Why did I lose my Page 1 ranking for my main term?
-
My site is http://www.killthezombies.com. I have historically ranked on page 1 for the term "zombie games" up until the beginning of 2012, since my site was launched in 2008. Now I am not in the top 100 at all, since Panda.
Over the last year, I've tried many things to answer and solve this problem. I've cleaned up onsite issues, and I've tried to be more active in link building since I historically allowed my users to build links organically.
While I don't expect to rank #1, since many of my competitors have the term "zombie games" in their domain, and they are far more aggressive on backlink building than I am, I do not understand why my domain is not even in the top 100.
It's clear I used to rank, and that Bing and DuckDuckGo still think KillTheZombies.com belongs on page 1.
I have reached out to Google to see if I've been penalized, and they actually got back to me to say I have not been. Google Webmaster Tools shows no crawl issues or warnings.
I have many #1 rankings for terms like "zombie killing games", "kill zombies", etc.
Does Google now think my site is about "kill the zombies" and somehow not about "zombie games", which is clearly my subject matter and something I've optimized for?
-
Can anybody provide insight from the timing in my search history graph?
-
Here's the history of SE traffic. The jump earlier this year is improperly labelled Adwords traffic.
-
Thanks Marie, I believe you're right about needing more help than just the forums. It's a start. I'm willing to hire if the right person sees this. The site itself doesn't make much money, but it's a labour of love.. it's been with me for 6 years.
I think the answer is in the gaps of my own knowledge. I know enough to feel like I'm covering all of my bases, but I'm not a studied Panda or Penguin expert - reading a few articles over the past year, but that's about it.
The redesign was a vast improvement in SEO over the previous site, but I'm too close to it to know if there was one key strength of the old site that I ignored.
I really think that google gives my competitors a pass on using link test like "zombie games" because it's in their URL, while if I use it, they see it as unnatural. I've never been warned though, so it's hard to say. It seems the landscape really favours using "zombie games" in the url right now. Everyone in the top 20 has this, and I don't.
-
If you're not in the top 100 then there is probably some type of penalty or filter going on. My best guess, again, is Panda. Here is some information that may help you understand Panda: http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/
Not having the word "zombie games" in your url is not going to make you drop out of the first 10 pages. Plus, if you dropped at the end of Sep it either has to be EMD (which it can't be because your domain name is not exact match) or Panda. Panda will cause a whole site to drop, or sometimes just a section. But, if Google perceives that the majority of your site is either thin or duplicated then it puts a Panda flag on the site and won't allow you to rank well. A few good pages in the midst of hundreds of thin pages are probably not enough to help you escape Panda if this is what it is that's affecting you.
"I think it's a legitimate backlink text though because my website is literally a list of zombie games." - Things have changed in the last year about using exact anchor text. It's not good practice and can get you penalized. Whether it has, in your case is hard to say. If you were penalized it would be either an unnatural links penalty in which case you'd have a warning in WMT or it would be Penguin and you really should have had a drop on Apr 24, May 25 or October 5. So, again, I'd focus more on Panda than Penguin.
I fear that you may be over your head though in trying to tackle this. Forums like this are great for getting tips here and there, but you're not likely going to get a solution as this would probably entail someone spending a good 5-10 hours going over your site, your redesign issues, your analytics and your backlinks.
-
Some issues I think I might have:
- Too many internal links. I have 80 games on my homepage and both have both an image and a text internal link - that's 160.. maybe I can join them in the same A tag?
- I don't use any canonical tags - yet I have a lot of "duplicate" content, such as every game has both a regular and "full screen" version, and every category of games has pagination.
-
Wow, you're a wealth of knowledge! Thank you so much for taking the time with me, this can be overwhelming and it's easy to make mistakes when you think you're making things better.
Webmaster Tools says that most of my backlink text is for "kill the zombies", but I have spent time trying to create backlinks for "zombie games". I think it's a legitimate backlink text though because my website is literally a list of zombie games. All of my competitors get the same backlink text, but the difference is their url has "zombie games" in it.
