$100 to who discovers why our rankings drop
-
I'm offering $100 to the SEO that pinpoints why our rankings dropped. Here's details:
Some very good people have this site:
nlpca(dot)com
and it has dropped for many of it's keywords, including the keywords
"NLP"
"NLP Training"
and many other keywords.
We dropped from 19th to 42nd for the term "NLP".
Here's what I'm doing about it:
(1) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the titles reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more.
(2) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the URLs reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more.
(3) We're redoing the home page as (1) above.
(4) We're fixing the 404s
(5) We're shortening the titles that are too long, and we're thinking of reducing the home page keyword count to 3 keyword phrases, although 4 keywords work in all of our other sites that have the keywords showing up at least 3 times in the content.
If it is something else, and you pinpoint it, and if because of you, we rise back up to around 19th (more or less) again then we'll give you $100 payable via paypal as a thank you.
I'm going to leave this question 'unanswered' until this is resolved.
-
Sorry, but not remembering 100% what I was thinking at the time of writing the response since it was a week ago, but trying to reread through what was written, I believe I was talking about how the SERP may have been manually rated. While some of the SERPS are ranked via the algorithms google has developed, I've heard and read that there are a number of them that are affected and rated manually by humans. If there was any human interaction by one of their manual raters, they may have deemed your site less "relevant" for the search.
Have you ever seen the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of the SERPs? Let's say somebody decides your website and the other 2 competitors are not what they were looking for when it came to the search "nlp" or "nlp training. Well, they could complain and potentially be reviewed by the manual raters or whomever responds to the complaints and drop you. Since it was before the most recent panda change, I was speculating that this could of been a cause.
-
It might be true, but when the drops occur or when the SERP is manually rated and changed in terms of the makeup, it could be because whatever's triggering it could have been finally re-evaluated at the time you dropped.<<
Could you expain this, SeattleOrganicSEO. That might be what happened. It looks like there was an algorithm change that effected us and at least 2 other strong competitors and shifted us all down
-
It might be true, but when the drops occur or when the SERP is manually rated and changed in terms of the makeup, it could be because whatever's triggering it could have been finally re-evaluated at the time you dropped.
However, I don't know if I know all the different pieces you do. Even with the above description of the issues, I think there's a lot more going on potentially that as "outsiders", we can't help with as much. Even when we know everything, we still might be clueless. Sorry, but I haven't had this problem with a client before. I know it will sound cocky, but we've only had the opposite problem (well not a problem) that the rankings go up. I call it a problem because sometimes a ranking improvement doesn't always translate into traffic (or qualified traffic for that matter). Sorry, going off on a tangent...
-
SeattleOrganicSEO,
That's worth looking at, but I'm pretty sure it's not only competition. We tumbled form 19th to 42nd in just a few days for the term "nlp". We'd been on the second page for many years.
-
I don't see it being the larger problem.
Have you considered that your competitors have jumped up their SEO efforts? Have you been paying attention to their backlinks and seeing if they've been doing a bit of link building on the keywords you're targeting? It's a lot of work, but if you know the 2 specific SERPs you're targeting, perhaps you can pay attention to what they're doing. Some SEO software out there make it a bit easier to keep track of...
-
I also just realized that we have articles on our website that are elsewhere on the web. Always with permission, but could this be a problem?
-
If this occurred around Nov/Dec, then it might not be the Panda changes. I just though since you posted recently that maybe the recent Panda change (3.2) could of been a possibility.
-
In that article, SeattleOrganicSEO, one of the comments is
Surviving Panda 3.2 - I will target the right keyword and provide superb content.
This drop in rank was occurring around November or December (Panda 3.1?) when I was trying to target several keywords per page and then later adding content to match.
I thought Panda was for scraping and duplicate content problems, do I need to worry about appropriateness of keywords? Do I need to only target keywords that the page is very obviously already optimized for? If it's not code errors, could this be why we've had a ranking drop?
-
I also am a big believer of clean code, crawalability in general.
but i used the bing SEOtolkit, that sees the site just how bing sees, it, I only found one invalid code error, and one page with too much css. I think the w3 validator picks up a lot of issues that are a bit picky.
but I also believe one open tag, can mean huge amounts of content are not read as visisble content.
This is even more concerneing now we have Microsodata, one error can mean your whose scema is useless.
i dont like to have any css or js in my HTML, I like to look at my souce code and be able to read my content easlsy.
This is one of the reasons i dont like CMS.
-
When did it happen? Any chance it happened around the 18th?
http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-3-2-update-confirmed-109321
-
Those errors are just for the homepage, albeit, there may be much less (once a tag is left open, it tends to really confuse the validator). I'd clean up the whole site for good measure; I'm a big fan of SEO PowerSuite's on-page tools when doing this sort of thing.
The line breaks don't all need to be totally replaced, the big gaps at the top just seemed a bit excessive. That particular recommendation is just based in my own superstitions, and those of others, but is based on this: the first 1/3 rule comes into play so much in SEO (weighting content placed high on a page, early in a tag, etc.); condensing the header section to a more sane level seems sensible. Some SEO auditers, such as WebCEO, will also yell at you if your TITLE tag doesn't immediately follow HEAD, for what I'd expect to be a similar thought; although again, not as scientific of a claim to my knowledge as valid code (which absolutely matters).
-
It's been a while since I did code validation, remind me - is that 79 errors just for the home page?
And will the line breaks confuse crawlers?
And remind me what the cleanest thing to replace the line breaks with are.
