Sudden drop in rankings over 7 days

[UE-Web]

Hello fellow SEOs,

I am having a few issues with one of the sites I manage. The site in question has dropped for a number of terms in the last 7 days, including:

• logo design - dropped 2 places, now 19th
• logo design uk - dropped 2 places, now 8th
• logo designer - dropped 3 places, now 20th
• bespoke logo design - dropped 3 places, now 10th

I'm worry that the site might drop for more terms if I just leave it alone. I haven't made any changes to the site but I have noticed that our number of inbound links has increased by 58% in the last 7 days.

I have put the site through OSE and used the spam analysis tool. There's only one domain linking to my client that has an orange spam flag but this link isn't newly acquired.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Bigb06]

Hello,

There was a Google Update Quality in June, so this update may have been impacted your rankings.

More info here : http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/

[UE-Web]

Hi Andy,

Yes, I heard about the local pack ads. Can't blame Google though, it's a good business opportunity from their perspective.

I will monitor the rankings closely and watch for any further drops. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen!

Thanks for your help.

• Matt

[Andy.Drinkwater]

That sounds very likely Matt. As we know, Google is doing a lot more with local results now. We now have to contend with 4 ads and then a local pack. Wait until we get the ads in the local pack as well!

With it only being fairly minimal drops, I think you would have to also take into account that it might not be what you are doing, but what other sites have done. If any other sites have done a big push, it might just have pushed you down a little. Always a difficult call that one though, but I do see it a lot.

-Andy

[UE-Web]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the reply.

The software we use takes a few days to update and the last update was 06/07/16 (UK date format). When looking at movements over the last 30 days it still shows that rankings are down over this period.

Interestingly, it was around a month ago that I changed the page title of the homepage and inner landing pages to be location specific.

However, the rankings for more general terms "logo design" and "logo design uk" did increase in rank after making this change, it's only now that they have decreased again.

The site now occupies position 1 on the organic SERP and position 1 in the local pack for "logo design london". Could it be that the reshuffle is due to the location based changes?

EDIT: Sorry, I should also add that we use Analytics SEO to see link acquisition. I believe it gathers data from Majestic SEO and Search Console.

Thanks

Matt

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

With just 2-3 places, do you feel this is anything more than just daily fluctuation, or are positions creeping even further down?

What are you using to see new links? OSE isn't always doing to be able to capture new links so quickly. How much focus is given to the page content?

-Andy