Improvement in rankings then site dissapears from SERPS?
-
Yesterday I saw significant improvements in rankings and the first page resulapp for several keywords appeared to have changed and included my site. Today the results appear to have reverted back and my site is nowhere to be seen. At least before I was in the top 100 but now I'm nowhere?
-
Unfortunately, all we can do sometimes is to keep marching forward and observe. If no improvement comes at some point, then more answers need to be sought out.
-
Yea it's still in the index. Its about 6 months old but I've only been working on it the last couple of months. I guess its just a waiting game.
-
My best suggestion is to give it a bit of time to see what happens. How long has the site been up? If it's been a short while (relatively speaking) it can take longer to stabilize.
Alternately, have you done a site: check to see if it's at least still in the index?
-
Should I expect my site to bounce back at some point? I've been link building but via guest posts which as far as I understand is white hat. I've been careful to vary anchor texts and use url/brand linking. I think if it was an anchor text penalty it would apply to that specific page. It seems odd the site is not returned in the SERPS for any keywords whatsoever.
-
Until a site reaches a point of stabilization, rankings could very well fluctuate. Many reasons can cause this.
1. Search engines continually test different results.
2. More than one algorithm has to be processed and they don't all update on the same day. So one algorithm may assign a certain ranking value, and another may alter that.
3. An algorithm update could literally change the landscape overnight. Even that could be temporary since updates are followed by real world reviews of their impact, and adjustments can be made.
4. Other sites in the system for those phrases could have had significant changes to their SEO or the way algorithms view those as well.
For all of these reasons and more, this is why short term evaluations are difficult at best to understand, and trends are more important.
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
-
What's the average rank update time after site and/or backlink changes?
What's currently the typical time, ON AVERAGE, it takes to see ranking changes when significant improvements are made to significant ranking signals on a long-established (as opposed to brand new) website? Does the rank update associated with on-page optimization happen sooner than addition of quality backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCCMoz0 -
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
Hello Mozzers. We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site. examples - site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked. We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do. It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc. Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8 thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
How to best utilize network of 50 sites to increase traffic on main site
Hey All, First off I wanna thank everyone who has responded to all my previous questions! Love to see a community that is so willing to help those who are learning the ropes! Anyways back to my point. We have a main site that is a PR 3 and our main focal point for lead generation. We recently acquired 50 additional sites (all with a PR of 1-3) that we would like to use as our own little back linking campaign with. All the domains are completely relevant to our main site as well as specific pages within our main site. I know that reciprocal links will get me no where and that google is quickly on to the attempted 3 way link exchange. My question is how do I best link these 50 sites to not only maintain there own integrity and PR but also assist our main site. Thanks All!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s0