Why have my rankings dropped?
-
I have a client who has just seen his average page rank creep up from around 39 to 34 over about two months, then it appears to have dropped back to position 40+ in the space of a week.
I believe he's made a lot of changes to targeted keywords, so I'd like to think it's simply because his old targeted keywords are dropping and new keywords still have to build their rankings. But I'm also worried in case he has over-optimised and might get getting penalised.
Any advice on where to start digging?
-
Sounds like solid and wise advice. Thank you!
-
Here is my experience...
I am a statistics nut and I love numbers, but that can lead you to spend a bit too much time on rank-watching and too much time speculating if there is a meaning to the movements. I have been watching the ups and downs of baskets of keywords such as those you describe since the 1990s. Today, I have a few dozen baskets of keywords (a dozen to a hundred keywords per basket) in a variety of industries that I am watching with SEMrush.
Almost every one of them has some up and down movement daily. Close competition with just one or two competitors can cause apparent major moves in your averages as they move up and you move down, as you move up and they move down. This is all part of the flux.
It is rare for a piece of my new content to move to the top of a worthy SERP right away. Instead, it sits deep and climbs slowly - over weeks, months, even a year or more. If you get links or do work on the site, those things rarely cause big jumps in your SERPs. Occasionally that happens, but generally not - unless you have a tiny site. So, the important thing to do, in my opinion, is to look back 90 days, a year, or more and see what progress you are making against your competitors. Its the long-term average that is important.
You should be working ever day to improve your position, but that will cook into your SERPs gradually over time. Tramping down hard on the accelerator, trying to move things with hastily-built content or a bunch of low-quality links is a mistake. Working for quality is slow and if you have the patience and do great work you will be rewarded for it - in time. Just keep your head down working, pay attention to your long-term SERPs and don't get too focused on small moves - especially when you are deep in the SERPs. Your SERPs are of very little value until you are breaking into the first page.
-
Interesting.
So what is the value of the daily rankings? And at what point should we be worried?
-
No problem.
I would still give the same answer.
-
Sorry, I should have been clearer...
- These are not Search Console average positions I'm talking about (I understand about the flux in that tool).
- These are the average rankings of 92 keywords tracked daily using the SE Ranking tool.
-
When a page is positioned down in the 30s, 40s, or deeper, the rankings will not be rock solid. They will constantly be moving up and down, down and up, in what many SEOs call "daily flux". It is not a good idea to attribute these movements to anything. They are simple fluctuations in how Google presents the SERPs. I wouldn't even call them "adjustments" in the rankings done by Google because your location, previous browsing, Google experiments, change in rank by almost any website above or many from below could influence.
You can even use a rank checker such as those offered by Moz or SEMrush or any other company and see continuous daily flux in the rankings.
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 drop after https migration [Need urgent help]
hey hi guys, i have lost all my organic traffic and in need of urgent help. Plz i need all your SEO expertise. My website is: makemoneyadultcontent.com (before judging me, let me tell you that i have been in adult industry for almost 7 years now and hence this blog was a way to pass my knowledge to everyone who is looking for it) Recently i saw that moving to HTTPS will benefit my site. I did not knew much about technical details of moving to https. My hosting was on siteground, and they have a button which you can press and your website will then be served through https. So i did that. Nothing else was done. this was done on 13th or 14th of june For the next few weeks here is my analytics (image attached) : As you can see the traffic fluctuated and finally i lost everything on 29th june. When i researched more, i found out that you need to follow many steps in order to move to HTTPS. So i followed this guide and completed all the steps: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https/ (also checked many other guides and tried to complete all the steps mentioned) Everyone said that the rankings will recover in one week, but now it has been more than 17 days and still the rankings have not improved. My articles are indexed as i can see it using site:makemoneyadultcontent.com but none of them are ranking for the keywords that i was ranking earlier. i have submitted the sitemap in google webmaster and around 166 (out of 218) pages are indexed. Here are few more images to help my case: plz plz help me what i can do to get my website traffic back. i have spent a lot of time and effort in building this site, cant see it die a slow death like this one. 8Wa8c [http ahref](http ahref) D42xw sAd9E
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akki910 -
Drop in Mobile & Tablet Rankings
We have pretty strong rankings and have done since we launched our business in 2004. Over the past two months, we have seen a strong growth in rankings after a bit of a drip last year, however over the past week we have seen a significant drop off in organic traffic. Further analysis has shown that this is coming from mobile/tablet traffic, as the desktop traffic has been fairly consistent. There does appear to be a drop (across all main keywords) on mobile/tablet, but again there is no noticeable drop in desktop rankings. I am obviously aware Google treats these differently, but we can find no obvious reasons why this might have occurred. It is almost as if some sort of penalty has been applied on mobile/tablet only. There are no warnings or obvious problems in webmaster tools and our mobile/tablet site is mobile optimised. At a bit of a loss and would appreciate a bit of guidance in where you think we should start to understand what is causing this and how we should go about correcting it. Thanks in advance for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
After Ranking Drop Continue SEO or Focus on Improving User Experience Instead?
