NEED HELP, Figuring Out Ranking Drop!
-
Hello, I need help from somebody, anybody, in trying to figure out why my site dropped so much for the keyword “wildblue” and “wild blue”. On the week of Feb. 13, 2012, my website jumped from middle of the first page to the fourth page, and then a week or two later jumped completely out of the index (or at least off the top 5 pages). We do not engage in any deceptive practices. Our entire website is centered around this keyword, and we are very relevant, and have informative and continually updated content for visitors.
I thought at first we got hit by Panda, but our overall organic traffic has not decreased, it has actually been steadily increasing compared to same time last year. I have tried over the past several months to get us back up, or at least figure out what happened, with no luck. If anyone could advise me on what might have happened, how to correct it, or even has any ideas of how I could figure out what happened I would greatly appreciate it.
Website is:
-
Trademarks can be registered in some countries, but not worldwide. Will it be any difference in selected country search if trademark is not valid there?
As i see in some results, google just hides the result if that page had official trademark violation, but does not penalize the website.
-
Well, we didn’t change URL structures or hosting or anything. However, Wild Blue is a trademarked term. However, we have permission from WildBlue to use the term for marketing purposes. This leads me to the same puzzler, which is that so many other sites similar to ours (many of the them much less relevant) replaced us in the rankings. I have tried for several months to figure this out. I hate to give up as this is so pertinent to the very core function our site and the information we provide, but I just don’t know what else to do. I even submitted a reconsideration request to Google. I haven’t heard back from them yet.
-
Is it possible that "Wild Blue" is a trademarked term? Just a thought, but I wonder if you could have been taken out of the index because of a DMCA takedown request?
Did you do anything else during the time period preceding the drop? Like change url structures, change hosting, etc.?
-
I appreciate your help. When our site was ranking for that term it was about 5 years old. We have ranked extremely well for that term for the entire existence of our site, with the exception of after February. This drop actually occurred even before Panda was released (about two weeks before I think). I did get one of the unnatural linkings Alerts In July (well after the drop occurred). However, I did a lot of research on it, and my conclusion was unless you got one of the warning messages related to unnatural linking don’t worry about it, as the site has not actually been penalized. From my understanding this message was more or less a “change what you are doing before it gets worse” type of message. Frustratingly we have never engaged in shady practices.
The only thing we have done that people now say has no effect is article marketing. Last year, we did invest some resources in creating some very high quality articles and submitting them to a few different directories. These were very informative and useful, and not the least bit spammy. Once Panda came out we stopped. To further complicate things, we didn’t focus any of these article efforts on the “WildBlue” keyword. Prior to Feb. we didn’t have to do much work for this keyword because we naturally ranked so well.
We actually use to have that keyword in our title, but took it out just a bit ago because we were not gaining any traction, and thought it best to reinvest that space with another keyword. The most puzzling thing for me about this situation, is that I understand gradually dropping for a specific keyword due to several factors. However, being completely dropped from the rankings in one week from a keyword that your entire website is designed to represent is still very puzzling to me.
-
There are a few things that stand out to me when looking at your site. First of all, you don't have the words "Wild Blue" in your homepage title, so if you are trying to rank your home page for this term that would help. I do see it on your inner pages, but do you have links built to the inner pages?
Your linking profile looks very unnatural, especially when you rank it by anchor text. However, if your drop happened in February of 2012, it wasn't because of Penguin because that didn't happen till April. Have you checked your webmaster tools for unnatural links warnings? This could be the cause. You've got a lot of anchor texted links as top anchors. A natural profile would have your url and brand as the most popular anchors.
When you were ranking for "wild blue", how new was your site? You may have gotten a honeymoon boost and then dropped down a few weeks or months later. However, it is a little strange...I don't see you in the first 8 pages for that term. I would expect at least one of your inner pages to rank...but again, if it's a competitive field and you've got no links to inner pages (I didn't check...just assuming), and don't have the keyword in your title then this could just be normal and not due to a penalty at all.
-
Why do you think other non-brand owners, would replace us? Looking at it from Google’s perspective it seems as if it would be counter intuitive to replace one website in the rankings with another one just like it.
-
I think that is a good conclusion.
-
Well, I thought about that too. However, many of the people that jumped ahead of us are not the brand owner either, nor are they in my opinion as relevant to the subject as we are.
-
Ive just this minuted posted a discussion about Google hurting aggregators on this very forum http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-google-making-life-harder-for-aggregators.
I think you may be seeing ranking drop for a branded term as I believe Google is working on reducing sites optimised for branded terms when they arent the brand owner.
-
No, wildblue.com is owned by another company.
-
Are you also wildblue.com? That site ranked in first when wild blue is search
-
What do you think caused your problems in ranking?
-
I kept adding new links and in time I recovered. I varied the links anchors to bring the direct to non direct ratio closer to 20%.
-
Any suggestions on what to do, or advice from what you did?
-
I had the same thing happen to a few of my keywords.
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
-
Will implementing 301's on an existing domain impact massively on rankings?
