50% of my keywords just had a significant drop for no reason no changes?

[syndicate]

I just looked at a report for one of my sites in moz pro and

 35/75 keywords just dropped on google, I didn't make any changes recently

Ranking Changes

•  12

  Improved

•  35

  Declined

Many dropping 5 - 22 places!

Any ideas on whats up, thank fully it didn't effect traffic, its pretty low anyways, but it has stayed the same...  But still dropped to page 5 for lots of stuff. Strange. Did google just update or something?

Thanks for any ideas.

[mad2k]

Hello Willem,

Yes, in my opinion you should submit languages. I'm not sure but think that main site on .com should be set as basic NL site.

For each sub-site (language ver) sitemap in particular language is needed, I have no idea how your sitemaps are created. If on automatic way (plugin or other way) it seems to be a bit complicated, but it's better to have sitemap than not to have, it is worth your effort.

Use meta tags "alternative" in section on each site.

And ... ask other people, maybe there is something new. Theres a lot of stuff in the GWT blog and forum...

Marek

[hometextileshop]

I do have 3 different sub directories on the main domain. /NL, /DE and /EN, one for each language.

So I should add a GWT 'site' for each language and set a target geographic location to the righ region and delete the hometextileshop.com GWT 'site'(that is the main domain for 3 languages)

That would mean remove the sitemap too since it has 3 languages in it too.

As for the sitemap: would it be better in my case to remove the sitemap all to gether and let the bots just crawl the site and index?

Or should I have the sitemap module reprogrammed to use the "alternative" tag.

And how would the sitemap be applied if I had 3 GWT sites (one for each language)

For each language a sitemap with the target language and the other 2 as 'alternative', or just one sitemap for all 3 GWT-sites with 1 main language and the other languages as "alternative'?

[mad2k]

HI Willem,

I'm not a prestashop specialist but i know that on one licence you ca do something like that shop-en shop-cs - it is from Polish prestashop forum  ... forum.prestashop.pl

My " use rel="alternative" for language versions" refers to the situation when you have language versions and you want to prevent from duplicated content.

When it comes your situation - rankings, in my opinion it is better to have 3 different subdomains or subfolders for different languages.

As I understand your site uses language switcher... and a versions are in main domain subfolders. For GWT doesn't matter which method you use - subdomain or folder.

Key thing is that you should submit to GWT 3 different language versions (subfolders) and do a verification with different GWT meta tag (if you use this method for GWT verification) or code or with three diff GA accounts.

So 3 lang ver -> 3 GWT "sites" -> 3 verifications by GWT

And last but not least ... you still should use "alternative" tag to ensure crawl-bots that it is different site version not duplicated content. remember that not only text can be duplicated content... images or other stuff too

It should work...

Cheers,

Marek

[hometextileshop]

Hi Marek,

Your comment on the rel="alternative" got me thinking.

I run a prestashop in 3 languages and use a sitemap module, and it doesn't use the alternative tag

( www.hometextileshop.com/sitemap.xml)

I always had trouble to rank in more than one language, the standard language in the shop seems to affect the language priority and since I use a multi langual sitemap I see english sites rank on dutch keywords (although the standard language is dutch), the dutch keyword is not even on these sites.

Somehow the multi language part of the site brings trouble and search engines seen to have trouble with it althoug each site is differtent in each language. (one url per language, own title and description and (translated) content)

Any suggestions?

[mad2k]

Hi Syndicate,

As you wrote - you did change nothing. It is possible that one keyword still has a good support for content, links etc... but other not.

Your competition probably did changes. Few tips:

• you should analyze bounce rate in correlation with time spent on page

• for pages with low bounce rate and short time spent and low traffic is better do them noidex and nofollow - they decreases site quality

• implement microformats,

- big impact has rel="author", "author" links should provide to author's site not to publisher site

• social media are the key to modern SEO position

• G+1 is not a social media but it helps a lot

• employ responsive site content (mobile) more than 20% of the internet traffic is on mobile devices (usage of CSS3 and HTML5 is a need)

• use rel="alternative" for language versions

• use Google Map Maker 

• and many many more, I advice you to read mentioned conference materials

You have to change your site - it is a must.

Just imagine that you start on Ford Model T in Formula 1 ...

The distance between Ford T and McLaren MP4-27 (2012) is the same like between internet five years ago and now.

Marek

[syndicate]

Anything is possible but I have a site that I haven't touched ANYTHING for about 5 years now and it still holds #1 for its main keywords. So not sure but seems not all sites are punished for old content, that content is nearly 10 years old but it still ranks #1 and top 5 for most all of its original keywords.   Makes it real hard to figure things out!

[mad2k]

Hi Bron,

Maybe it was because you did nothing, remember the words "Change or die" said in 4th century by Claudian Claudianus and also in recent times by marketing guru John Porter from Harvard.

In 2011 google did 525 changes in algorithm. In 2012 they are still doing changes. Google new trend is to promote sites friendly for users not for robots. Backlinks are still have  have impact but not as big as in the past. Now we're stepping in new world ... semantic search. Now for Google good article is article between 1000 - 2000 words with good quality and with minimum once a week publication on your site/blog. There are also lots of other changes and news ... you should take a look on SMX conference materials.

...so maybe you have to change something, do a site revision and next do changes...

Take care,

Marek

[syndicate]

Yes something happened, not sure what. I have 3 competitors in my report.

Most of them dropped by only by a normal amount of 1 point not 25.  None had more then 1 or 2 points in changes while the vast majority of mine were off the page.

I didn't do any linkbuilding, all I have done in the past month or so, it do some minor content changes to only the homepage.  Really strange, maybe some of the links changed offsite or something. I cannot figure out what happened.

[hometextileshop]

I noticed the same thing on my websites. (all of them)

What stood out was that alle the keywords that have more competition and had more linkbuilding over the past year dropped more than keywords with no linkbuilding on it.

Around met I heard more people telling me that their sales in their shop have dropped since middle of this week.

The key question is what to do about this? How to get ranking up again.

If there was a google update it did not seem to effect my competition. The people mentioned above  all have websites around the same size as mine. Maybe that's got something to do with it (guess)

Please ask any question that arises, I'll be glad to answer if that leads to a solution to this.