Impressions and search queries help
-
Hello,
In the past month alone, my website www.shiftins.com has had a significant drop, about 50%, in my overall impressions and search queries (info from Google WMT). Now my target keywords have maintained their rankings but it looks like my site has dropped off the map for every other search term. I have not received any unnatural link warnings or anything of that sort so I don't think I have been penalized. Does anyone have an idea of what might have caused the decline and is there a solution to restore my prior status?
-
IMHO It's not likely, just an algo change.
-
You have been extremely helpful Bryan Thank you very much. So you don't think my site has been penalized?
-
Yes this should help, I would focus on earning new links by creating real value to your audience/users...
What are they searching for and what is the quickest way to deliver this message. As long as you are adding value and building a clean link profile you should rank again.
-
Thank you this is what I suspected since only non target keywords went down. So do you think if I start changing my anchor text and start building new links using only branded anchors to dilute my exact match, that i will be able to regain my search queries or is this also an over all link quality penalty?
-
First you must diagnose you anchor links. Are most of them linking in using exact keyword phrases? or are they mostly linking in with your Brand Name/URL?
A natural linking profile is 50% brand keyword phrases and your URL, 25% Diverse anchor text (ie. how to "keyword"), 25% Exact keyword.
If you linking ratio is not like this it might be the cause for your problem. To fix this you will need to contact all the sites that are linking to yoursand ask them to change the anchored link to your brand name.
Hope this helps.
-
Thanks do you have any recommendations for how to recover?
-
There was a Penguin (http://mozcast.com/events) update on Oct 5th. THis update was targeting sites with low quality links and search engine manipulative link profiles.
-
Thanks for the response. It happened 10/06/12 and has continued to the present. There have not been any additional changes besides the addition of a video (around 10/16) and of course a few new links. Is there any other insight you may have?
-
It all depends on when you lost your rankings and if there were any recent changes that may have caused the drop.
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
-
Help Needed regarding DA and PA..
Hey there guys, I need help regarding the DA & PA on my site Criccraze From the previous few weeks, the DA PA of my website has gone down. Any fruitful suggestions from anyone, please? I would be heartily thankful.
Algorithm Updates | | Jashii80 -
Flux in Bing/Yahoo search rankings?
Has anyone else noticed any flux in Bing/Yahoo desktop search rankings in the start of March? Our weekly MSN search traffic was steady and then starting dropping off around March 3 or 4. Weekly desktop traffic now down about 20% Anyone see anything similar or have any resources for learning more about this?
Algorithm Updates | | ted-zarceczny0 -
QA for Sitelinks Search Box
hi all, I have added the suggested code to my homepage as follows: This was added 10 days ago. I continue to see on Google SERPs a search box sitelink, but it produces a page of results on a secondary SERP page for my site instead of bringing people directly into my site to the search result page relative to their query. Is there a time lag from the time the code was implemented to when it is functional on Google? Is there any way to QA the code to ensure it works correctly and if Google has yet to include it in their latest cache?
Algorithm Updates | | dsinger0 -
Future address change and local search
I have a client who targets a particular city, and up until now has had his physical location in the suburbs of that city. This April 1, his office will have the city address he has been targeting. I have spent a lot of time over the past year claiming ownership of all local directory listings and consolidating addresses as he has moved several times in the past 5 years. Looking at this as an opportunity to get the official USPS address he will be using and use the exact same address for everything. So many different variations out there right now for him. Wondering if it would be ok to start promoting the new address before the April 1 move and also when to start with the directory listings. Also, have held off on purchasing the yahoo directory link because of the suburban address but reconsidering this as of April 1 as well.
Algorithm Updates | | c2g0 -
Drop in Page Indexing, Small rise in Search Queries
Hello, I have a news based website so i am creating multiple new posts daily. I changed a lot of the site and got rid of old potentially duplicate content back in feb and had a sharp drop in pages indexed. I know this was because I removed a lot of pages though. However I still have a good 20,000 + pages on my site and my indexing has dropped a further three times since then. From 9,000 to 2,000 a coupe of months ago and then slowly down since April to just 133. It doesn't seem to have affected my search queries yet but surely will if it continues. I am really confused as to how this might happen & how to turn it around. We dont use any dodgy SEO tricks either.
Algorithm Updates | | luwhosjack0 -
Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
Algorithm Updates | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Any health bloggers/writers out there want to help in an experiment?
Hey mozzers, I'm trying a post-penguin experiment with a brand new website. New domain, separate hosting from all my other stuff, all that. It is run on an article script that allows new authors to make articles and post them. It is all health related and there are no other topics. I'm trying to see if a brand new site can get something to rank quickly with no SEO being done. No links of any kind, just social media sharing of articles. Authors can put links in their articles to anywhere they want, so if you want to help your health site out with a link, go for it. I'm looking for any writers who want to join us in this experiment. i figure if we get a lot of content on there, all original, no spun, natural links, we can do well. if so, I'm abandoning all penguin hit domains and starting over. And you all can get some links out of it. I've already got me and my employees, so the more the merrier. Just let me know if interested.
Algorithm Updates | | DanDeceuster2 -
Bounce rate help?
I'm trying to get to the bottom of the bounce rates of a few of the keyword results on my site. I think I'm getting traffic to an informative page and visitors are reading it then hopping back to Google to search for the terms I've just given them and I'm getting high bounce rates for this. I'll use an example to make it clear. A Google search for "hp 3050 ink" gets my HP 3050 printer page (A page that lists all the cartridges that will work in a HP 3050 printer) as a pretty good result. So far so good, right? My problem comes when I look in analytics and see that this page has a massive 80% bounce rate. The only reason I can think of is that people are using my site to find out what cartridge a printer will take and then using that information to refine their search. Am I over looking something? Is there anything I can do? Does it even matter? If it does is it really fair that my site is being punished for being a useful resource? Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | Stinkyink0