Hi Guys,I have a new SEO client who only has the non-www domain setup for GWT and I am wondering if implementing a 301 for www will have a massive negative impact on rankings. I know a percentage of link juice and PageRank will be affected. So my question is: If I implement the 301 should I brace myself for a fall in rankings. Should I use a 301 instead to maintain link juice and PageRank? Is it good practice to forward to www? Or could I leave the non www in place and have the www redirect to it to maintain the data? Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu0 -
External Followed Links Over Time Nasty Drop HELP!
I had someone help me with SEO and they basically used some stupid form to get back-links I am still learning and have taken over my site to better do things right. I have had a major drop across the board since Panda and Pinguin and rightfully so from what I am seeing. My question is: Google obviously removed the backlinks and SEO MOZ shows this in its report. Do I need to disavow these links still or can I just focus on link building properly? What is the best course of action here? gGuSyJf
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | megapixall0 -
Ranking factors: What am I missing here?
I'm trying to understand what techniques might have been used to help the site malime.com.au rank for the term 'boys tops' on Google (AU). It appears to be a new domain, there are hardly any backlinks and basically no social mentions. Internally, the site uses the term 'boys tops' to link to the same page that Google chooses also—so that much makes sense—but other than that (and some weird keyword-stuffed page titles and meta tags) I cannot find much reason for this site to rank as well as it is. Have I missed something? Or is it just a low-enough competition phrase that it can do this with basically internal linking? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathanV19770 -
Penguin Maybe? Ranking low for main term: Trying to find cause and correct
Hello, For nlpca(dot)com one of our main keywords is the term "NLP" We are ranking 25th for that term.Possible causes: 1. keyword stuffing on home page, though we need to use the term over and over again to describe ourselves. Also, competitors like nlpco(dot)com and nlpu(dot)com also mention "NLP" a lot 2. Backlink profile: see this spreadsheet. We have a lot of sites from other countries and many sitewides but all natural and almost all branded. Ou company names are NLP Institute of California, NLP California, and NLP and Coaching Institute. 3. nlpcacoach(dot)org is a sitewide footer link. So is iepdoc.nl. We're going to ask the first site to take our link down. 4. No "What is NLP" article. I think that might help. 5. Most of our 60 articles are posted on other sites. We author about 30 of them. I'm working on authorship via rel="author" and rel="me" links. There's usually 2 authors 6. Most of the title tags used to be 4 keywords separated by pipes -"|" I changed them all after the updates took the keyword "NLP" down. That's about all I can think of. What do we do or clean up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Can anyone tell me why this site ranks so well?
Site in question: cellphoneshop.net From what I can tell from their link profile, the links they garner don't appear to be particularly high value but they dominate organic listings for my vertical (cell phone accessories), esp. in the last 2-3 months when Google was supposedly increasing the quality of their search results. Can anyone tell me why in particular this site ranks so well for competitive short and long tail terms?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eugeneku0 -
Does the SEOmoz Suggested Directory List Need to be Updated?
So, since Google updated their link schemes page (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356) with avoid using "Low-quality directories", I've been thinking a lot about what makes a directory "low-quality". Obviously, this is important, or Google wouldn't have mentioned it. I was wondering if someone could explain to me how some of the directories suggested by SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/directories are NOT low-quality, specifically some of the ones marked "General". The page lists stuff like busybits.com, for instance. One that I guess many are aware of, and yea it has a high home page PageRank, and it's got some history, and it's human-edited, ok great. But does it actually add any value to anyone that's not just looking to get a link? A page like http://busybits.com/Business/Others/2/ having (dofollow) listings like "Phone cards, Calling cards" "Insurance in Canada" .... ect. It just looks like an SEO backlink hub. No value at all to a user trying to discover new sites/content. Anyway, back to my main question, how is something like this NOT "low-quality"? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MadeLoud4 -
Help for a complete SEO newbie!
Hi all, I've just joined seomoz today to try and further my very young education on SEO. My major problem is i need my site to rank high in local search engines but feel that none of the customers read much of the content as i am a landscaper and feel they just search "landscaping in Newcastle" and are immediatly looking for a contact number to arrange a free estimate. I dont do any online sales, its just to generate leads. I've spent alot of time building a better site than my local competitors but they still out rank me on alot of keywords i.e. "Driveways in Gateshead" My question is do i keep adding more and more content hoping this will work long term or do i link build with anchor text etc or both? I cannot believe they still out rank me when i feel i have more links more anchor text and a load more origional content and images. I think it may be that my site is still under 1 year old. I feel i am boucing from content to link building then trying something else without any real knowlegde of what i really should be doing or what should be the priority at this young stage for my site. I have managed to get on page 1 of google for most of my keywords in local searches ( obviously not national) but still feel its been more down to luck and effort than actually knowing what i am doing when it comes to site and offsite optimization Any help, tips etc would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | totaldriveways0 -
Has anyone ever reported a spammer and actually seen them de-ranked?
I have a few competitors outranking me using black hat SEO. I reported them to Google, and I'm just wondering if Google will even look at it. What has been your experience with this? Has anyone ever gotten results?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | UnderRugSwept1