Rankings Shifting for the Past 2-3 Years
-
For the past 2-3 years, my site’s organic rankings have been dramatically shifting, ranking well for a few days and then dropping for a month or two, then ranking again for a few days, and then dropping again. During the time of higher rankings, form submissions increase significantly. The ranking increases or decreases are typically between 10-30 spots each time. I’ve done everything I can think of to address any issues: improved speed, limited 404s, changed the architecture of the site, updated link anchor text, etc. Nothing seems to work.
The site has 88% of its traffic coming from desktop, with 9% from mobile and 3% from tablet. The disparity between desktop and mobile leads me to believe that the ranking issues are mobile-related, especially now that Google is using mobile-first indexing.
I thought dwell time could be an issue, but session duration is 2:07 minutes and bounce rate is under 60%, with an average of 2.27 pages per session. That doesn’t indicate any quality of traffic issues to me.
There are no warnings in Google Search Console, and speed is 58 for mobile and 86 for desktop on Page Speed Insights.
I’ve been doing SEO for 12 years, but this has me stumped. My top suspicions are:
- Speed issues on mobile
- Penalties for redirects from old website to the new website
- Penalties for anchor text for the old brand name instead of the new one.
The site is https://dragonflydm.com
Has anyone seen anything like this? Any ideas?
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
-
What should I do if same content ranked twice or more on Google?
I have a Bangla SEO related blog where I have written article like "Domain Selection" "SEO Tools" "MOZ" etc. All the article has been written in Bengali language. I have used wp tag for every post. I have submit xml site map generated by Yoast SEO. However I kept "no index" for category. I know well duplicate content is a major problem for SEO. After publishing my content Google ranked them on 1st page. But my fear is that most of the content twice or more. The keywords are ranked by post, wp post tag and Archive. Now I have a fear of penalty. Please check the screenshot and please suggest me what to do. uRCHf yq7m2 rSLKFLG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AccessTechBD0 -
Rubber Ball Ranking Results
We noticed a few weeks ago that rankings for the phrase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jayblue
Charity Collection Buckets
Were bouncing between this page
http://www.carefundraisingsupplies.co.uk/fundraising-products/Charity-Collection-Buckets
Rank 16
to this page
http://www.carefundraisingsupplies.co.uk/fundraising-products/fundraising-supplies
Rank 85
So we de-SEO'd the second page and added more content to the first page.
This seemed to lock Google onto the first page at 16, but it then started to slowly slide downwards. We have made a few more on page text tweaks, tried to reduce keywords density all to no avail. Even though overall this site has a better DA and MOZ profile than those ranked 1 and 2 for the phrase, we just cannot seem to get it moving in the right direction. We are just about to apply some quality links to see if that helps. But we are wondering if we are missing something at a technical level, like category structure, Canonicalisation, 301 redirects or something else. Any thoughts?0 -
What is the best way to track rank?
I'm curious what tools and tracking mechanisms everyone uses to track rank, especially with all of the changes in the last year. I've read a ton of articles that say even in 2014, rank will continue to matter, but besides using the keyword rank tool in Moz, I was hoping to learn what everyone else uses to track rank on a keyword and page level (are those two separate things?).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RachelEm0 -
Internal page ranking
If I have a domain: Example.com I want this domain to rank for several keywords. I build a page on the domain called Example.com/glasses If I SEO the page Example.com/glasses with backlinks etc... will that URL come up on google or will it simply bring Example.com up on the SERPS. If I have three keywords, should I make a subpage for each page and SEO that page? Will that make the domain rank for all three keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Sudden and Aggressive Fall in Rankings
I have seen a sudden and aggressive drop in rankings for my site. The site was ranking #4 for rental insurance and now sits at #9. It was ranking #16 for renters insurance and now dropped to #171. We vary anchor text in our link building campaign and focus on getting links from PR3+ sites as well as produce content for quality sites in exchange for being a featured author + link. The site has not been over optimized (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc.). I would appreciate any insight into what could be causing this significant drop in rankings and what my course of action is to reinstate my rankings - Penguin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
My Domain rank is falling but my traffic is improving?
I have been here for one month today and have been reworking many pages to improve my On-Page results for my site www.antiquebanknotes.com I have seen some really nice improvement in my organic, search and non paid keywords. (up 38%, 21% and 29% this week) But last week all of a sudden my domain authority dropped from 10 to 9. Not tragic but still odd since I have been getting some decent results from my optimazations. My competitors have domain authority in the 20's so it's something I am sure I need to work on. I have added links out to relevant sites and added lots of content but my domain authority falls? Is this common when a site makes lots of changes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0