Suddenly ranking dropped in US: What actions required to retain?
-
Hi Moz community,
Our website has global audience, visitors and clients. Suddenly our website dropped in rankings for main keyword in US; which is our primary targeting country. Not sure why? This is been happening for last 2 months, we waited it to recover and now trying to fix if we can do anything about it. Is there anything wrong with back-links? What might be the factors contributing here for global website?
Thanks
-
Hi,
There could be a variety of things that could have caused this, but I would start by asking a few questions:
- Did the drop happen quickly? Did it go from positions 1-3 to 20 below in a day or two?
- Is the SERP volatile? Has there been lots of movement for the SERP historically?
- Have other sites in your space seen negative drops? I know there has been a lot of movement in the last few weeks.
Some general things I would jump into to start looking:
-
Core technical elements.
-
Was the page de-indexed somehow?
-
Was the page canonicalized elsewhere?
-
Did the core on-page elements get re-targeted to another term or removed?
-
General health of homepage/site
-
Is your backlink profile healthy? Did you ever purchase links/did someone purchase negative links to your domain?
-
Is your content scraped or duplicated across other sites?
-
Is your website mobile friendly?
-
Does your site load quicker than 5 seconds?
-
As Nikki mentioned, it's also important to look at who is ranking now.
-
What is the DA of their site compared to yours? Is it much higher?
-
Is their quality of content better?
If the drop happened quickly it's likely that something technical went wrong or you've been hit with an obvious penalty.
If it's happened over months, it's probably less obvious and could be multiple things.
I know that's not a straight answer, but those are some starting points I could think of with the information provided. Hope that is helpful!
-
Check the websites of the competitors that outranked you. What's their on page like? Do they have a local presence in the US? Who are linking back to them? Do their sites have a better link profile than yours? Check their estimated traffic per month. Is it higher than yours? You can get the link and traffic data from AHREFS.
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
-
Should I target low competition related keywords to rank my main keyword?
Hi everyone, I created a product review based blog about finding the best outdoor basketball but it's MOZ keyword difficulty is increasing drastically. I'm finding it difficult to rank. Is it a good practice to target low competition related keywords to rank the main keyword?
Algorithm Updates | | rosie16
Please advise, Thank you!1 -
How much do branded search organic traffic & direct traffic impact the ranking for their non-branded topic/keyword?
Hi Moz community, We can see many websites with a reputation will have more number of visitors landing with these two types of traffic mostly (>90%): organic traffic of brand queries and direct traffic. Will these visits help and impact the ranking of these websites for the keywords/topics they been employing? Ex: Moz will have many such visitors. Will this really impact the ranking of Moz for non-brand queries they try to rank for, like "SEO Software". If so, will this have a huge impact or it's just a minor ranking factor. Because we have this with our website and we don't see such boost in rankings compared to our competitors with less direct traffic; where as I been looking at some SEO articles that direct traffic is one of the most important ranking factors. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Consistent drop every time after ranking good for few days: Same experience?
Hi all, We been facing this ranking fluctuation issue for over an year. Every time we made some changes for better optimisation. We improve rank but eventually drop after few days. Most of the changes we employed are On-page like page loading, fixing broken links & redirects, page titles optimisation, etc. When can see the ranking improvement for our main keywords and related keywords for a while and we drop with in a week eventually. I wonder if someone face the same issue and any thoughts on this scenario? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What date tags are required/best to use for articles or other landing pages?
Does anyone have suggestions on which date tag(s) are most important to use and how to use them on the frontend? (i.e. dateModified, dateCreated, and datePublished). The Structured Data Testing Tool is coming up with errors for my article pages, but I'm a bit confused which ones should be in the code vs. showing on the frontend.
Algorithm Updates | | ElsaT0 -
Google traffic drops (October 24th 2014) - Penguin 3.0?
Hi All My client's site http://www.carismaautodesign.com took a bit of a knock around 24th October 2014. Google organic traffic down by ~32%. I am trying to understand if site has been hit by a Penguin refresh (3.0) - and if so why?
Algorithm Updates | | seowoody
If it was, it would appear to be a false negative as the site and backlink profile is clean. The content is perhaps the only area in question... as it's more of a brochure site, therefore content is relatively thin and promotional rather than in-depth/editorial. For example, the gallery pages are very similar in structure, with the images and specification text being the only variation, click on any of the vehicle interiors to see what I mean - http://www.carismaautodesign.com/gallery/mercedes/viano/ You will see the specification text is unique per vehicle interior, but not hugely; Then how could it be? The interiors all contain the same elements just a variation in seating, leather colour, stiching, wood finish etc. Question: Do you think... a.) This IS NOT a Penguin issue but something else (please ellaborate)
b.) This IS a Penguin issue but a false-negative, so do nothing, this will bounce back with next Penguin refresh
c.) This IS a Penguin issue related to content. Merge all gallery pages into one page per vehicle (i.e. one Mercedes Viano Interior page, with all 19 interior galleries as part of the page - thus building one stronger page with more intro text and simple bulleted specification per gallery)
d.) This IS a Penguin issue related to something else (please ellaborate) Thanks,0 -
Google Rankings Jumping Around
Hi, Since January, the Google rankings for one of our sites has been jumping around. Sometimes it's on page 1, then it disappears and comes back around 1 month later. It's strange because it's only a small section of the site that it's happening to. Every other section of the site is doing really well. Just wondered if anyone else is having this problem, or has had it and can suggest any fixes. There are no technical issues, no changes have been made to the site, all I can think is it's Google messing around with their algorithm? Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Karen
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
Kilobytes downloaded per day: poss causes for MAJOR drop?
mid august, i went from averaging about 7 million kb/day but since have been at about 800 thousand. time spent downloading each page went up maybe 30% but pages crawled stayed the same. apart from the speed issue, don't think we've done anything to trigger this (none of the usual suspects like link structure, errors, sitemap, or new code). any other ideas? and is this disastrous for my indexing or am i over-reacting. thanks for your help
Algorithm Updates | | babble0 -
Today all of our internal pages all but completely disappeared from google search results. Many of them, which had been optimized for specific keywords, had high rankings. Did google change something?
We had optimized internal pages, targeting specific geographic markets. The pages used the keywords in the url title, the h1 tag, and within the content. They scored well using the SEOmoz tool and were increasing in rank every week. Then all of a sudden today, they disappeared. We had added a few links from textlink.com to test them out, but that's about the only change we made. The pages had a dynamic url, "?page=" that we were about to redirect to a static url but hadn't done it yet. The static url was redirecting to the dynamic url. Does anyone have any idea what happened? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | h3counsel0