I changed settings in search console and my rankings dropped significantly?
-
hi reader,
3 weeks ago i changed international targeting setting in search console to USA and 3 weeks. ago i was ranking pretty fine in the US. now i am out of top 100.
is it search console or other reason?
-
I did the same with my website and facing the same issue.
-
It is possible that this happened by changing international targeting. Also, check if Google had any algorithm updates at that time as well.
-
The international targeting setting is deceptively powerful and I have seen it wreak havoc.
I wouldn't expect it to cause problems with US rankings if you change it to be more focused on US so if you made other changes around the same time it is probably a good idea to look into what you can test/roll back.
The good news is when I have seen this setting cause problems I've seen the problems reverse pretty quickly after switching the setting back so if you do determine that there wasn't anything else around the same time then it could be worth testing switching that back.
Hope that helps!
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
-
My Website Not Showing In Google English Search Results
My website is not visible on Google English. Selecting the language of Google in Hindi, Spanish, etc., my pages are visible in search results.
International SEO | | Jude_Wix0 -
Incorrect homepage country variant appearing in search resutls
Hi, Background I have an international site with 32 country homepages within the same domain: eg www.domain.com/en-gb/
International SEO | | coma99
www.domain.com/fr-fr/
www.domain.com/de-de/
www.domain.com/es-es/ and so forth We use IP redirection on the root www.domain.com (which has no HTML page of its own) to divert the user to their relevant country homepage. Within each country homepage we include: (a canonical link to itself) ... (hreflang alternates to all instances of other homepages including itself ) Our Google Crawl bot is located in Germany and so when it crawls our root www.domain.com it takes the title and description from its destination url which in crawlbots case is www.domain.com/de-de/ because of the IP redirect. What is the problem I am trying to solve? Every variation of local Google results (eg UK/FR/IT/US) displays at the top the crawled root www.domain.com page with German title/description. How can I stop this happening? Surely adding appropriate hrefs and canonicals to every homepage instance is sufficient for Google to display to you your relevant country homepage variant instead!? Thanks0 -
How i rank in Latin America and Spain?
Hi everyone! I need to rank my site with Spanish content in Latin America and Spain. Do I choose a neutral Spanish to try to rank in every country or make content for each country? If you choose a neutral Spanish, which is the most indicated (Spain, Colombia, Mexico, other)?
International SEO | | Ewerton.RD0 -
Wants to Rank Well in Multiple Countries
We have been using moz subscription from last few months & are quite happy so far. We just wanted to explore more out of it & wanted to understand how to approach the optimization for having us rank well in US. At the same time we don't wanted to lose upon what we have achieved till now. I have read through some blog posts & found that changing the international targeting in GWT can also hurt. My vision is to rank well in multiple countries but at the same time do not lose rankings in India. Any help here would be appreciated so whatever we do, we do it right.
International SEO | | fourseven0 -
Lost local organic rankings and international issues
Hi Everyone, Hoping we can get some help from our fellow Mozzers (Mozee's? Mozites?) We have 3 TLD's .com.au .co.uk & .com We noticed an issue a couple of weeks ago where we suddenly lost a lot of our search rankings for keywords on the .com.au site that we'd been top with for a long time. A lot of our Australian visitors were coming through our US site. US & UK sites got increased ranking results. We fixed up what we thought were the issues (Potentially HREF Lang issues and old sitemap issues). Google Search Console is still telling us we have some HREF Lang Errors, (but this could be waiting an updated crawl as the number is decreasing) Our main domain example.com is now showing up as first result in google.com.au search and the example.com.au doesn't show up until page 4 (prior to 2 weeks ago it was number 1) Any input would be appreciated...
International SEO | | tinyme0 -
Search visibility increase with international SEO
Hi Moz Community, I am wondering if there is any tool and/or any sort of standard increase in search visibility I can assume that we will have with our website if we expand to start targeting Spanish with our site. At the moment we receive about 6000-7000 visits a day with 75% of that coming from the US and UK. I am wondering is there any way to make a rough assumption on visibility that will increase by launching a new Spanish speaking website. It would be a subdirectory, not a subdomain or gTLD. I am struggling to find a concrete answer on this and i'd like to make a semi-accurate forecast of the traffic we can expect based on the increase in search visibility that our Spanish language site will provide us. Thanks
International SEO | | Brian_Dowd0 -
Getting A Sub Domain To Out-Rank The Main Domain
Hi, We have a prospective client who currently have a sub domain setup for each language, they all have the same content as the main domain. The problem is that the main domain is written in English (but not UK English), and they want the UK sub domain to outrank it (it's the other way round at the moment). Effectively, there are duplicate content issues here and as a result it looks like Google have chosen to keep the main domain (as it has more authority) and lower the UK sub results in its rankings. Is there a feature in webmaster tools where you can target subdomains to a location (I know you can do this with a main domain). Additionally, any other tips for the above would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance,
International SEO | | jasarrow0 -
A google ranking problem
HI, Thought I would try SEOMoz out for a while and I am going to dive straight into my initial problem. I have my client moving up nicely in local Google search within my country but the problem is he seems to have actually slipped down a place when I search on google.com/ncr. (and on Rank Tracker) He does sell locally but is a worldwide supplier of his product and wants to obviously rank well everywhere. I understand why he has moved up locally but don't get the shift down internationally. So, 1. If everyone's Google is forcing local search results on everyone, how do you market better internationally. 2. Noticed that his competitors are all getting clever and now using keywords in their URL. Two guys are new on first page Google just because they have Keyworded urls. (killing me). The one guy has one backlink!! (although the client does have a keyworded URL stashed away but we don't want to got that route because we like to keep things 'white hat') The client is happy because when he searches he see's his site moving up nicely but I have a conscience and I am going to have to tell him whats going on. (that his Google is showing local results) I hope that all makes sense. Thanks Mike
International SEO | | MIkeCape0