Why did my rankings drop?
-
Hi all,
In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links.
Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen:
1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see.
- Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites.
3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too.
-
A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3.
-
I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse.
Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net.
Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from?
Any help would be appreciated.
-
I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content
That is clearly a large change which should have been mentioned up front.
When you drop a page from your site, you will of course lose any traffic that page generated. Even if those pages were low traffic pages, they did generate some traffic.
When you say the old content was replaced by fresh content, exactly how was this change done? If you have a page named "homes currently for sale" and you update that page with new information, the URL remains the same, the backlinks remain and the overall effects should be positive. Even a normal change such as this one could have a negative impact on traffic though in a corner case such as you listed a popular address or area before, the house sold and was replaced by less popular listings.
There is a lot of analytical data to analyze. How much traffic were the old pages generating vs the new pages which replaced them. How many back links did the old pages have pointing to them? Were all these pages properly redirected?
With respect to links, if your client has money to spend use it on other methods of traffic generation. Pay for high quality content to be created. Pay for advertising. Pay to be entered into the couple of directories that actually make a difference. Pay for A/B testing of the site's pages. Don't pay for junk directory submissions.
-
A closer look at the Analytics: Yahoo traffic seems to be down by 60%, especially on long tail terms. The shift happened on the 4th August. In the 10 days prior I had added about 10 paid submissions but I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content and replace it with fresh listings supplied by the client. I wonder!
Overall there is a slight reductions in most keywords but as you say this could be because competitors are building links too.
-
I started building links from these directories
The overwhelming majority of directories are a complete waste of time. They offer absolutely no value at all for SEO, and real visitors will never see and follow the links
I started buying submissions to directories
Buying links is a violation of search engine rules, If and when you are caught, you will suffer a penalty. In the meantime, understand that the search engines know which directories sell links and most likely offer those links no weight at all. If they see your site has acquired links from multiple paid directories they could take that as a sign you are attempting to manipulate rankings.
Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen
There are so many factors involved to even begin to properly respond to this statement. If you had 1000 links previously and build 20 links, then you have increased your links by 2% which may not have any effect on traffic at all. You need to research what is driving visitors to your site. Is it organic search results? An advertising campaign? Social networks? etc.
Once you break down the traffic drivers, you need to further investigate the overall traffic. For example perhaps the keyword "vitamins" is the top driver of traffic to your site. You can check to see how much overall traffic the search term provided this month compared to last month.
What are your competitors doing? If you built 20 links and your main competitor built 30 links, or received 1 high quality link, then you may drop in rankings. Your search results are always a competition with your competitors.
In summary, any time you spent with directories is not likely to add value to your site. If you want to use directories the main ones I would suggest are Yahoo, BOTW, DMOZ and Business.com. If your industry has any high quality niche directory that can be considered as well. Otherwise your focus should be on creating very high quality content which is useful and touches upon important industry topics, then obtaining links to that content.
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
-
Why am i ranking better in canada?
hi, some of my keywords with high volume are ranking on first page in canada, but in the states i am on 3rd pages first result. what factors are contributing this disparity. what can be done here in this case. is it because of my links and tld distribution or some server location thing. what should i do to rank better in the US? i have shared hosting server in singapore.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Traffic dropped suddenly
-In early January 2013, we had to switch servers after many years with the same one. We were highly ranked and getting about 8500 unique visitors per month. -We didn't notice the traffic falling because we were focussed on a major site redesign and addition that we launched in April 2013. Visits continued to fall, this time also because the company that launched it didn't double check their work and had some dead links etc. Those were all fixed by approximately June 2013.- early January 2014 we switched servers again because we were afraid the new server we moved to was perhaps ranked poorly or was possibly a spamming site before. Currently, nothing has changed. What was about 8500 unique visitors per month 18 months ago, is now about 1,000 and no leads are coming in at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HasitR0 -
Significant drop in web rankings
We have two websites and last week we had a significant drop in search engine rankings. Some of these search rankings we have been top 3 for the past 5 years and now we are not in the top 20. Last weekend we changed our hosting provider and IP addresses for the first time in over 7 years. Now is there a way we could work out if we have been hit by the latest Penguin update or if the change in hosting / IP has caused these drop in rankings? I would appreciate any thought or ideas at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
How to get an online store ranked
Hello, The question is how to get SEO traffic to www.misslovegirls.com [staff warning: this is a lingerie site and may be not safe for some viewing situations] The only editable info we have on the pages is in the Meta Keywords and Meta Description on each page. Goal to get search engine traffic to the site. Any suggestions? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemktg10 -
Page Rank
Hi guys I have an ecommerce in prestashop (unfortunatelly I can not change it at this moment). I made all main activities both off and on the page. And actually it is working pretty well since I am up on the SERP for all the target keywords. BUT, the page rank still be 0. The site is about 2 years old. My main competitor has the same domain authority than mine, but he has a page rank > 0 Moreover I have more quality links then it has, but it is older Any suggestions? Many thanks Ciao Diego
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrelax0 -
What is wrong with my once highly ranked site?
Hello, I'm really desperate for some help. I believe I've been hit by Panda as traffic started diminishing late March for my 6 year old website. I've never had a sharp drop, only gradual. I've lost a load traffic since then. I did change shopping carts in June since I had a a canonical issue from my old cart that couldn't be corrected. The old cart also did not allow me to have unique product titles and the urls were garbled with letters, numbers, etc... I know Panda did not like that. I've made several changes (cleaned up broken links, added more content to my site, added Disallow: /search/ and Disallow: /search to my robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content from my search box.) My most prized keywords (tutu and tutus) are on page 15 or so of Google now, when they used to be on page 1 or 2 at the worst. Other good ones are slipping too. I do need to hire an SEO to optimize my titles eventually as I believe my they are still a bit stuffed but before I do that, I am just trying to get the other stuff done first. My main questions are this... Do any of you see something else that looks bad to you in the eyes of Google? I'd love the cold, hard truth as I'm pretty desperate for my site to recover, if at all possible. Thank you in advance! Here is my site: http://alturl.com/mvmux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tutugirl0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Suddenr Ranking Drop
Hello all . Im experiencing a sudden ranking drop for one of my websites . Keyword = Green Tea Search Engine = google.lk URL = www.eswaran.com/greenTea.html This page was at 7th on 1st page . Since coupe of weeks back its moving backwards . I didn't even do any link building for this page other than doing little changes to titles tags . What would be the reason for such a issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Osanda0