Sudden Drop in Rankings
-
I manage a site and this past month have noticed some pretty significant drops in rankings for some of our main keywords. I'm trying to understand why and what I can do to correct it. We did do some 301 redirects a little over a month ago so I've been wondering if that has anything to do with it as Google indexes the new URLs. One thing I did notice in Moz is that it is showing that Google is indexing the new URLs but associating them with the wrong keywords in the wrong location. The company services three locations and each location has a service page on the site. But Moz is showing that in Atlanta, the indexed URL is the Nashville one, etc. Is there any way to affect that?
Another thing to note is that organic search traffic is actually up so it doesn't appear to be affecting them which I find a bit strange.
Just looking for any insight as to things I should be looking into to explain the sudden drops.
Thanks!
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
-
Good organic ranking/Poor local ranking
Hi, I am a local retailer with a physical store in a major US City. My website is very well ranked on major keywords related to my business from an organic result perspective (between 1st and 3rd spot). However, in terms of local results (google place), my website isn't even ranked (except for one specific long tail keyword). Anybody know why? Thank you so much for your help. This is driving me crazy:-)
Technical SEO | | larose370 -
New website's ranking dropped
Hi, Im working on brand new website i didn't even start my link building yet, just added to local directories i slowly started getting my ranking on 3rd page of Google then few weeks ago my ranking fell for all the keywords so now the website doesn't even rank on 10th page. Its been like this for a few weeks now. Here's the website Screenshot http://screencast.com/t/wDWk8sxLw Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | mezozcorp0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Varicose Veins Just Not Ranking
Buonjourno from 6 degrees C damn cold wetherby UK 🙂 This page http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ has remained stubbornly out of the Google rankings for target term "Varicose Veins" Heres what Ive done so far:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
1. Made sure the HTML is optimised for the target term
2. Linked from the home page via a scrolling footer Now i'm not looking for a page 1 result but I'm curious to know why the term hasnt even touched the unexplored backwaters of even page 3. p.s If there is a canonical problem please tell me how you diagnosed that 🙂 Thanks in advance, David NB - Just spotted this page can be access via 2 different URLS (Uppercase W being the difference) http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/
http://www.varicoseveinsurgery.com/varicose-veins/What-are-they/0 -
Organic Traffic Dropping. 404s found. Is this it?
My organic traffic has dropped 20% in the past month. I noticed some major 404 errors today on a very commonly clicked link on our website. I had the developers fix the error today, but then I thought I'd look in Google Webmaster Tools. That's when I saw the attached picture. 2454 404 errors were found. We only have 1500 pages in the entire Google index. Could this massive amount of 404 errors attribute to this drop in organic traffic? dU240 dU240
Technical SEO | | davewjones0 -
Should I update old well-ranked posts?
I have a Wordpress site and I think I have "split content" problem. We use to publish preview info, i.e. "leaked images of iphone 5". Some weeks later, official release with official images. And some weeks later, our own review with quality content and pictures. Sometimes the first post are well ranked, but the best content is in our review. How should I manage that? I tried to make a page of each product and link it, but posts stills rank better than pages. And now I have several pages for the same keyword, ie: mysite.com/2011/08/11/leaked-images-of-iphone-5 mysite.com/2011/09/15/iphone-5-official mysite.com/2011/10/15/iphone-5-mysite-review and all linked in mysite.com/phones/iphone5 ... and mysite.com/tag/iphone5 What do you think is best approach to this kind of site? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | DSG0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0 -
Does a CDN affect search rankings?
I feel kind of stupid asking this, but if i use one it would speed things up quite a bit. It is for a ecommerce website, any guidance on this would be awesome!
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0