Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My site keeps losing positions, Please help!!
-
Hello,
This is the first time I post on this forum but have been a Pro Member for about 11 months.
Im going crazy the more I do the more it drop positions.
My problem is that one of the sites that Im working is has not been on the top 50 of any of the keywords. There were many issues but I have reduce the number.
Im not sure if I can post the link here or via PM.
My market is very competitive and Im using word press.
One of my target keywords is: web design miami
I would like for a member to give me an opinion of my site and may tell me what Im doing wrong.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hello,
Firts of all, you can do some fix on site optimization.
i.e You have the same keyword repeated twice in the title, Design Miami, second you have two H1 Tag, one for Web Design Miami and another for Graphics Design Miami, you got some inline style, else try to do nofollow footer links, and another suggestion, configure your server (HOST) for gzip. Cuz the sitespeed is another big issue last time.
I have made this changes for one of my clients site, which he had a lot of good linkings but on site optimization was a really mess, and this little mistakes helped me a lot to take higher positions on SERP.
Just my opinion, you can try this and see changes for some of your acctually positions.
-
A quick look at your backlink profile shows that you've got a lot of followed footer links containing the anchor text "web design". This type of tactic used to work at one time but no longer works and in some cases can get you penalized.
The best thing you can do is analyze your Analytics and see when you started to lose traffic for keyword phrases containing "web design". There's a good chance it happened Apr 24, May 25 or Oct 5 which were Penguin dates.
It's also not a bad idea to check WMT for a manual unnatural links warning just in case.
If this is Penguin, then some people who have had Penguin issues because of footer links like this have been able to recover. Recovery in general would involve having each of these sites nofollow the link (or potentially change it to something like your url, but this is debatable).
Then, when there is another Penguin refresh you should see some type of recovery. BUT, if this type of link was your only type of link and you don't have much of a natural link profile then you may not rank after all. You may need to start doing some things to earn natural links.
If you do have the footer links nofollowed/changed, you won't see any improvement until Google refreshes Penguin again which could be anywhere from today to months from now.
-
This is the link:
-
sounds like a penalty if not in top 50. you can post the URL and we'll take a look.
-
You can post the link here for everyone to see. Or you can shoot me a PM and I'll take a quick look.
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 does a site that is worse than mine by every objective measure I can find, keep outranking me in search?
I’ve been working on educating myself about SEO all day, again. All-Star Telescope up in Canada. We have a competitor that consistently ranks #1 and I don't get it. Their site is full of duplicate content (straight copy and paste from the manufacturer site). They don't have any meaningful blog or video content to add relevance or value to their site. We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the the competitors page. Our site is slow, but theirs is slower. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page (a popular telescope). Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069?_pos=1&_sid=f0aa91cc2&_ss=r Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope?_pos=1&_sid=56abdabd4&_ss=r#description Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). The text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here, something that isn't being captured by the tools that I have. Is it simple the fact that they get more traffic? Is that why some people go and buy traffic? Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Technical SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada We've worked with two highly ranked SEO's to try and figure this out, one in Canada, and one in the USA. I haven't seen a confidence inspiring answer from either of them. Posting on a forum is a bit of an act of desperation, I'll continue to work the problem, but it's discouraging to see the leader in my industry look like he's just phoning it in with his website.1 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive. It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile. Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product. My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content? Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Way to spider Wordpress site
I have an old Wordpress site and I want to move it to a new server and take it off Wordpress (too many hacks). I am trying to spider the site so as to get static, non-Wordpress, pages. I am having trouble doing this. When I spider the site, it changes the URLs. For instance, if the URL is www.domain.com/page/ the URL I get out of the spider is /page/index.html And those are not the URLs in the search engine indices. There are about 2000 pages on this site, so it is not feasible to set up 301 redirects. I tried using these spidering programs: WinHTTack Website Copier and PageNest Does anyone know of another method of turning a Wordpress site into a non Wordpress site?
Technical SEO | | DanCrean0 -
Changing images on site without losing ranking
A number of images on my site rank very well under google image search but need to be replaced with updated versions. If I keep the file name and pixel dimensions identical will switching the image effect my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Justin450 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1