Rankings dropped - Why?
-
At the end of November a client site dropped significantly in the rankings.
The drop effected almost all the keyphrases we monitor.
Historically the homepage has always ranked higher than the sub-pages - however now it seems Google is no longer ranking the home page, and instead ranking the sub-pages, just far far lower down.
Any ideas what could cause this?
-
Hi Matt & Marie,
Many thanks for your comments.
I think it is Google only. Having not identified any other likely cause, I think that the Panda update on the 21st of November is the likely culprit, the timing is definitely correct.
Thanks again,
Gary.
-
Can you tell if the drop happened on a specific date? November 21 was a Panda update.
I did a traffic drop report for one site that had an unexplainable drop on November 27. I could have sworn it was a Panda related issue, but Google has not announced a Panda refresh on that date.
It could be totally unrelated to an algo change though. I have an embarrassing story to share. Just last week the same thing happened for one of my domains. The home page was nowhere to be seen and inner pages were ranking. It turned out that my domain name had expired. (Long story...there was an issue with email notifications.) The inner pages were still ranking because they were in the cache and not often visited by Google.
Also look for things like accidental noindexing, canonical tag issues, malware, etc.
-
Hi Gary,
Could be any number of things. Can you tell me what sort of work you are doing on the client's website, especially regarding linkbuilding? Do you have access to the client's webmast tools? Is there a notifcation of a penalty within there? Also, has the drop in rankings only occurred on Google, or have they dropped off of Bing and Yahoo results as well?
If you can give a bit more info, I'm sure a lot of people will be able to help
Matt
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
-
Landing Page Drop Out
Hi, If a product page drops out of organic ranking, but you've made no changes is there a good place to start in order to find out why? I feel like it's almost impossible? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Positions dropped and do not recover
Hi all, Site: https://www.fascinators.com.au k/w: fascinators (this is the main one I am looking at) About 2 years ago, I redesigned the site. It used to be on first positions in Google Australia. After redesign, positions dropped and never recovered. No matter what I do, I can not get them back. I even involved professional SEO agency for the last 6 month to help build links, but nothing works. (old site used really old non mobile-friendly engine) As far as I know site is technically sound with no issues. In the last few month position for my main keyword 'fascinators' jumps really wildly. From position 9 to not being in Google first 100. And jump can happen overnight. As of today it disappeared from first 100 again. I am really tearing my hair out on what can be wrong. Link building is underway. This is one area I am aware of. Thinking of keyword spamming, i removed lots of 'fascinators' from URL, but that did not seem to help much. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Rudolf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rudolfl1 -
Ranking drop for "Mobile" devices category in Google webmaster tools
Hi, Our rank dropped and we noticed it's a major drop in "Mobile" devices category, which is contributing to the overall drop. What exactly drops mobile rankings? We do not have any messages in search console. We have made few redirects and removed footer links. How these affect? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
Satish0 -
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 -
Drop in rankings
Our keyword rankings have dropped greatly since July'12. Our site used to be in the top 8 rankings for the most competitive keywords on our industry and now rank 30+. Being new to this industry any help would be greatly appreciated. www.fragileremovals.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
Hi all, We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower. One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www). Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August. We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor: We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks. Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day. GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact. Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tact0 -
UK Company Major drop in traffic & rankings on one primary keyword since March
I am helping out a small UK company who have had a sudden drop in organic search traffic since March 24th. Investigation highlights some issues with the site,e.g. Potential canonicalization of home page, a few html errors, some inbound links to the /index.html version of the homepage rather than /. But, nothing particualrly major and nothing that is different to pre-March 24th. The indexed pages looks ok in Google (although Bing is ranking the non-www version of the homepage) but this does not appear in Google's index. Searches for the company name on Google.co.uk show it as top result & some keywords are ranking reasonably well (based on homepage). Selecting blocks of text from the homepage and it ranks #1, but its Google rank for the primary keyword has gone from #2 pre-March 24th to not in the top 100 results since. SEOMOZ is grading the page A for the keyword which appears prominently on the page & keyword is the first characters of the title. It is not a particularly competitive keyword. Adding UK to the keyword and the page is Google.co.uk ranked #3. It's almost as if they are being penalised for a single keyword which I've never seen or heard of before. Any ideas? ** The company has never carried out any SEO - white hat or black hat. The site is perfectly normal, nothing dodgy or concerning about it at all.** Thanks in advance for your advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Could this URL issue be affecting our rankings?
Hi everyone, I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back. The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page: www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404: www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404] I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include: www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website. This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering... Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gmorgan0