Sudden Rankings Drop for Good Keywords.. Did I Do This? Please Help :(
-
Hello,
I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either.
Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada).
My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41).
I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer)
The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!
-
Ok. Is there space in your H1? Also the first sentence of the first paragraph?
-
Hi Andrew... It is in the title, however I don't think it is anywhere else on the page.
-
You mentioned the keywords took the client to the homepage.
Was the homepage targeting these keywords? Where they in the title for example.
If not then you've had a good run but it's time to start targeting these important keywords with bespoke pages.
-
Be more specific about the keywords in each level and layer of the navigation and perhaps I'll be able to provide you with some more detailed insight.
-
The timing of this correlates with the slight traffic drop (our traffic did not drastically drop but I did see a drop for a few good keywords like I said).
Thanks so much for this! -
This is a very complicated question and without taking a look into the site it's quite hard to diagnose whether you've made a mistake or not. Maybe someone else can help with that aspect.
But what I can tell you is that there have been two recent and ground-shaking updates to the google core algorithm at the end of March. Perhaps the first thing I might do is to rule out any connection to these. Remember not everything you are doing is affecting your traffic. Google and many other factors are constantly at play. It's easy to get overly concerned that you've made a mistake when rankings fluctuate but oftentimes it can be nothing to do with you but to do with an external factor.
I would go and look around Barry Schwartz' site and also get some dates for the algo updates and see whether these correlate with the rankings to rule that out first. It seems the recent updates were not penalties but helping quality sites rank so a sudden drop of the magnitude you're reporting would seem unlikely, but I would make sure that it's got nothing to do with the March Updates, read around them and rule that out first as a cause.
Sorry I can't be more specific/helpful. Small fluctuations are normal but I've been seeing some BIG ones in March both positive and negative. Take the stuff on SEO Roundtable with a pinch of salt. Like the comments. They are often from poor quality spammy sites and are all whining about rankings drops whenever google makes an update. But what Barry says is usually spot on and I keep my ear to the ground to try to link big drops or bumps to what's happening over at Google.
-
I should also note that the digital catalogs contain links to products that are on the site
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
-
Please Help me! I need advice for my website
I have 2 Domains with the same name vps nine and vpsn ine with same content. How to solve that problem? Do I need to change the content from my main website. My Hosting is having different plans, but with the same features. So many pages were having the same content, and it is not possible to change the content, what is the solution for that? Please let me know how to solve that issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
Site Rollback for Careless Website Design That Caused Rank Drop
New PPC Client (out of necessity) had their site redesigned for mobile without much care given to it by a "SEO Expert". None of the meta data was copied over to the new images and pages, much of the old content was simply deleted, intra site links completely changed. Huge hits in organic rank, resulting in traffic declines occurred as their lead volume hit zero the following month (April 21 until Present). Any concerns I should have in doing a simple rollback beyond redirects and GWT (Search Console) ops? Current plan is 1. Setup redirects back to old site 2. Launch PPC campaign to recover call volume and leads. 3. Optimize old site for mobile simultaneously with simple responsive framework for menu, text. 4. Start disavowing poor-quality links that were added (got 10 with spam rating >4). 5. Eventually move them back to Wordpress and the theme they paid for with site content, meta data, etc all in tact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jclmns0 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Checking keyword rankings
I have 2 questions: 1. To check keyword rankings with firefox, i am choosing: Tools>Options>Privacy>"clear all current history" Timerange to clear: Everything Check Boxes: Browsing and download history, form and search history, cookies, cache, active logins Is there anything else I need to be doing? 2. Search results in my Niche are heavily localized. Is there any way to check rankings in another area? Ex: By default, our rankings are for Northeast NJ. Is there any way to check Baltimore, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Why does my site keep dropping and dropping when it comes to impressions?
It all started very well but now it is all just going down and down even though I try to follow the proper guidelines. Could anyone give me some advice if I pm the link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | y3dc0 -
Sudden drop and Rise in SERPs
Our site was affected by panda but now we have recovered almost. But some strange things are going with our site for example Traffic for some pages has been dropped(over 100 position) overnight and recover. (graph is attached for a page). We have dropped(over 100 position) on all keywords for a page except a single keyword (staying on first or 2n position). Our home page is not ranking in top 100 position for title keywords. Is our website under any type of filter or penalized by Google?. What is your opinion about our internal link structure and content? URL http://bit.ly/rvxzDm and graph for this page is attached for sample data. looking for your opinion and suggestions. Thanks IXT0m.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray0