Sudden SERP drop?
-
I'm wondering why my mainpage of my site just disappeared from google while a post from my site ranks at #11 on google.
I currently only have 1 .edu backlink to it and the anchor text is my url site : http://www.domain.c0m
What is the meaning of this? I checked my on page optimization and I got an A. The only problem I saw with my site was keyword stuffing on the homepage because my posts contain the keyword and its listed 26 times on the homepage but that shouldn't be the problem.
-
Wait I thought if people are doing exact search, you don't use quotes?
-
"Except changing up the robots.txt, adding meta descriptions to everything and more...."
Seems like there could be a correlation to your changes and how your site is ranked to me.......... Not knowing exactly what changes were made its tough to say.
Can you provide more info or a link to your site?
-
How long was you ranking for the term before it dropped? week, month, years?
Try putting quotes round the term and see where you rank so "Swimming Fast"
-
Over the last two months all my sites (20) were down yet consistent in traffic.
Then last week I experienced a boost across the board. All separate sites all experiencing a very good increase in traffic.
Now - the last 7 days the drop in traffic has been steady and moving in a downward spiral, and yes, again across the board. What was significant that my anchor store (since 2002) was really dead in the water.
Site 21 (a political blog) with a PR 6 was beginning to show real signs of wear but it's recovering slightly.
Penguin, Panda, or whatever these sites are well monitored, all still very well indexed so maybe its the warm weather, summer fun, boredom but business is down, way down.
-
I know I didn't get slapped because I rank #4 for another keyword similar to it; for example:
my keyword is swimming fast
I still rank #4 for swimmingfast but I am not seen on SERPS for swimming fast.
I am not keyword stuffing though because my posts show up in the home page and several keywords pop up in the snippet portion and I cannot remove it. I can minimize my posts to the page to 1 but then my webpage isn't visually appealing. I haven't done any 'major' changes to my website except changing up the robots.txt, adding meta descriptions to everything and more.
So yes, it was out of the blue =(
-
Was this drop out of the blue or has there been some recent changes? Sometimes when there are significant changes made there are equally drastic changes in SERPs.
I do know that keyword stuffing is BAD and have seen it negatively impact pages on one of my sites in the past. Has this Key Word density always been high?
Not having any more information about your site, I would have to suggest addressing your KeyWord issue at hand and see if that moves things in the right direction for you.
If you can provide more information or a link to your site, I will bet many people will be happy to provide some great insight to your issue.
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
-
.xml sitemap showing in SERP
Our sitemap is showing in Google's SERP. While it's only for very specific queries that don't seem to have much value (it's a healthcare website and when a doctor who isn't with us is search with the brand name so 'John Smith Brand,' it shows if there's a first or last name that matches the query), is there a way to not make the sitemap indexed so it's not showing in the SERP. I've seen the "x-robots-tag: noindex" as a possible option, but before taking any action wanted to see if this was still true and if it would work.
Technical SEO | | Kyleroe950 -
Help: trying to get social media channels to show up in SERP knowledge panel
I have embedded the code intended to tell Google which social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc...) are associated with client on their website. It was done via the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. I have also tested that code on Google's structured data testing tool and it checks out. I had previously used another SEO audit tool (Seomator) and that said it checked out as well. However... the SERP for this client is still showing only their basic Google business listing info and not the additional panel showing their associated social media channels. I followed some instructions (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/social-markup/#my_social_media_profile_isnt_displaying) searching to fix this problem at the Google developer site and it said something about clicking "feedback" at the bottom of the knowledge graph panel and then clicking on "wrong?" over the name and then entering something about how it's not displaying the social media channels. The problem is I don't see this text: "wrong?" anywhere to click on. Been troubleshooting this for a month now and can't find an answer. Did I do something wrong like not turning around once counterclockwise and barking like a seal? 😉
Technical SEO | | therealfudgypup0 -
Duplicate content issue: staging urls has been indexed and need to know how to remove it from the serps
duplicate content issue: staging url has been indexed by google ( many pages) and need to know how to remove them from the serps. Bing sees the staging url as moved permanently Google sees the staging urls (240 results) and redirects to the correct url Should I be concerned about duplicate content and request Google to remove the staging url removed Thanks Guys
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
Meta keywords shown in Google SERPS as site description
I'm seeing Google display meta-keywords in the SERP description for some sites (at least a half dozen that I've checked). I BELIEVE IT IS AN AJAX ISSUE BECAUSE: The sites all use AJAX to display content. So the meta-keywords are in the header, and the javascript that displays the content. Non-AJAX parts of the site display properly in Google SERPS The meta-keywords don't visibly appear anywhere on the page. When I turn off images and Javascript in Chrome I don't see any hidden keyword text. I BELIEVE IT IS A GOOGLE-SPECIFIC ISSUE BECAUSE: Each site displays properly in Bing and Yahoo SERPS - the meta-description is the description. However, (as expected) I see the same strange meta-keyword activity in Aol search In Screaming Frog's SERP preview I see the meta-description as the description. Google has been ignoring met-keywords for years. Any idea why it's appearing in the SERPS for these AJAX powered sites? I found one other person who saw that Google may be reading and displaying their content in AJAX even though that content is meant to appear on a different "page". No one on that Google Forum seemed to understand the person's problem. The only reason I get it is because now I'm seeing it with my own eyes. I know the Moz community can do better, so i'm posting about it here.
Technical SEO | | AlexCobb0 -
Plenty of 302 Redirects, can they harm SERP?
Hi my client has recently relaunched the website and they use a lot of 302 redirects because they want Google to crawl the pages. They do not plan to add any content to those pages. I advised 301 instead but they do not want to do this. Can too many 302s harm their rankings?
Technical SEO | | GardenPet0 -
Site blocked by robots.txt and 301 redirected still in SERPs
I have a vanity URL domain that 301 redirects to my main site. That domain does have a robots.txt to disallow the entire site as well. However, for a branded enough search that vanity domain still shows up in SERPs and has the new Google message of: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt I get why the message is there - that's not my , my question is shouldn't a 301 redirect trump this domain showing in SERPs, ever? Client isn't happy about it showing at all. How can I get the vanity domain out of the SERPs? THANKS in advance!
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Dropped 20 places!
Hi everyone, I have spent the last 3 weeks using SEO Moz to improve the SEO of my website. I have reduced the amount of crawl errors from 6000 to 600, I have optimized my on-page to A grade for 4 of my main keywords and have been posting keyword optimized blogs posts 3 / 4 times weekly. My reward for this? A drop down to page 4 of Google for my main keyword and a very annoyed boss! Can anyone think where I may have gone wrong? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gaz33421 -
We're no longer turning up in Google SERP for our brand search when we used to be #1 after our site update. Any ideas why?
We recently updated our website and during the push, someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report. Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.
Technical SEO | | JoeLin0