Google rankings tanked....Now what?
-
We just experience a drop in Google rankings, some pretty harsh, across all of the keywords we have been ranking greater than 50. I’m a noob at SEO, but a technical noob so I started doing my home work. I’ve seen references to the “google dance” and “Honeymoon”, but this hit seems to have effected competitors too. Everyone seems re-ranked with several junk directories jumping up more than I think they should. Has anyone else seen this? Is this more Google algorithm adjustment or a natural settling based on our new SEO attempts? In either case, what should we do next? I know there is a holistic approach and everything is important however, we need bang for the buck at this point to before we start bleeding. One or two next steps?
Our industry is residential cleaning and the site is www.bitabliss.com
Here is a little history:
The site that’s been running for about 2 years. We initially put up a very basic “throw something up” site without much thought of SEO except for some basics and a long tail approach with a blog, FaceBook and Twitter. We launched an updated site on Feb 23. with new theme and this time some, “on page” work to better hit the basics. The site structure was kept the same and we added on some more localized content in hopes to take advantage of local searches. Also, enter SEOMoz to get us tracking things (Yay MOZ). Until yesterday, we had been doing pretty well in some of our target cites even with the more basic site. When we launched the new site focusing on page titles, descriptions and page content, and a few directory attempts. We started to see some incremental growth. It seemed to me that this kind of growth meant that we were doing the right things and doing a better job than some of the other sites. Any way, yesterday we got smacked down. This seems too harsh for a for the slow increases we have seen over the last month.Any thoughts you have would be great appreciated.
Thanks!
-Shawn
-
Certainly possibly that it was a small algo shift, but unless lots of other sites fell in the rankings, too, I'd say the fresh boost/loss is the more likely culprit in this case.
BTW - you might want to check out this slide deck for some ideas on growing content/links/inbound marketing: http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/inbound-marketing-for-startups-in-2011
-
In our case, new content comes in the form of blog posts, tweets and FaceBook updates. The goal is a minimum two blog posts per month with topics that are related to our business (tips hints, products) or community focused (events, current affairs, etc).
-
Rand,
Thanks! I had a feeling links were going to be going to be high on the list. I'll head that direction.That is one of things I see as a huge advantage the big franchise outfits have. Do you think there is anything to this "reshuffling" that I think I see? For several keywords where the big chains were near the top, we all seem to have been pushed down.
Thank you!
Shawn
-
adding new content, such as?
-
Links is a bit narrow - I'd say citations of any type. We've seen examples where having a site's name brand mentioned in a news article led to a flurry of crawling and higher rankings. It's also the case that adding new content to your site, making it a better converting site, improving usability, design, navigation, etc. can all have positive impacts on your ultimate goals and on SEO, too - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals
-
So lets say when you done optimizing your website the only way to move in ranks is getting new links?
-
No - definitely not. I'm saying that for competitive search results, having a good site and good content isn't enough. You need to show the engines that you're also an important, well-referenced resource and that means citations (links, tweets, shares, mentions, news articles, local citations, etc).
Links are important, but link building without the basics of a good site and business (which Bitabliss.com seems to have) is folly.
-
Rand so what you saying is that the most important part of SEO is a link building?
-
Hi Shawn - it looks to me like the biggest issue is lack of quality links. I think what may have happened is that your on-site efforts, relaunch and start of link building efforts gave you a short term boost that's now ending. I looked through your links at Yahoo! and with OpenSiteExplorer (the latter is usually slower in finding new ones), and there's only a very small number and from only a few sites.
I'd work on earning those citations from quality sources and over time, you'll likely regain some of those rankings. Many SEOs have, in the past, observed something akin to a "fresh boost" and I suspect that's what happened here.
BTW - this link building tip in particular might be useful - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local - in addition to the local links, you can likely get lots of good direct links, too.
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
-
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
Drop in Rankings
Hello Webmasters, My site has incurred a sudden dip in rankings across sections. We conducted an analysis and have observed the following two major issues: Unnatural Links Penalty: Our site was issued an Unnatural Links Penalty on May 23. Basically, we have both 'http' and 'https' versions of our website registered on Webmaster tools. Initially, the warning showed up on the 'http' version and thus we started a cleanup by extracting the linking domains and have also filed a reconsideration request once all the spammy domains were removed and rightly disavowed. Recently, we got another manual action warning on the 'https' version regarding the unnatural links. So we have started with the cleanup activity right away. While analyzing this issue, we came across another major problem regarding the two versions which is our next concern and is mentioned below. https Canonical Issue: For more insights, we went through our site’s content and found that our website is following the below pattern Our 'http' version of the webpages get 301 redirected to the 'https' version. This 'https' version again has a canonical pointing to the 'http' version thus creating a loop. To conclude, I request your valuable learnings and thoughts on the following: Which of these issues are likely to have affected our website’s ranking Which version is likely to be preferred by Google (https or http) in our case
Technical SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
Google Analytics Annotation
Is there a way to add annotations to the GA visitors graph? There is a YouTube tutorial on how to do this but the comments suggest is has not be rolled out yet in the US and I can't get it to work. Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Google authorship what am i doing wrong
Hi, i am using google authorship on my site but when i use the testing tool it is not working. before the upgrade we had it working fine but now it does not seem to work. we have our google plus account pointing to the site and the writer we are trying to add is not coming up on the tool here is the code we are putting on the page Google+ and the page in question is here http://www.in2town.co.uk/emmerdale/emmerdale-laurel-is-determined-to-take-action when i check the tool i get the following Authorship Testing ResultAuthorship is not working for this webpage.andAuthorship rel=author MarkupCannot verify that rel=author markup has established authorship for this webpage.the tool i am using to check is http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippetsany help to solve this problem would be great. i am using joomla
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Empty Google cached pages.
My little startup Voyage has a tough relationship with Google. I have been reading SEOMOZ/MOZ for years. I am no pro but I understand the basics pretty well. I would like to know why all pages on my main domain look empty in google cache. Here is one example. Other advice is welcome too. I know a lot of my metas and my markup is bad but I am working on it!
Technical SEO | | vincentgagne0 -
Google Reconsideration Request (Penguin) - Will Google give links to remove?
When Penguin v1 hit, our site took a hit for a single phrase (i.e. "widgets") due to the techniques our SEO company was using (network). We've since had those links cleaned up, and our rankings have not recovered. Our SEO company said they submitted a reconsideration request on our behalf, and that Google denied it and didn't provide which links we needed removed. Does Google list links that need removing if they are still not happy with your link profile?
Technical SEO | | crucialx0 -
Page rank and ranking down
Hi I blog at Technostarry. Some 3 months back during page rank update, my page rank went down from 3 to 2. I don't know the reason behind this. And now, my traffic and ranking is also down. I am not involved in any bad SEO practices, I don't copy paste and I write original content. I am too confused as why and what has happened with my site. If someone could analyze my blog and look at my weak points then that would be great. I would like to get any suggestions to get back my ranking and also page rank back. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | technotech0 -
How to show ratings on Google?
One thing I have noticed recently is "review ratings" appearing in the Google search results. I have attached a screenshot which shows an example of this. I think this is a really good feature and helps make a listing stand out in the SERPs, I would certainly be more likely to click this one. My question is how do you code for it so that Google will display it? The URL of the page in question is http://www.footy-boots.com/inter-milan-away-shirt-2011-2012-9430/ 4nXyk
Technical SEO | | ukss19840