Can one back-link fluctuates ranking of website with thousands of back-links?
-
It happend to our website. We have seen major ranking fluctuations for our website because of one back-link. What kind of links those can be? Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?
-
HI John,
I replied to Patrick.
"Why Google is not stopping them.....": What I mean was, Google claims that they will take care of any bad , low quality or spammy links pointing to us to make sure their they don't affect us. But it's not happening in our case as few links can impact rankings and they did. Is Google really accurate about this?
Thanks,
Satish -
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the detailed response. I have experienced this with couple of links few times, where one or two links are affecting our rankings. I have clear figures and proofs for this. These links are triggering the algorithm or vice-versa. Moreover it's not really taking weeks for such impact. I can see in days.
Thanks,
Satish
-
I think Patrick has asked a lot of fantastic questions around this, but let me just say that it's highly improbable that just one link will cause massive ranking fluctuations like this. Have you done the analysis to see if there are others that have been built that you were not aware of as well?
I'm also a bit confused on your question of "Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?" First off, Google says that they are just devaluing bad links not penalizing, even algorithmically, for them. I don't buy it. I think they're heading in this direction, but they're definitely not there yet.
If you're really concerned about this one link, disavow it and keep moving. Go build good links and develop great content that you can do outreach around in order to get the links that will help you rank.
John
-
Hi there
There are a couple of questions I have:
- Was this an immediate ranking jump? It may have been an algorithm change or a volatile day on the SERPs - you can check with the Panguin Tool.
- Was this one link from a relevant or reputable site? I would be worried that if you pinned it down to one backlink (again, which I am skeptical off), to check that it's not a spammy backlink or has a history of algorithm fluctuations / spammy backlinks itself.
- Did you make any onsite SEO changes to that page or your website? This would also cause ranking changes.
There's a great article from Moz about how long link building takes to influence rankings, I would read into this. Links don't cause immediate change to your rankings, they are thought to take weeks / months, so I would be willing to bet this is something onsite that you did or aligned with an algorithm update. Let me know if this makes sense or you have questions!
Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
How to improve or fix my website ? for an unknown reason bad ranks on Google
Hello, I know that I need to have good quality backlinks, and I am getting backlinks sometime more sometime less. but that is not a problem at this moment i belive. So I am asking someone who can help me and check my website MajorDroid and tells me how can I improve or fix my problem if there is a problem. Because I am very sad when I see this for example: if you search for keyword: oukitel k3 review my website is at page 3, but at same time on page 1 there are only three relevant results, and all other results on page 1 are only partial like OUKITEL K3 Specs Confirmed.... and they are not relevant for users... because they are looking for review. I have the same problem with other keywords also where my page is on second page or third page of Google... and again some other websites with only partial keyword are on first page.... and google claims to offer relevant info for users... now i do not know how google looks my website, or where is the problem ? why quite often my website ranks on second page or third page although competition is not great, and google shows only several relevant results on first page... for example this is review for oukitel k3 I hope you can help me Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zgb0 -
Benefit of getting more then one link from a site?
Hi Guys, Is there any benefit (purely for SEO - link building) to getting more than one link from a domain if you already have 1? From my understanding, even if you had 100 links from a domain, that really counts as 1 for link authority. So from this, i don't see much point in getting more then 1 link. Is this a right assumption? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
OK to have multiple local business structured data on one website?
Hello there, I'm working on implementing local business structured data for a website but we have multiple offices. Is it okay from a Google perspective to add different local business data on different pages of the website, or can I only use one set of local business data site wide? Many thanks, Gill.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
Keyword Ranks Jumping all over? Top 10 to 40 back to top 5?
So thanks to MOZ I now can track my very large website which has several hundred pages built for specific keywords. The problem is that If I have a page built for a keyword like "equipment transport" for example, and one week that keyword will rank top 5 and the next week in the 40's and then all the way back up to top 5 or 10 again. Google is bouncing these pages/keywords around like a trampoline would. How do I stop this. Do I need to make changes to slow down how often I want the pages to be crawled? In my research this is what I am hoping the problem is because my 1200 page site has no consistency on a 1000 keywords. One week 350 increase and the next week 600 decrease. And I track each keywords changes week to week in an excel sheet. Feedback would be greatly appreciated, because until I can get these pages to quit bouncing around so much a lot of my efforts are pretty much a waste as I can seo a top 5 ranked page/keyword that is ranked 40th the next week and back down to top 5 because of the lack of consistency.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwebb0070 -
How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Hi SEO Gurus, I have a question. How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
Positive , negative or neutral impact? I will appreciate if you will provide detailed answer Thank you for your time webdeal0 -
This is kind of a trick question, but if you could only do ONE thing to improve your search ranking what would you do?
This is kind of a trick question, but if you could only do ONE thing to improve your search ranking what would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
Why does Tripadvisor rank higher than my official hotel website?
We have an official hotel website under our brand hawaiihotels.com called www.RoyalLahaina.com. It is a resort in Hawaii. However, Trip Advisor comes before our official website but it doesnt do this for the other websites. Could anyone tell me why this is happening? It is ranking higher for royal lahaina resort
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TSpike10