-
Not necessarily your one path to salvation (and keep your money on this if it does help gain some ground), but I'd personally start with cleaning up the source:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnlpca.com%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&
doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.279 validation errors could definitely confuse crawlers about how things are organized, and imply usability issues. I'd also do something about the extreme # of unnecessary line breaks. I recently pushed a legal niche site up from page 5 to page 1 on a very competitive, short-tail phrase with not a lot more than cleaning up ugly code.
-
One think i noticed is your linking structure, this would I assume been like it is all along and would not be the reason of the drop. But your menu is on every page (I am assuming), meaning that all pages are linked by all pages. This pattern leads to all pages sharing teh rank, but what you want is your landing pages to have most of the page rank.
you should link to as many pages as you can from the home page, but only link to the home page and landing pages from every other page (where posible of cause). this will shift the PR to those pages. See link for a simple explaination.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
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
-
Core Web Vitals hit Mobile Rankings
Hey all, Ever since Google announced "Core Web Vitals" are mobile rankings have nose-dived. At first, I thought it was optimisation changes to the page titles we had made which might still be part of the issue. However, Desktop rankings actuallyy increased for the same pages where mobile decreased. There is the plan to introduce a new ranking signal into the Google algorithm called the "core web vitals: and this was discussed around late May. even though it's supposed to get fully indexed into a ranking signal later this year or early next; I think Google continuously test and release this items before any official release. If you weren't aware, there is a section in Google Webmaster Tools related to "core web visits", which looks at:1. Loading2. Interactivity3. Visual StabilityThis overlays some of the other basic requirements of a good website and mobile experience. Taking a look at our Google Search Console, it appears to be the following:1. Mobile- 1,006 poor URLs, 100URLs need improvement and 475 good URLs.2. desktop- 0 poor URLs, 379 need improvements and 1,200 good URLsSOURCE: https://search.google.com/search-console/core-web-vitals?resource_id=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.griffith.ie%2FIn the report, we can see two distinct issues with the mobile pages:CLS Issue: more than 0.25 (mobile)- 1,006 casesLCP issue: longer than 4secs (mobile) - 348 case_CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)This is a developer issue, and needs fixing. It's basically when a mobile screen jumps for the user. It is explained in this article: https://web.dev/cls/Seems to be an issue with all pages. **LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)_**Again, another developer fix that needs to be implemented. It's connected to page speed, and can be viewed here: https://web.dev/lcp/Looking at GCS, it looks like the blog content is mostly to blame.It's worth fixing these issues and again looking at the other items on page speed score tests:1. Leverage browser caching- https://gtmetrix.com/reports/griffith.ie/rBtvUC0F2. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=griffith.ie- mobile score for home page is 16/100, https://www.griffith.ie/people/thamil-venthan-ananthavinayagan is 15/100I think here is the biggest indicator of the issue at hand. Has anybody else noticed their mobile rankings go down and desktop stay the same of increase.Kind regards,
Web Design | | robhough909
Rob0 -
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages?
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. The 3 locations old domains were redirected to their sites within our main brand domain. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages? And possibly increase our domain authority hopefully? We didn't want our brand spread out over multiple websites/domains on the internet. This also allowed for more content to be written on pages, per each of our locations service's, as well.
Web Design | | BurgSimpson0 -
What factors make a ranking difference between Desktop and Mobile?
Hi all, What makes a website rank better on mobile? Usually page load speed and mobile responsiveness matters and makes a difference to rank w website better on mobile than desktop. our website is surprisingly ranking better on Mobile but not much on desktop. What might influenced here in improvement in mobile ranking and drop in desktop? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)
Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
Web Design | | cpawsgo
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents? Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page. The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside. However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen. The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied. Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper? Thank you!0 -
Best Approach to Rank For Multiple Locations With Similar Targeted Keywords
I'm trying to determine the best way to set up a website to rank for a similar set of keyword phrases in three different cities. The keyword phrases I want to rank for are all pretty much the same with the only difference being the city associated with the keyword phrase. For example, "Austin water restoration" vs "San Antonio water restoration" vs "Houston water restoration". Each city needs about 7 or 8 pages of unique content to accurately target the group of keywords I'm trying to rank for. My initial thought was to write up unique content for each city and have each city act a site within the main site. For example, the main navigation for xyz.com/austin would be Austin specific, so when you land on xyz.com/austin and go to Services - Water Restoration, it would be all Austin specific content. The same would be true for San Antonio and Houston. The only problem with this approach is that I have to build up the page authority for a lot of different pages. It would be much easier to build up the page authority for one Water Restoration page and just insert a little "Areas we serve" on the page that includes "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" and maybe work the coverage area in again at the bottom of the page somewhere. However, it would be much more difficult to work "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" into the title tags and H1s though, and I couldn't logically work the cities into the content as much either. That would be a downside to this approach. Any thoughts on this? Wondering how large companies with hundreds of locations typically approach this? I'd really appreciate your input.
Web Design | | shaycw0 -
New more "helpful" internal linking causing SERP & traffic drop?
Still dealing with the weird traffic drop on my website. I have removed a bunch of old links from a defunct blog, 301 thin pages, added text to remaining pages. I'm still stumped. So awhile ago I freshened up my website and thought I was "helping people" by making sure they could CONTACT the studio more easily... I added more links to the "contact page" I thought this would help conversions...This changed the number of links to my entire site....Would this be the problem with my ranking/traffic drop? http://bayareaboudoir.com/babinternal1.pdf
Web Design | | Squee1 -
Old school HTML and rankings
How does really old school HTML (with inline CSS and a boat load of markup errors) affect modern SEO? I'm talking purely rankings, not conversions or bounce rate etc.
Web Design | | DavidWilsonSEO0