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
-
Image redirection: Will it helps or hurts?
Hi all, There are some old images (non-existing now) from our website which have backlinks. We would like to redirect them to some live images to reclaim the backlinks. Is this Okay or sounds suspicious to Google? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Any more info on potential Google algo update from April 24th/25th?
Apart from an article on Search Engine Roundtable, I haven’t been able to find anything out about the potential algorithm update that happened on Monday / Tuesday of this week. One of our sites (finance niche) saw drops in rankings for bad credit terms on Tuesday, followed by total collapse on Wednesday and Thursday. We had made some changes the previous week to the bad credit section of the site, but the curious thing here is that rankings for bad credit terms all over the site (not just the changed section) disappeared. Has anyone else seen the impact of this change, and are there any working theories on what caused it? I’m even wondering whether a specific change has been made for bad credit terms (i.e. the payday loan update)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thatkinson0 -
Spammy Website Framed My Site & Stole Rankings
Hi One of the pages of my website was starting to gather some real traction in Google rankings and hit 3500 visitors per day. This is the page: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/drinking-apple-cider-vinegar-benefits/ On 11th January search traffic to this page fell to virtually 0. The rest of the site rankings were unaffected. Yesterday I tried searching for some of the main keywords I was ranking for and instead of my search listing, this was appearing: Image: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/weird-rankings.jpg It is in the exact position I was ranking in, but instead this evn . moe site has stolen my ranking. Upon opening the website, it is simply my original article page in an iframe. If you look at the source code of the offending website, you will see what I mean. Hopefully now you are getting a 403 forbidden error as my host blocked referrals from that site but they still hold my rankings. Has anyone ever seen this before? How was this done? And how can I get my ranking back? Thanks in advance, James
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesPenn0 -
A Sitemap Web page & A Sitemap in htaccess - will a website be penalised for having both?
Hi I have a sitemap url already generated by SEO Yoast in the htaccess file, and I have submitted that to the search engines. I'd already created a sitemap web page on the website, also as a helpful aid for users to see a list of all page urls. Is this a problem and could this scenario create duplicate issues or any problems with search engines? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy10 -
Need help determining how toxic this backlinking is
Okay, so my company has an SEO company already. However, we're trying to get people internally cross-trained on SEO, so I've been selected to kind of do a crash-course in SEO and look at our site from a new perspective. We are in the process of getting our old site ported over to a new one we've also created on Wordpress. I've been doing a LOT of online research, but this is definitely a very new field for me. Here's our current site: www.cedrsolutions.com So, here's my question: While doing some SEO-optimizing automatic tests on our site, I came across some weird backlinks to one of our pages: http://www.cedrsolutions.com/dental-office-manual/ http://en.calameo.com/read/003415063525a885728e7 Here's the thing: We didn't make this. It looks HORRIBLE, the copy is gibberish, and it looks weird. Doing some more searching, I started finding stuff like this https://lessons.engrade.com/dentalofficemanual/1 http://pumosust.over-blog.com/2014/09/how-to-get-customized-dental-office-manuals-online.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egMonqa5eRo (???? I don't even understand how someone did this, the photo in the book is just the photo from our page) http://www.tuugo.in/Companies/cedr-hr-solutions/0150008267958#! http://www.webjam.com/dental_office_manual/$my_blog/2014/09/12/how_to_get_customized_dental_office_manuals_online Conservatively, I'd say there's at least 100 of these types of pages out there linking to us, maybe more Then I started finding comments on blogs http://blog.kenexa.com/hr-focus-on-increasing-revenue-not-just-managing-costs/ http://geekologie.com/2012/05/bad-ideas-boyfriend-visits-dentist-ex-da.php (some NSFW language on that one) So, my first thought is obviously "Okay, these are gibberish, over-optimized, and ALL of them are trying to bump our relevancy for something along the lines "Dental office manual" EDIT: I should also mention these links ALL just appeared out of thin air. A whole bunch in early July, and more in mid-September. They didn't just slowly accumulate. So (finally) here's my questions: 1. Did our current SEO company probably do this? The only thing they've mentioned before is that they were going to create some backlinks for us, with an assurance they'd be genuine links that would build Pagerank without getting us slapped by Google. 2. Am I correct in my opinion that these are toxic links that could get manual action taken against us by Google? I'm not sure how LIKELY it is (as again, there's only about 100 or so) but they seem to be violating multiple Google principles. With how often Google pushes out algorithm updates I feel like we could still get busted for this even if the links are like 6-7 months old and not sending us much traffic. I'm asking because I've been told to set up a conference call with the account manager at our current SEO place, and I want to know what I'm getting into. I might be wildly over-reacting about nothing, I might be kind of right but it's not that bad, or I might be 100% right and what they are doing is not cool at all, and could kill our SEO if we get busted by Google. I'm not sure which it is. Checking Google webmaster tools and analytics, I don't see any drops in organic traffic between July '14 and now, so I don't think we've been smacked by Google algorithm-wise. And there's no notice from Google of manual action being taken, or anything being wrong with our backlinks, so I'm fairly confident these links haven't hurt us at least as of today. I'm just worried going forward (especially when we finish the new site and submit it to Google to get crawled, the URLs will be the same) Sorry this was so long. I'm kind of nervous, honestly. On the one hand, these backlinks seem SUPER sketchy to me, but on the other hand, I don't KNOW any of this stuff. It sounds kind of ridiculous for me, someone with maybe 3 weeks of intense Google-education in SEO, to be questioning something a real, established SEO company is doing. I mean, I kind of have to assume they know better, right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CEDRSolutions1 -
From keyword rankings to ......... what KPI?
Hi Folks, I have a customer whos keyword rankings for Google have fluctuated rather widly over the past two months which has caused some consternation on their part dispite our reassurance. This is caused in large part due to their lack of understanding of SEO, little effort on their part in implementing changes for SEO and what I belive to be unrealistic expectations (having done no SEO work on their site wanting to see first page ranking for competitive keywords like 'heart attack' within 4-8 weeks). At the moment we are using just keyword rankings as a KPI and I wish to reframe them by using additional or alternative KPIs so that as rankings fluctuate with future Google seach algorithm tweaks and changes that the customer isn't solely focused on them. I am still in the process of formulating this list but so far I have decided to include the KPIs listed below. Month-on-Month / Quarter-On-Quarter Organic search traffic volume (should be rising) Top landing pages excluding branding keywords and homepage (should corelate to content created to target specific keywords) Number of landing pages on the client site that rank List of landing pages and bounce rates (are the 'gateway pages' holding visitors due to meeting their search requirements?) Average number of keywords per landing page (possibly integrated with the landig page reports above as a dimension to demonstrate correlation of # of keywords to landing pages) Some visibility on top keyword search terms (provided from Adwords where possible and GWT also) Top organic keywords (from adwords and GWT) Conversions from organic search (will vary from client to client for their own needs but will primarily be implemented using Google Tag Manager event tracking for things like enquiry forms etc) Referral traffic Delta/Ranking trends over large set of datapoints (will depend on how often you poll/track rankings but for example if you track rankings weekly then assess the trend of the rankings over 3-6months to smooth out the fluctuations) Your thoughts and feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu1 -
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 -
301 Redirect Asp.net Help
Hey, we are redesigning the site and we are changing a lot of urls to make them more SEO friendly But some of the old urls have PR 4-5 What is the best way to do about this? How to do a 301 redirect for specific pages in asp.net Or do you recommend something elsE? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Madz0