Lost rankings in the last week
-
In the last week, my website's rankings dropped for a number of keywords. This is the first time I have seen a net drop (and it's significant) in my SEOMoz rankings report (been climbing consistently since January), and I haven't changed my strategy at all.
Can anyone shed some light on this? I noticed that my two major competitors have both lost domain rank as well.
-
Thanks Sara!
-
It's so frustrating. The following week we climbed rankings but then last week we dropped again. I think it's also to do with the fact that I am trying to rank for too many keywords at the moment. Grrr!
-
Yes, I guess that was the last panda, my website also was hit hard, and it is pretty weird considering we begun a big cleanup of duplicated contents 5- weeks ago, and actually we expected to have some good results from this last update!
-
There was a Panda update so it could likely be from that - http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-25-seems-to-have-hit-151732
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
-
Rankings Continue To Drop
Hi there I'm at wits end trying to stop the slow bleed in our rankings to our store URL's that started mid March 2017 and continues through to today. I'd appreciate some pointers and hope this will throw up a challenge to someone out there. Here is the background: 1. We run an e-commerce store on Shopify with a blog. The recent ranking decline has been almost entirely on the store URL's (catalogue and product pages) while at the same time we have seen steady growth in search volumes in the blog - this makes me think we are seeing a Penguin4 penalty of some type, because the impact is confined to the store URLs. 2. We received a linked based manual penalty back in 2014 and this was successfully removed within 3 months. We have quite a large disavow file as a result. 3. Shortly after launch of Penguin 4.0 in Sept/Oct 2016 we saw a really nice boost in traffic and ascribed this to being under a previous Penguin algo penalty, now removed. 4. Come March 2017 we see a small but steady weekly drop in rankings for our store URL's only, this steady drop continues through to today and over time has become significant. Approximately a 50% decline in visitor numbers to store URL's only as of today, since March. All of this despite: a. Initially I thought this was a Panda issue (because it seemed to coincide with Panda releases in March and May) so the entire website has been rewritten (during June and July) with thin content removed across the store and the blog. Remaining content has been given a serious content boost, being very careful to watch for over-optimisation, and for keyword cannibalisation. I think I've got this right. There are also no crawl issues being highlighted by Moz Pro or SEMRush site audits. b. Recently discovered, only last week in fact. A very low domain website, trust score (0 and 0) had been copying our blog articles steadily on a weekly basis, starting Oct 2016 (yes same time as Penguin4) and only caught last week (my fault for missing this). These articles were copied verbatim with all links and so generated nearly 400 spammy backlinks to our store URLs (about 30% of all the links we have). I've had all these articles removed from the spammy site via DMCA so none of those links exist anymore (as of 8/14/17). I've also disavowed this domain with Google. Could these spam links be the issue, and Google is still needing to crawl this site to see the links are no longer there? I'm not sure because my understanding is that Penguin4 would have devalued these links to start? c. A general review of links and anchor text. I've used Moz Pro and SEMRush backlink audit (linked to Google Search Console) and have removed all toxic links by contacting web masters and using Google disavow. This included removing any links that I think are causing over optimised anchor text. After disavow, according to SEMRush, we have no toxic backlinks left and only 50 out of 1200 links with "Money" anchor text. This exercise was completed two days ago when the last disavow file was uploaded. However I don't believe there was an issue here before as toxic links were < 1% of all links and exact match "money" anchor text in the region of 5%. d. One potential problem with our backlinks is that we have quite a few high domain/high trust links to our scholarship page with anchor text "official website". The net result is that our "Other" anchor text category is just over 50% of total links - these are mainly educational institutions with .edu domains. e. A review of internal linking. We had some what I would refer to as SEO links, linking all product and collection pages across the store, through a tagging type system. This was removed two days ago as it was probably unnecessary for user experience. Other than this I have two concerns remaining with our internal linking structure. The first is that we have quite a big static navigation on the left margin of our store collection pages. This is not faceted navigation, but static. The second is that we've internally linked from almost every blog to our "key" money page in the store, however with varied and non-money anchor text. f. There is nothing in Google Search Console indicating a problem, no manual actions, no significant HTML improvements, and Google has indexed over 90% of URL's compared to the sitemap. All broken links have been fixed - there were a lot before but all fixed as of three weeks ago. g. Checking site speed in GA. Speed has remained constant over the period and we have put in some fixes to improve it. Site speed has not got worse and scores average in Googles speed checker. That's about it. It's possible that with the recent changes made with respect to b, c, e and f above I just need to wait a couple more weeks for Google to catch up, and would appreciate thoughts on this. However I'd also like some thoughts on the static navigation on our collection pages, plus importantly on linking from blog articles to mostly a single money page in the store - of all that remains I think this is potentially a problem. Our website is located at www.thekewlshop.com Many thanks for your help. Charles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | charlesfitz0 -
My Search Rankings Are In FreeFall Since Last One Month. Should I Be Worried?
My site www.midigital.co until the 10th of December, 2015 was ranking more or less in the top 10 for 92 Keywords most of them 1 word and 2 word, built upon over 10 years of SEO and optimization (all ethical). Since that time however it's like Google's decided that we didn't belong there and all the rankings are in free fall. The only change was that we updated our Wordpress Version. Nothing else was changed. Links were same as always. My organic traffic figures have fallen 99%, many KWs have been buried beyond 51+ and because of that client's queries we got have virtually disappeared. PPC helps but it's not Organic. Should I be Worried or is it just more Google Dance?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat0 -
Ranking strangeness
Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client. Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve. Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on. Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages). The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1! Bang -straight to top spot. However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition. Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one. We still need to fix thin and duplicated content! I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre. Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Why do some domains out rank stronger authority domains
Hi, If we take the Moz stats into account here, how comes sometimes weak Moz stat domains out ranking strong Moz stat domains? For example: A inner page with DA56 / PA40 is outranking a Wikipedia inner page with DA100 / PA82. That's a massive difference basically twice as strong on the Wikipedia page but being out ranking. In this case I assume the onpage SEO is playing a big part, but can onpage optimisation be that powerful? And I see this all the time, what SEO factors cause this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
Sudden rankings drop for our most profitable keyword?
Hi, I was hoping you could help me with a troubling issue that has come up this week. We have consistently ranked in the top 3 for the keyword "grey goose glasses" for the last 12 months. We received 74 visits from this keyword from Dec 3 to Jan 3. For some reason on Jan 4th we dropped from the top 3 to somewhere around 40-70 and receive almost no traffic from this keyword an longer. The page that was ranking was http://thebottlemill.com/tbm/grey-goose-drinking-glass.html I have since changes a the Page title and URL with a 301 redirect and the H1 tag to be a better match but this was just done yesterday. We havent seemed to be effected like this on other keywords. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bottlemill0 -
Ranking Ranking Factors!
When you look at the keyword analysis, you see the following ranking criteria: - | Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority | Root Domain Linking Root Domains | How do you rank the importance of each of these factors from 1-4? For example, PA, PLRD, RDLRD, DA Please explain. How many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Can Affiliate Links Harm Your Rank?
Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links? If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0