When these problems happened, I grabbed onto the advice that the best SEO was to create good content. I hired a copywriter who writes descriptions of games for the inner pages, and blog posts. She writes new content 3 times a week. For this reason, I don't expect that onsite text or content would be my problem, because my competitors that outrank me definatily do not do this.
The biggest and most clear drop was September 28. I also remember that being when my ranking went out of the top 100. It is likely best to focus on that one.
So, I come back to my first question - why am I not in the top 100? I would understand not being in the top 5, or even the top 10, but not in the top 100 points to a definite PROBLEM. Something is wrong with "zombie games". Google is purposely excluding me from that group.
-
The first point I'd like to make is that you've got a lot of different things going on. I'll give you my thoughts but I wouldn't take this advice to the bank because there may be multiple factors.
September 28 was EMD, but you don't have an EMD. An EMD would be if you had a very poor domain that was ONLY ranking because it was called zombiegames.com. You were not affected by EMD. When EMD hit I asked people to send me domains that were affected. Most of them had Panda issues. It turns out that Google sneakily refreshed the Panda algorithm on Sept 27. It was a big one too...I've seen a lot of sites that were severely affected by that Panda refresh.
There was no major algo change June 1. It's not Penguin unless it happened directly on May 25 which was a Penguin refresh date. Penguin didn't cause a gradual drop. There was no algo change Aug 30 or December 24. You mentioned you redesigned your website. If you didn't put url redirects in place properly then this could cause issues. Or if you changed your title tags.
Regarding anchor text, I'm talking about the links pointing to your site. For example, the link pointing from this site to yours is anchored with "zombie games": http://www.pokerunderworld.com/. And this one: http://www.tantraonline.ph/forum/showthread.php?8465-Forsaken-Guild-of-Shiva/page2
If your drop wasn't on a Penguin day then I wouldn't go removing links though.
The issue is most likely to be one of quality (which would fit with Panda). Look at your site through Google's eyes. When the crawl the home page, what are they going to see? They can't decipher images and you've got no text. And all of your inner pages are very thin...just 1-2 lines of text.
-
Hi Marie,
Thank you for your feedback. It's hard to look at the site as it is today in response to the original issue because I've reactively tried a few changes this past year.
The major drops have been:
September 28, 2012 - organic traffic dropped overnight from 1,500 to 750. This was the EMD update, and I actually expected my ranks would improve since Exact Match Domains tend to dominate my niche. It actually seemed to strengthen the value of domains with "zombiegames" in the URI.
June 1, 2012 - organic traffic began a gradual drop from 3,000 per day to 1,500 per day by August 30, 2012. This could be a Penguin issue, although the change was not sudden.
December 24, 2011 - February 1, 2012 - organic traffic dropped from 4,000 per day to 3,000 per day. This was around the time I had redesigned my website.
I don't actually see the "zombie games" anchor texts on my pages. Can you point to some areas that you think should be changed? The term "zombie games" shows up in my homepage 11 times:
2 - title tag (changed March 23, previously title was "Zombie Games - Kill The Zombies!")
2 - description tag (has been this way for a few months now)
1 - main menu
1 - footer menu
1 - in an <a>tag under the logo image, inside an</a><a>- could this be seen as hiding a keyword?
2 - in other headings. I should use
instead of **..
1 - in the copyright line
Thank you!
Ryan**</a> -
Are you sure your rankings dropped on a Panda day and not Penguin? You have a lot of links using the anchor text "zombie games" and that could easily get you affected by Penguin.
If it was a Panda date on which your organic traffic dropped then you've got to look for the two most common Panda factors: duplicate content and thin content. I think the latter would most likely be your problem. Your pages all have only 1-2 lines of text on them. If this is Panda then the solution is probably to beef up the text on each of your pages.
-
Thanks Scott for the thoughtful answer. I set up http://www.killthezombies.com/zombie-games/ last year for the purpose, but I never figured out how to 301 my homepage to that sub-page, and I wasn't sure if it was very smart to stop using my root directory.
What do you think about it? I like your feeling that using the word zombie more than once in the url could be bad.
Would 301'ing www.killthezombies.com to games.killthezombies.com be your best advice? Personally, I don't like it, but that's coming from my heart, not my SEO brain.
Since I'm not even in the top 100, I lean towards google penalizing or sandboxing me in some way. It's hard to imagine Google thinks 100+ sites are better for "zombie games" , especially when I've got the 2nd oldest "zombie games" site in the niche.
-
Sorry to hear about your troubles. From my understanding google puts more emphasis on contextual links that point to your site, where as Bing and other search engines will look more at your on page SEO, which looks good from what I can see for zombie games.
The only thing that I see right away is that zombie games is not in your URL, which would help you rank for that key word. The issue you face to me would be either to put more effort into building backlinks to your home page for zombie games, or to create a subdomain or another page with zombie games in the URL:
zombiegames.killthezombies.com or killthezombies.com/zombiegames
Which actually might be over kill I try not to repeat terms in the URL as it looks spammy to me maybe:
games.killthezombies.com or killthezombies.com/games
If you're not showing up in the top 100 this would be the tactic I would choose, but this would be like starting from the beginning and you would have to build links back to this page to really complete with other sites ranking for that keyword.
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
-
Lower Level Pages Being Ranked for Key Terms
Good Afternoon We've been having problems with a site for a little while now. It had a penalty (partial link) a few years ago and never really recovered back to it's full potential despite the fact that the penalty was eventually removed and we've since changed the domain completely as well as moving over to https and left behind / disavowed bad links. In the Moz ranking stats now, I'm seeing that some of our lower level pages are ranking for core terms and the erratic nature of the ranking graph seems to indicate that Google is confused and not knowing what page to pull. For example, the top level page would be Hotel in Spain but the page that is ranking for that term is one of the individual hotel information (lower level) pages lets say the Holiday Inn . The lower level page has info on the individual property but also makes reference to it being a "Cheap Hotel In Spain" My suggestion to resolve the problem is to scale back the references to the top level terms on the hotel pages and reintroduce breadcrumb links to help Google follow the structure of the site again Does this sound reasonable or would anyone be able to suggest anything else to try?
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Contact Page
I'm currently designing a new website for my wife, who just started her own wedding/engagement photography business. I'm trying to build it as SEO friendly as possible, but she brought up an idea that she likes that I've never tried before. Typically on all the websites I've ever built, I've had a dedicated contact page that has the typical contact form. Because that contact form on a wedding photographers website is almost as important as selling a product on an e-commerce site, she brought up the possibility of putting the contact form in the footer site-wide (minus maybe the homepage) rather than having a dedicated contact page. And in the navigation, where you have links such as "Home", "Portfolio", "About", "Prices", "Contact", etc. the "Contact" navigation item would transfer the user to the bottom of the page they are on rather than a new page. Any thoughts on which way would be better for a case like this, and any positives/negatives for doing it each way? One thought I had is that if it's in the footer rather than it's own page, it would lose it's search-ability as it's technically duplicate content on each page. But then again, that's what a footer is. Thanks, Mickey
Technical SEO | | shannmg10 -
Search Term not appearing in On-Page Grader but is in code?
Hi, I have never had this issue in the past, but I am working on a website currently which is - http://hrfoundations.co.uk I didn't develop this website and the pages are in separate folders on the FTP which I have never come across before but hey ho. Anyway I have added the search term (HR Consultancy West Midlands) to the about us page in the h1, title and description however when I run the On-Page Grader it only says that I have entered it within the body which I haven't even done yet. When I view the page source it has defiantly been uploaded and the search terms are there, I have tried checking the spelling incase I spelt it incorrectly and I still can't seem to find the issue. Has anyone else experience this in the past, I'm going to go away now and check the code for any unclosed divs etc to see if that may be causing any issue's. Thanks Chris
Technical SEO | | chrissmithps0 -
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 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
Please Help! I lost ranking from #1 SERP
PensacolaRealEstate.com I am new to SEO. I lost my first place ranking on google. I held it for YEARS. I think I lost it with the last update... How do I analyze my site to find what is penalizing me? How can I get back to the top?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590