Are the latest Ranking Reports counting the new large format site links as positions?
-
Received my weekly ranking report this morning and noticed a specific keyword that I've been ranking in the 3rd or 4th spot has dropped a significant amount of positions. I tested the results myself and it appears the site links of the manufacturer are being counted as positions? My keyword has me in the 3rd position (although it is much lower on the physical page now because of the new format).
I'm really wondering how this will affect organic listings going forward - this new format could be a game changer.
-
Hey all!
So, we recently released a fix for our tools that solves this issue of counting those site links towards the top 10. If you do see this happening in your rankings in SEOmoz, though, feel free to email us at help@seomoz.org any time. Thanks again for the heads up Jamie!
-
Aaron,
If you could include me in on the answer - I'd appreciate it also. I just noticed this on some of my keywords for sites that aren't big brand names, but have the keyword in their URL. Pushed me down 5 or 6 spots on the first page.
-
Aaron,
Please also let us know - via our pro address or here, whichever.
-
Hey Jamie,
This is an interesting issue! I'm not sure if it's how we want to be calculating rankings, so I'm going to open up a customer service request about this and try to look into it ASAP. Thanks for letting us know! I'll get back to you over email at your PRO email address. Talk to you then!
-
Perhaps.. but I think this is really connected to being 'good for the user' - as cliche as it sounds. If Google sees clickstream abnormally 'high' for position 1 for brand terms, then they are sure this is what the user wants.. so why not expand those site-links to allow for better landing pages for the user. When searching for 'Gap' why not already have the options for 'mens', 'womens', 'baby', etc. And when searching for 'nordstroms shoes' - why not already have the option for 'boots', 'sandals', 'pumps', etc.
Personally I think its a good thing for people to find what they want faster.
I'd bet 95% of people would not be happy landing on an affiliate site when they meant to find the brand site..
-
I think this is also Google's way of saying, "Hey, you want to compete with brand terms and be relevant on the SERP, you need to be using Adwords." Going to pay really close attention to my first page organic visits over the next few weeks and see how getting pushed down further on the page affects our traffic.
-
Totally agree with you Jamie regarding it being a game changer. Branded terms where competitors were trying to rank organically are now seriously pushed down due to jumbo sitelinks. For local businesses, Google is also embeddeding local place page snippets - it ends up taking up half of the SERP real estate!
I imagine it will get harder for SERP trackers to scrape - needing to differentiate between large sitelinks and actual organic listings.
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 happens if we remove all the links to internal pages from our homepage?
Hi Moz community, We wanna give a try by removing all the links from homepage to internal pages and keep just a free trial button. Will this impact our SEO anyway? We have nearly 15 important internal pages at 2nd and 3rd hierarchy level. They may drop in rankings but we want to risk for few days to understand how it works. Your opinion please! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Issue with Category Ranking on Page 1 vs. Homepage Ranking on Page 2
A client has a high-volume keyword that is rendering different results, whether it is on page one or page two of Google SERPs. If the keyword is on page one, ONLY the category page is ranking. When the keyword bumps off to page two, BOTH the category AND the homepage are ranking. This is happening on our IP and theirs, incognito and personalized searches. This has been happening since February. Any thought/insights would be greatly appreciated, thank you!!!!
Algorithm Updates | | accpar0 -
Site´s Architecture - Categories . What´s the best in my case?
My Dear friends of MOZ, I´ve got you a case that has been driving me crazy for 2 weeks, Im doing an SEO audit for big brand that sells electronics. Since they sell all kind of electronics, and are very popular the site is quite big and has several categories. Now...Im working particularly in a kind of micro-site that sells two kind of products that are very similar but not the same. Lets say in this site they are selling super-light-weight-Laptops and tablets, so if you look the site its a Laptop/Tablet site. But the site is not under a laptop/tablet directory, some pages are under laptop and others in Tablet directory . For example : Home page URL: /light-laptops/home.asp ; Products general page page URL is light-pads/products.asp ; and each single product page is under laptops or pads according the type of product. From my point of view, they should create a new directory called /light-laptops-pads/ and single directories for products, and case studies, etc.. Since they want to show both products together when you click in products (off course they will be creating sub-directories for the two types of products). At the begining I thought they were really mistaken, but now that I see that all light-pad content is in one folder and light-laptops content is in another, and the site jumps from one category to the other I am a little bit confused. PLEASE HELP ME PD: I want to make clear that general categories like products, case studies , contact us, solutions pages are in some cases under /light-pad/ directory and in other cases under /light-laptops / directory PLEASE PARDON MY ENGLISH!
Algorithm Updates | | facupp10 -
Recommended action for site hit by penguin ?
What is more advisable, though there surely could be debate on this? Back in '07 till sometime around a year ago it seems our site got hit by google's updates, no manual action though, and have seen in past few months disavowed what we could find as well as deleted a lot of links. We are also working on getting word out on the brand as well and trying to get on some business websites to have articles and offer some discounts. Our keyword rankings seem stuck in limbo the past year or so though. Some main keywords for example seem stuck around page 8 when they used to be on page 1. Question is, can what seems to be a penguin update be recovered from? Is Google likely to refresh the algorithm? Also could starting a new site be more worth the investment - starting fresh with natural links, etc And if googles system could pick up that the site is run from same ip, etc. would they care? Also the keyword competition one of Moz's tools said around 46% if that makes a difference for one of the main keywords. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | xelaetaks0 -
Quickest way to deindex a large number of pages
Our site was recently hacked by spammers posting fake content and bringing down our servers, etc. After a few months, we finally figured out what was going on and fixed the issue. However, it turns out that Google has indexed 26K+ spammy pages and we've lost page rank and search engine rankings as a result. What is the best and fastest way to get these pages out of Google's index?
Algorithm Updates | | powpowteam0 -
Affect in SERPs when moving footer links off the homepage
I have several pages that rank highly in the SERPs and these pages are linked directly to my homepage in the footer. I want to clean up my footer because I have too many site wide links but don't want to hurt the SERP rankings during the transition. Will removing these page links from the footer impact SERP rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | braunna0 -
Google spitting out old data as new alerts
Am I just unlucky or are others seeing this too? I have several google alerts. For the past 6 months, google keeps sending crap along with good stuff. its a bit like their search results. There are three types of Alerts they send that I'm not impressed with. 1. Alerts that are from unintelligible splogs that take real news stories and rewrite them with unintelligible garbage that makes no sense at all. Sometimes, they serve up new alerts from the same splogs I saw several months ago, that I felt sure they would have zapped by now. 2. Old stories, that have been around for months. I just received one that was from January, from TechDirt, a big site that must get a huge amount of attention from google. 3. Irrelevant stories because they love to show how smart they are by splitting my alert keyword text into multiple words, but it gives useless results. This is the kind of stuff that crappy search engines like AltaVista used to do. Is google reverting to the childhood of search with all these changes?
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
SEO Link building / Article Distributation
Quick question in regards to link building and OFF PAGE SEO... Why isn't Articles distributation via wire services considered a "Duplicate Content" issue by Google? i.e. If take the one article and post it accross 50 (do follow) websites, Press release sites, and blogs. I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this. Regard, Sammy
Algorithm Updates | | revsystems.com0