Sudden decline in ranking
-
Hi SEO People,
Rankings for one of my search keywords has declined over the last two weeks from place 2-4 down to 13-15 on Google NZ. It had sat at the place 2-4 level for months.
Nothing has changed on any of the sites above/below ours, and nor have any changes been made to our site.
All our other, similar, keyword rankings have either stayed unchanged or improved.
Does anyone have any bright ideas?
-
Precisely! Sorry if my initial question was not clear (need to learn proper SEO speak).
I will attempt to get in contact with the site owner.
Thanks Marcus
-
Hey Chris
You have pretty much nailed it and you do have no access to that page however I would try one thing.
If you check that page it is still indexed in Google:
info:www.pressreleasesworld.com/team-building-auckland-how-to-choose-your-partner/
So, you could contact them and tell them that a page that clicked on in the Google results generated a page not found error on their site. If you can get this message to the right person they may well fix this.
Not to say you would not want to push on with other link building anyhow but... this could be the best of both worlds.
It does not always have to be technical.
Marcus
-
Hey Chris Just to clarify: do you mean that the this is the best (or was the best) link using anchor text from an external site and it now no longer exists? If that is the case, then you could contact the site owner and let them know that they have a 404 there and send them a cached version of the page so they can fix their issue. Alternatively, you likely need another good link to get back to where you were. Hope that helps. Marcus
-
In this case, you might want to consider setting up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file. Here's a quick how-to guide.
Redirect it to a relevant page and it should pass on the strength that it had. This in turn could help the new page to rank for the term.
-
It's the Top Linking Page Using Anchor Text.
I would ASAP DIY but I have no access to the linking page (unless there is another way?) - http://www.pressreleasesworld.com/team-building-auckland-how-to-choose-your-partner/
-
If your top ranking page was returning a 404 error then yes, there's absolutely no doubt that this would effect its ranking.
The Googlebot would basically be hitting the page and being repeatedly told that there's nothing there and so would devalue its strength in the SERPs as a result (because what user wants to hit a 404 page?)
That's an ASAP-do-it-yesterday sort of fix!
-
Thanks Tom and Marcus for your insightful replies.
I did some further link analysis and found that the top linking page was now a 404 redirect. I presume that would be the main cause...?
-
Hey Chris
Without a link or the keyword it's hard to give anything other than very general advice and this could just be a natural flutter. The SERPS are so volatile that fluctuations happen almost daily so It may not be a cause for concern and it may come back to near where it was in a short matter of time.
If you wanted to dig further, the obvious thing to look into would be the links to your site and specifically any links that used this keyword.
- Do you have low quality links with this anchor text?
- Could links have been devaluated?
- Could low quality pages with links on have been hit by the last panda update?
It is likely nothing to worry about but if you have done some lowish quality link building around this phrase then it may warrant further investigation.
Hope that helps and happy to look a bit harder if you can drop in the keyword and a link.
Marcus
-
It's not a large enough of a drop for me to think that your site may have been effected by an update. Regardless, if you have webmaster tools set up (and if not, do so), my first step would be to check for any messages from Google.
After that, I'd analyse your own link-building campaign over the last month or two and maybe compare it against a few competitors and see if there are any differences and short comings. Open site explorer has recently had its index updated, so it can help in this case.
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
-
Ranking a Polish website in English with existing keywords
I have a website that is currently in Polish and I'm interested in ranking it for the same keywords in English. I'm wondering if I need to create entirely new pages for the English version or if there are plugins or other tools that can help me translate and optimize my existing content for English search engines. my website seo factor. Any recommendations or experiences are greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mohammadrehanseo0 -
Can't understand poor rankings
Hi Guys Our site gets an A for on page optimisation and has much more backlinks and content than our competitors yet we rank no where for majority of keywords Please Help! Mike
Technical SEO | | MikeAquaspresso0 -
How to improve ranking of a website again, after being penalized by Google?
The ranking of our website has gone down in past 2 months. The reason,
Technical SEO | | TGA123
I believe is that we had more than 300,000 spammy comments posted on it
(the website is based on wordpress) so Google treated it as
un-monitored forum and penalized. We have deleted the older comments
and new comments can no longer be posted. Need suggestions on what else
should we do to rank better. Any advice would be very welcome.0 -
Why my rankings slipped down a bit after January 20 ?
http://www.customgreekthreads.com/, we used to rank #1 or #2 for "Greek Apparel", "Greek Clothing" or "Greek Cloths" in google, but since January 21st 2013 (I guess it was after the google update), we started to rank down at around #8 or #9 for these keywrods. Other keywords have also slightly downgraded. Can you check what we might need to do to recover this or if we are doing anything wrong?
Technical SEO | | Plato820 -
Exact URL Match For Ranking
Has anyone else run into this issue? I have a competitor that purchases domain names for popular inner pages we are trying to rank for. We are trying to build a brand, our competitors have a lower domain authority but rank higher for inner pages in the serps with VERY little content, backlinks/seo work, they host a single page and do a re-direct to their main site. Would this be a good long term strategy? EX. We sell golf clubs our brand name is golfcity (Ex only) and we carry callaway clubs, our competitor is also building a brand but they purchased callawayclubs.net and do a re-direct. They rank on page one for keywords callaway clubs. If I do try to do this does one have an advantage over another? .com. net .org. because Ive seem them all used and rank on page 1. Thank you!!!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Wrong Page Ranking
Higher-level page with more power getting pushed out by weaker page in the SERPs for an important keyword. I don't care about losing the weaker page. Should I: 404 the weaker page and wait for Google to (hopefully) replace it with the stronger page? 301 the weaker page to the stronger page? NOTE: Due to poor communication between content team and myself, the weak and strong pages have similar title tags (i.e, "lawsuits" and "litigation")
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Google rankings tanked....Now what?
We just experience a drop in Google rankings, some pretty harsh, across all of the keywords we have been ranking greater than 50. I’m a noob at SEO, but a technical noob so I started doing my home work. I’ve seen references to the “google dance” and “Honeymoon”, but this hit seems to have effected competitors too. Everyone seems re-ranked with several junk directories jumping up more than I think they should. Has anyone else seen this? Is this more Google algorithm adjustment or a natural settling based on our new SEO attempts? In either case, what should we do next? I know there is a holistic approach and everything is important however, we need bang for the buck at this point to before we start bleeding. One or two next steps? Our industry is residential cleaning and the site is www.bitabliss.com Here is a little history:
Technical SEO | | BitABliss
The site that’s been running for about 2 years. We initially put up a very basic “throw something up” site without much thought of SEO except for some basics and a long tail approach with a blog, FaceBook and Twitter. We launched an updated site on Feb 23. with new theme and this time some, “on page” work to better hit the basics. The site structure was kept the same and we added on some more localized content in hopes to take advantage of local searches. Also, enter SEOMoz to get us tracking things (Yay MOZ). Until yesterday, we had been doing pretty well in some of our target cites even with the more basic site. When we launched the new site focusing on page titles, descriptions and page content, and a few directory attempts. We started to see some incremental growth. It seemed to me that this kind of growth meant that we were doing the right things and doing a better job than some of the other sites. Any way, yesterday we got smacked down. This seems too harsh for a for the slow increases we have seen over the last month. Any thoughts you have would be great appreciated. Thanks! -Shawn1 -
Why do I rank so differently in Bing and Yahoo?
Howdy SEOmozers, I've noticed that I rank very differently in Bing and Yahoo compared to Google (and it’s the bad kind of different) for many of the terms that I'm targeting. Can anyone give some advice on how I can put this right or link me to some good resources about the differences in their ranking algorithms? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman1