HELP: What happened to my rankings? No warning from google how to know if i was penalised?
-
Hi Guys
I have just completely a site re-design, I have 3 top level domains.
I have no idea whats causing the drop in ranking. I have changed the title tags and meta tags to improve them and make them better, as the last ones weren't really doing us justice. But I see now it has actually dropped our main keyword. I read somewhere that i had to completed **site search **to check and I don't see our home page showing. I was ranking for the keyword: "online psychics" for over 4months at #6 and now is not showing anywhere in the top 50 keywords. I'm also affraid I can not find our other keyword "online psychic readings" which we were ranked #11 seems to have dropped to #44 I have no idea why this would be the case. Our new home page shows a better user experience and also added more content, unqiue content at that - our last design was content thin so I have no idea why we have dropped so much in rankings. The site is also new about 6months new. I have checked WMT and have not received any warnings of any penalties as such, unless it is still coming?
Does anyone have any suggestions here?
Cheers
-
WOW thanks again Dirk, your feedback is beyond! Thanks for informing me of these changes and sending me those links!
I will work on getting the above sorted asap with my developer
Cheers for all your help!!!!
Justin
-
Forgot to mention: don't forget to change it on all three sites.
The new site looks really nice compared to the old one - and speed seems to have improved. However still some work to do:
- time to first byte takes ages - could be related to the configuration of the server or related to some plugin causing delay.
- ask your programmer to use gzip to compress HTML
- minify your css & js
- optimise your images
- modify your caching (time is too short)
The detailed result from webpage test is here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150503_A2_BZ7/
Also check https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - your score is not too bad but check the improvements that are suggest.
Good luck!
Dirk
-
Hi Justin,
Normally everything should return to normal after a few days. You could try to speed up the process a bit by taking your key landing pages from Analytics. Fetch these pages in Webmaster tools (Fetch like Google) - when they are fetched submit them to the index (off course you first have to remove the noindex tag).
It's a quite common mistake - we had a similar case with a test robots.txt which was put in production. I was on holiday at the time and only noticed the error when I returned (3 days after go live). Everything returned to normal within a day.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Oh wow hey Dirk, silly me! Yes thank you for that oh how embarrassing.
I had told my developer to remove this last week - seems he hadn't and I didn't bother to check it! After I remove this should all be back to normal again?
-
Hi Justin
I fear that you have migrated your test settings to production - you have 196 HTML pages on your site - 115 pages have a content='noindex, follow' name='robots'> in the head section - this is also the case for your homepage and several other pages that seem important for SEO. Removing the tag will certainly help
Dirk
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
-
Why Google not disavow some bad links
I have submitted bad links that I want to disavow on google with the Moz Pro hight spam score. Its almost 4 months completed yet I have a bad link that exists with high spam score any solution? https://fortniteskinsgenerator.net/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marktravis0 -
Google Answer Box Optimization?
Anyone have any luck in optimizing your site to show up in the Google Answer Boxes that popup for informational queries? (for example: "what is seo?") I've read many of the articles that have been written on the subject, and have been able to show up for many queries by a) ranking high organically, b) placing the question at the top of the page, and then answering it succinctly. However, for one term a competitor continues to show up in the answer box instead of us, despite their site ranking lower organically in the search results. Anyone have any experience/advice for replacing a competitor in the Answer Box? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TakeshiYoung2 -
Better ranking competitors have paid links from blog pages
I have a trial of all the tools at the moment and it's a lot of fun. I have been delving into site explorer and found that some competitors have links to them from obvious seo promoting paid blog sites. One has no other links except a paid for blog from a site that openly admits it offers paid marketing and they shot up to 4th on page one for a main keyword phrase. The info from moz and matt cuts video's say not to do this, but it's so tempting. The blog is well written, while I sit here and do the right thing, my competitors have page one. If the blog is well written and is meaningful is it OK and if google ever decide it's paid and don't like it, wouldn't it be better to be page one for 6 months and then recover? I'd love to give the link to the seo, blogger thingy but don't want to come across as promoting it in any way. I am sure there are loads of them anyway.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Peter24680 -
Need help please with website ranking problem!
I am currently struggling with our site www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk to rank our PVC banners page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html On the UK search I have the following positions. hfe-signs.co.uk/banners.php
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson
signfirm.com/banners.html
bigvaluebanners.co.uk/PVC_Banners_High_Quality_Cheap_Outdoor_PVC_Mesh_Full_Colour_Banner/
bannerprintingandroid.co.uk/pvc-banners/
printedbannersandsigns.co.uk/
your-print.co.uk/pvc-banners-special.html
bannerbuzz.co.uk/pvc-banners
bannerbuzz.co.uk/
auraprint.co.uk/products/banners/
vinylprinting.co.uk/pvc_banners.html
banners.co.uk/CustomBanners-BlankBanners.htm
use - http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html I can't decide if it is url structure of the site, to many links on the left hand nav diluting power, keywords, etc but it does not look right that we are so far down, at least 2 of the pages above us have no content at all and some have no links or social either. Any help would be appreciated.0 -
Is it outside of Google's search quality guidelines to use rel=author on the homepage?
I have recently seen a few competitors using rel=author to markup their homepage. I don't want to follow suit if it is outside of Google's search quality guidelines. But I've seen very little on this topic, so any advice would be helpful. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
Should we add our site to Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Should we add our site nlpca(dot)com to google webmaster tools? Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years. We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Why Proved Spammers are on 1st Google SERP's Results
This question is related exclusively to few proved spammers who have gained 1st Google search results for specific terms in the Greek market, targeting Greek audience. Why he looks spammer and very suspicious? For instance, the site epipla-sofa.gr, sofa.gr, fasthosting.gr and greekinternetmarketing.com look suspicious regarding their building link activities: 1. suspicious spiky link growth 2. several links from unrelated content (unrelated blog posts forom other markets, paid links, hidden links) 3. excessive amount of suspicious link placements (forum profiles, blog posts, footer and sidebar links) 4. Greek anchor text with the keyword within articles written in foreign languages (total spam) 5. Unnatural anchor text distribution (too many repetitions) So the main question is: Why Google is unable to recognize/trace some of these (or even all) obvious spamming tactics and still these spammy sites as shwon below reside on the 1st Google.gr SERPs. Examples of spam sites according to their link building history: www.greekinternetmarketing.com www.epipla-sofa.gr www.fasthosting.gr www.sofa.gr All their links look very similar. They use probably software to build links, or even hack authority sites and leave hidden links (really dont know how they could do that). Could you please explain or share similar issues? Have you ever found any similar cases in your industry, and how did you tackle it? We would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter. Regards, George
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Clickwisegr0 -
Why is the rankings for certain targeted keywords dropping sharply in the past few weeks?
Excuse me here I can't reveal the website url here due to the confidentiality. Background: This website has about 100+pages, and is a wordpress site. Out of 15 targeted keywords, there are few ranked first on Google.co.uk. others are ranked between 3rd and 50+. In the past couple of weeks, we have been submitting to various websites/directories. and 4 main keywords' rankings are improving steadily from 50+ to 20+. We don't buy links, or pay for link exhcanges. We only exchange links on rare occasions. Symptoms: 1. 2 out of 4 main keywords dropped its rankings from 20+ to 80+ 4 weeks ago over night. 2. We kept on acquiring links from directories and websites, and 2 weeks after the drop, the rankings of 2 affected keywords had gradually made its way back to 20-30. Just we thought the glitch was over, these 2 keywords has dropped rankings to 50+ once again. 3. The change of rankings looks too suspicious to us, so we went to use the Moz tool, and discovered the domain authority has also dropped 25% of its value in a month time. We never experienced such violent changes in terms of rankings in such a short period of time. My question is: what factors there are to have caused such violent shifts? Why the value of the domain authority is dropped by 25%-30%? What elements affect the domain authority the most?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robotseo0