Six months after starting a marketing campaign and spending a lot of money on SEO audits, link removals, wire frames, copywriting and coding my web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) traffic dropped significantly after I launched a new version of my site in early June. Traffic is down about 27%, but most of the traffic from competitive terms is gone and the number of leads (phone calls, form completions) is off by about 70%. On june 6th an upgraded version of the site with mostly cosmetic changes (narrower header without social media buttons, streamlined conversion forms, new right rail was launched. No URLs were changed, and the text remained mostly the same. But somehow my developers botched up either canonical tags or Robot Text and 175 URLs with very little/no content were indexed by Google. At that point my ranking and traffic. A few days ago a request to remove those pages was made via Google WebmasterTools and now the number of pages indexed is down to 675 rather than the incorrect 850 from before. But ranking, traffic and lead generation have not yet recovered. After spending almost $25,000 over nine months this is rather frustrating. I might add the site has very few links from incoming domains and those links are not high quality. An SEO audit was performed in February and in April a link removal campaign occurred with about 30 domains agreeing to remove links and a disavow file being submitted for another 70-80 domains that would not agree to remove links. My SEO believes that we should focus on improving visitor engagement rather that on more esoteric SEO like trying to build incoming links. They think that improving useability will improve conversions and would generate results faster than traditional SEO. Also, they think that improving click through rates, reducing bounce rates will improve ranking by signaling to Google that the site is providing value to visitors. Does this sound like a reasonable approach? On one hand I don't see how my site with a MOZ domain authority could possibly compete against sites with a high number of quality incoming links and that maybe building a better link profile would yield faster results. On the other hand, it seems logical that Google would reward a site that creates a better user experience. Any thoughts from the MOZ community???? Does it sound like the recent loss of traffic is due to the indexing of the 175 pages? If so, when should my traffic and ranking return? Incidentally, these are the steps taken since last November to improve SEO: SEO Traffic & Ranking Drop Analysis and Recommendations (included in-depth SEO technical audit and recommendations). Unnatural Link Removal Program Content Optimization (Audit & Strategy with 20 page keyword matrix) CORE (also provided wireframe for /visitor-details pages at no-charge) SEO Copywriting for 10 pages New wire frames implemented on site on June 6th Jump in indexed pages by 175 on June 10th. Google Webmaster Tools removal request made for those low quality pages on June 23rd. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
How to improve ranking of deep pages?
While this may sound like an obvious or stupid question at first...let me explain... We are an e-commerce website which sells one type of item nationally; for sake of an example which is similar to us, you can think of an e-commerce site that sells movie theater tickets in cities and towns across the country. Our home page ranks very well for the appropriate keywords as well as some of our state and city pages rank very well for local searches. However, while some state and city pages rank well for their respective local searches, others have a low page rank with some not even in the top 50 for their respective keywords. My question is that we aren't clear why some pages will rank well while others wont when the competition looks similar for those local searches. And in today's Panda/Penguin era we are unsure of how to get more of these state/city pages ranking better? For the record, we are quite strict about on-page SEO, 99% of our 5600 pages are crawled & we have minimum SEO errors from the SEOMoz crawls. Can anyone provide some feedback & thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTSupp0 -
Ranking with other pages not index
The site ranks on page 4-5 with other page like privacy, about us, term pages. I encounter this problem allot in the last weeks; this usually occurs after the page sits 1-2 months on page 1 for the terms. I'm thinking of to much use the same anchor as a primary issue. The sites in questions are 1-5 pages microniche sites. Any suggestions is appreciated. Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m3fan0 -
Quick ranking boost
Hi, What is hte quickest way to get up the rankings for a particular not hugley competitive keyword ? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prongo0