Sudden Ranking Drop
-
One of my clients websites : http://www.renta-vw.co.za experienced a sudden ranking drop on 24/08/2012 for 2 of the Keyword terms :
The 2 terms are :
cheap car hire cape town
cheap car rental cape town.
The site ranked top 3 in Googel.de, Google.com, .co.uk, .nl
I'm not sure if it is just a 'Google Dance' or something else at play? I checked Webmaster tools and did not see any messages from Google...
This is causing a big loss of revenue for my client and after doing extensive analysis, I'm not the wiser as to what the issue is?
Please assit.
Thanks,
Marnus
-
Good advise, Thanks agian.
-
Is this a recent incremental Penguin Update?
Penguin update happened around April 2012...
if I build more backlinks with anchor text other than my keywords it should help?
Yes.. Build quality links (your brand/URL) from relavent authoritative sites (Link to sites in which your site can benefit the users).
What is the best startegy to build these links ( Social Bookarking, Blogs etc ) as I need it indexed quickly.
I would build a blog on your site and write articles that can benefit specific niche related people. I would find niche related people and build a relationship with them (by adding value), offer them to contribute on my blog and then ask them to share it.
Do you think Google will tell me if I'm penalised if I contact them?
I would not contact Google because they did not send you anything. However I would invest my time in some quality work that can benefit users..
Conclusion:
Give the people what they want and Google will give you to the people.
-
Hi Donnie,
Thanks so much for the reply. Is this a recent incremental Penguin Update?
So if I build more backlinks with anchor text other than my keywords it should help?
What is the best startegy to build these links ( Social Bookarking, Blogs etc ) as I need it indexed quickly.
Do you think Google will tell me if I'm penalised if I contact them?
Thanks again,
Marnus
-
Many people who were affected by the penguin update did not receive letters in GWT (Google webmaster tools)
The anchor linking profile for http://www.renta-vw.co.za:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.renta-vw.co.za%2F
Your back linking profile is based on mostly exact keyword phrases, In fact I only found one back link here that is branded or pointing at your URL. This does not look natural, a natural linking profile has more branded keywords/ URL links then exact anchored links.
| cheap car rental cape town | 53 | 78 |
| cheap car hire cape town | 42 | 71 |
| long term car rental cape town | 38 | 60 |
| renta vw | 2 | 3 |For this to look natural "ranta vw" should be first on this list...
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 did our highly ranked keyword drop to 51+ for just one week?
One of our most important keywords (ranked 5) dropped to 51+ one week and then went back to 5 around the time we launched a new site. Why did that happen?
Technical SEO | | virtuance_photography0 -
New site luanched- rankings plummeted
Hi all, we just launched a new version of our site and have seen huge drops in traffic to the homepage. Url structures were changed and now include /us at the end and a lot of the content was consolidated to make the homepage a little cleaner. We kept title tags and meta data the same. Rankings have declined significantly. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice?
Technical SEO | | perfectsearch711 -
Does having no content on a mobile page have effect on the ranking.
We are about to go live with a mobile version of our webshop, mobile users will be shown an alternative version of the desktop page. At the moment we have little to no content on the mobile pages; how will this effect our ranking? (desktop and mobile page have the same URL and meta, only the "body" is different)
Technical SEO | | G.School0 -
How do we maintain keyword rankings when creating a domain?
We are creating a new corporate "marketing site" on Hubspot and connecting our existing product site to that as a sub-domain. Our existing site ranks very well for all of our targeted keywords. The existing product site will now be behind a login, so how do we transfer juice to the new site in Hubspot? Or can we?
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
Then why my site is not ranking
My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Website not ranking but the blog is!
I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely. Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem. I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Organic Traffic Dropping. 404s found. Is this it?
My organic traffic has dropped 20% in the past month. I noticed some major 404 errors today on a very commonly clicked link on our website. I had the developers fix the error today, but then I thought I'd look in Google Webmaster Tools. That's when I saw the attached picture. 2454 404 errors were found. We only have 1500 pages in the entire Google index. Could this massive amount of 404 errors attribute to this drop in organic traffic? dU240 dU240
Technical SEO | | davewjones0 -
Mobile site ranking in desktop searches
A robots.txt file is properly implemented on the mobile site to block Googlebot from crawling, yet, when running a site: query for the site in google, it still returns over 104,000 pages from the mobile site in the index. Why could this be happening?
Technical SEO | | craigsmith3330