by engagement metrics, etc. is unknown, but what is certain is that greater fluctuation seems occur the deeper you get in the search results. I would not be highly concerned with this rankings loss at face value.
However, there are some things you can check.
- Have you lost any links pointing to this page recently
- Have you made any substantive changes to the site, such as internal link structure
- Have you introduced alternate content on your site that may now outrank this page
These are just a couple of the first steps you can look at.
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
-
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Why one of my top pages dropped?
Hello here. Our website, virtualsheetmusic.com, is pretty popular in the sheet music realm, and we used to rank on the first page for the keyword "violin sheet music" until a few weeks ago with our violin dedicated page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html But a couple of weeks ago we dropped to over the 5th page on Google (I can't even find us!) and I have no idea why. Most of our top ranking pages are still there though. This never happened before, after 17 years on the web. Do you have any idea why that could have happened?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Need a layman's definition/analogy of the difference between schema and structured data
I'm currently writing a blog post about schema. However I want to set the record straight that schema is not exactly the same as structured data, although both are often used interchangeably. I understand this schema.org is a vocabulary of global identifiers for properties and things. Structured data is what Google officially stated as "a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it..." Does anybody know of a good analogy to compare the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
What was your experience with changing site url's?
I work with a company that is about to move to a new platform. Because the category and page structure is different every almost every url but the home page will need to be 301 redirected. I know how to do this and am pretty sure I will find and fix 99% ahead of time and not have too many 404's showing up in webmaster tools to clean up. My question is has anyone who is reading this post had to do this before and what was your experience with organic traffic after you made the switch. I am predicting that even if I successfully redirected 100% of the url's there would be some loss for a couple of months just due to the fact that we are making a major change. My bosses are asking if there will be any loss and I need to tell them what to expect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentH0 -
Blocking Certain Site Parameters from Google's Index - Please Help
Hello, So we recently used Google Webmaster Tools in an attempt to block certain parameters on our site from showing up in Google's index. One of our site parameters is essentially for user location and accounts for over 500,000 URLs. This parameter does not change page content in any way, and there is no need for Google to index it. We edited the parameter in GWT to tell Google that it does not change site content and to not index it. However, after two weeks, all of these URLs are still definitely getting indexed. Why? Maybe there's something we're missing here. Perhaps there is another way to do this more effectively. Has anyone else ran into this problem? The path we used to implement this action:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbake
Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters Thank you in advance for your help!0 -
How should I handle URL's created by an internal search engine?
Hi, I'm aware that internal search result URL's (www.example.co.uk/catalogsearch/result/?q=searchterm) should ideally be blocked using the robots.txt file. Unfortunately the damage has already been done and a large number of internal search result URL's have already been created and indexed by Google. I have double checked and these pages only account for approximately 1.5% of traffic per month. Is there a way I can remove the internal search URL's that have already been indexed and then stop this from happening in the future, I presume the last part would be to disallow /catalogsearch/ in the robots.txt file. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0