Dropped to 45th spot. How to track ?
-
Hi.. We specialize in CMS Development and all of our keywords were spotted on 1st page always. Most of them were on #1 only.
ON a weekly basis, we only post resourceful blog posts on our website . Since 2-3 months, I have seen quite some drop in traffic and today when I tried the rank status, I see the keywords have dropped to 4th or 5th page.
Is there a way, I can track, what went wrong ?
Where to start with ?
The site always ranked good since 2 years of its start already.
-
GWT is clean. And we never had any paid links or something special. All we did was concentrate on social sharing, good on page optimization and then good blog posts about those keywords and social bookmarking mostly.
Thats all. Very odd.
-
Hi there
You may be interested to read this post on some of the recent ranking fluctuations seen late last year/early this year. It explains very well what appears to be happening - continuous link devaluation.
Now, this isn't a penalty of sorts - it's not related to Panda or Penguin. It's just a re-evaluation of links pointing to your site. If you've been concentrating on posts to your site and not actively accumulating editorial type links, then it might account for the drop. Simply put, if you haven't been receiving a great deal of high quality links to your site (while competitors have) and your site had links from directories and other places, which may have been devalued (Google has certainly hinted at doing this), then it may account for the drop.
First of all, I'd double check your webmaster tools messages to see if you have received any notifications from Google, just to rule out any suggestion of a penalty. Second, it's worth looking at the pages where the ranking has dropped - for those SERPs that did drop, were they all for the same page? That might indicate link devaluation.
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
-
Penguin 2.1 update, ranking dropped.
Hi, My website was hit by Google's new update like never before, first my ranking dropped back in May when Google rolled out with their second Penguin update, back then i was outsourcing my SEO since most of the time i was working on optimizing my local maps. As soon as noticed my traffic dropped i start doing SEO my self, I removed over optimized keywords on website ( title, meta description) then i analyzed my link profile and found that i had a lot of commercial anchor text linking from spammy websites, mostly blog comments. Its been over 4 months since I used Google's disavow tools in hoping that will help me get my raking back, but i still see these spammy links in my profile, 90% of them are nofollow anyways , so i'm not sure if disavow tool helped me at all. With this Penguin 2.1 update my website ended up on page 4-10 for 90% of my keywords http://screencast.com/t/3bcw8LUxpj Im not sure what would be the best way out this, should i buy a new domain and start fresh?Please let me know if you want to take a look on my link profile and give your opinion. Looking forward to your help!
Technical SEO | | mezozcorp0 -
Sudden drop in ranking google.co.uk ranking
Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
My homepage+key pages have dropped 40+ positions after implementing redirects and canonical changes. HELP!
Hi SEOMozers, I work for a web based nonprofit at www.tisbest.org. I had a professional contact recommend that we work on our redirects to our homepage because we were losing valuable rank benefit. This combined with getting sick of seeing our weekly SEOMoz crawl reports show 304 duplicate page and title errors for months. No one could seem to figure out what was happening (we think it had to do with session stuff; we were seeing several versions of each page showing the following: www.tisbest.org/default.aspx/(random character string) My developer and I read a bunch of articles and started making changes 10 days ago: He setup 301 redirects from http://tisbest.org to http://www.tisbest.org. (set the canonical domain). We did a redirect from http://www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to root with "/". I set the canonical setting to www.tisbest.org in our webmaster tools. In our web config (we're running in asp.net), we changed our session detection from auto-detect then saw some session funkiness so we changed it back. Though we do think the character strings we were seeing were session GUID. He forced lower case URL’s to reduce duplicate page content/titles. I got my weekly crawl report 9 days ago and we had dropped from 340 duplicate page title and page content errors went to one. We went nuts and felt like the kings of SEO. Then, yesterday (9/28), the SEO grim reaper came knocking when I received my weekly SEOMoz ranking report. It said we had dropped 40+ spots for all of 9 of our keywords. Sure enough, I searched our keywords and our website was gone. Then I searched our company name, tisbest, and only a few of our pages show but not the homepage. I searched for our URL www.tisbest.org, and I originally got the expanded view (with 8 links to various webpages - can't remember what this view is called) but now, today (Saturday), the expanded view is gone from this search result. Also, when I run the On Page Report card for our homepage, I get the following error message with no results: "We were unable to grade that page. The page did not load. Curl::Err::TooManyRedirectsError: Number of redirects hit maximum amount." When I run the Open Site explorer report, I get this message at the top: Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.tisbest.org/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?" If I go to the report for the that report's page, it says that "No information is available for that URL." Just tonight (night of 9/29), our developer added the rel="canonical" href="http://www.tisbest.org" /> to our homepage tonight to see if that would help. We did not do that originally. In our Google Webmaster tools, I am seeing the number of URL Error - Not Followed has sky rocked. I have attached a screen capture to this thread. There are also a large number of URL Errors - Not Found errors as well. I did some research tonight and downloaded and ran Screaming Frog SEO Crawler. I have attached a screen capture below with this report and a couple of questions I sent our developer that may be helpful to you. Also, not sure if this is relevant, we use a master page that all of our pages inherit from so all of our pages get the same meta-data: name="keywords" content="charitable gift card, charitable gift certificate, non profit gift card, charity donation, giftcard, charity gift card, donation gift card, donation gift, charity gift, animal gift card, animal gift, environmental gift card, environmental gift, humanitarian gift card, humanitarian gift, christian gift card, christian gift, catholic gift card, catholic gift, religious gift card, religious gift" />id="ctl00_metaDescription" name="description" content="Award winning Charity Gift Card, for over 250 premier charities. A customized donation gift that makes the world better. TisBest is BBB Accredited." />name="google-site-verification" content="EfJIhN3h2SVSXdSpUbfceBVw2q6zrGX8rRQhdNZ1xY8" /><title></span><span> </span></p> <p>Can anyone help me/us identify the issue that obliterated our rankings? I am happy to give an information needed. Thank you! Chad Edwards</p> <a download="Bqcu1.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/Bqcu1.png" target="_blank">Bqcu1.png</a> <a download="ZXQ8d.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/ZXQ8d.png" target="_blank">ZXQ8d.png</a></title>
Technical SEO | | TisBest0 -
Why Would PageRank Drop From 4 to NA?
Yesterday my homepage had a PageRank of 4 according to the Google toolbar (which I know isn't accurate, but bare with me) and the majority of my other pages were PR2. Today every page on my site is PR N/A, or PR -1. I also used a couple of free page rank checkers to make sure it wasn't just my browser. The only link I have ever purchased is on botw.org. I submitted my site to 6 free directories about two weeks ago, but only to the highly recommended ones, and with different anchor text at each. I have no messages in my Google Webmaster Tools account, nor do I have any significant crawl errors. My SERPs and resulting traffic have not (yet) been affected. Any ideas what's going on? I did start a Google AdWords campaign about 10 days ago that ran for 3 days and then got suspended due to the nature of my website. Could that be it?
Technical SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
URL with tracking code
Hi there, At the company i am currently working for we have a problem with shortcut url with tracking in it. They send a lot of brochures with a shortcut URL which redirects to the page of the event with tagging. For example The real URL is:
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen
http://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/ The URL in the brochure is:
www.sbo.nl/schoolleiderpo this then redirects to: h
ttp://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/?utm_source=direct&utm_medium=shortcut&utm_campaign=schoolleiderpo Now we can measure the effect of the brochure on on-line traffic and conversion. This is great but a lot of website link to that shortcut url and if the event is put offline the links to it generate an 404. We have now about 800 backlinks that generate this 404 and i want to fix it. Another big problem "i think" is the possibility that google will index this url with tagging. Now i have 2 options: 1. look at al the url with that 404 and redirect them with a 301 to the best page 2. create the shortcut on an page that is most suitable but then i will get the tagging in the URL and i guess google will see this as dublicate content. It is possible that in the future the shortcut url will be used again. What would you suggest as the best sollution.0 -
I had a massive ogranic traffic drop in the past 72 hours (80%). What should I do? I
I am very very worried as my organic traffic suddenly came to pretty much a halt last Friday. We have been working very hard on content in the last 2 years and have 0 duplicated content with many thousand travel guides, tips and other travel related info. We are also publishing a successful travel blog which used to get quite a bit off traffic. Everything stalled last Friday and since we are operating in the travel industry which is very competitive, this will be very hard on us. In fact, I fear that we will not survive this drop for more than 2-3 months. How do we find out about what happened and what can we do to get our SERPs back? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madsuh0 -
My uniques have dropped around 25% since following advice here
Hi, since posting a few threads here and following instructions (post more unique content, link building etc) my website traffic has dropped by around 25% My SERPS rremain pretty much unchanged. I'm posting tons more unique content. Am I just being penalised slightly because I've made drastic changes to my site (301 .com -> .co.uk) etc or am I doing something wrong?
Technical SEO | | craven220 -
Does Google take into consideration the number of ad tracking pixels on a page into its ranking algo?
Does Google take into consideration the number of ad tracking pixels on a page into its ranking algo?
Technical SEO | | CLee-1779961