Branded Product Dropping from 1st position. Why?
-
Hi All,
I have a branded product that's always ranked 1st. It's a popular product which attracts the majority of our website's traffic. Now it's suddenly dropped from 1st to 20th. Can anyone advise me why this has happened? I've made no radical changes in the last month.
keyword: Wattbike Atom Url:https://wattbike.com/gb/product/atom
-
It's because Google believes that your page doesn't sell the product (which makes the page dramatically less useful) which is due to them crawling your site and caching pages from the wrong data centre (apparently somewhere in Australia!?)
Check it out. Here's your beautiful page:
Look how beautiful and useful it is, with the ability to buy the product and with all that nice content:
Now let's look at Google's cache of the page:
You can clearly see in that above link, we're querying Google's cache of the "gb" version of the page (%2Fgb%2Fproduct).
But how weird is this? It's cached the AU page 'as' the GB page ,which states to Google that the product isn't available to buy:
Uh - what Google!? Are you high? Why have you cached the AU page as the EN/GB page. I bet you any money, that has a huge amount to do with this.
I reckon' you've got regional redirects installed which snatch up users and force them into their own region's version of the site / page - unless a user manually uses the flag to change their location. Seems like good UX right? And it is, but don't apply the same logic to Google
Exempt Googlebot from your regional redirects if you have any (do it via user-agent based .htaccess / web.config exclusion, your dev will know what that means!)
You may find that by doing this, Search Console starts giving you more error reports in other areas. That's because you will have lifted a veil that has been cloaking certain issues underneath of redirects (leap that hurdle when you come to it)
Either you have a Google caching bug on your hands, or they deployed the wrong data centre to cache your URL, and that's when the redirects bork'd everything. IMO, that's what it is
Even if this isn't 100% accurate it will be enough to get a good dev-tective sniffing
Hope that helps...
-
Happy to help! Good luck!
-
Thanks, John, I'll follow your steps and keep you updated. Fingers crossed its nothing sitewide. All our other keywords are performing normally.
-
Hey Thomas,
I'm stumped on this one. Your inner link count looks good (358) as well as external link profile to that page. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Add exact keyword to
2. Add exact keyword to
3. Review Google Pagespeed insights data: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwattbike.com%2Fgb%2Fproduct%2Fatom
4. Review the schema structure on product pages: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwattbike.com%2Fgb%2Fproduct%2Fatom
5. Review 404 errors in Search Console
You normally don't see this type of drop unless there's a bigger issue going on related to the entire site. I hope that helps!
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
-
Title Tag Change - Drop in Organic Placement?
I've been working on increasing CTR my changing the title tag & meta descriptions. Has anyone ever noticed a drop in organic SERPS from doing so? Even if CTR goes up? It seems to me that if the CTR goes up and user experience in that way is improved these changes should yield an increase in the average position. Would you agree? Thank you!!
On-Page Optimization | | leslieevarts2 -
Rankings have dropped but why?
Recently our keywords have plummeted with regards to anything hen related on our stag and hen website. We were on the first page ranking 6<sup>th</sup> for terms such as Newcastle hen and hen weekend Newcastle. Now were around 15th this has also began to happen with other keywords. Content wise our pages score 90+ on page optimisation, we do have various keywords on the pages alike our competitors and use the highest searched for term as our page title. Our page speed is good on mobile and desktop. I’m struggling to see why we can’t seem to crawl back up to the first page when people who are outranking us have minimal content on slow sites. I know we lack back links but this can't be the only reason? Our website is hangoverweekends.co.uk
On-Page Optimization | | andy_simpson0 -
Is there a way to keep your brand name in the title tag even if your title is cut off?
Hi, I've been thinking of placing our brand name in the front of our title tag for brand recognition purposes. While doing research I came across a few sites that seem to have their brand name on every title tag, regardless of whether of not their title tag was too long and getting cut off by Google. Ex: Personalized Cutting Broads & Humidors...-Etsy The title tag for the example above was for a store in Etsy that sells personalized cutting broads, which was what i searched for. Normally a title tag that is too long gets cut off by Google and your brand name no longer shows if you've positioned it at the end of your title tag. Is there a way to get your brand name to show up at the end of every title tag even if your title is long and gets cut off by Google? Obviously, I could just place the brand name at the front of my title tag, but if I wanted something like my example above is that possible? Thanks You
On-Page Optimization | | znotes0 -
Will changing order of bullet points in product descriptions add some uniqueness?
We write our own unique product descriptions and have a unique product video for each color variation and multiple unique product images and display seperate user reviews per color variation. We prefer to have seperate product pages for each color variation for several reasons (targeting color searches and user experience seeing all color variations when browsing category pages). Product descriptions of color variations are quite similar.
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse
I was thinking about spinning dynamically order how bullet points of product descriptions are presented to add some more uniqueness. I am not expecting a massive impact, but do you think this increases a bit googles perception of page uniqueness?0 -
Total Links has doubled in less than one month!? Trust and Authority Drop
Hey Guys, Our website has just recently started to manage our website with SEO in mind and there are a few things that I am concerned about. 1. Domain authority, moztrust, mozrank have been dropping. 2. We had 368k links on 6/27 and on 7/11 we had 563k Is this a result of confusion between our www.websitenamehere.com and websitenamehere.com?
On-Page Optimization | | briggsb0 -
Why did our ranking go up, then drop down again?
Hello SEOMoz community. I work for a website that runs a collectibles news service and sells collectibles online. I recently renamed one of the pages from "Stock for Sale" to "Collectibles for Sale" anticipating this would help our ranking for the term "collectibles for sale". This changes the Title, URL and h1 to Collectible for Sale. A few days later we were up to 5th on Google UK for that keyword. But now after the weekend we've dropped off the face of the earth... Or at least somewhere low down in the rankings. I imagine there could be multiple reasons for this, but what are the most likely causes? There is not much text on the page, it contains an iFrame with image boxes that link to relevant collectibles categories. Website: www.paulfrasercollectibles.com
On-Page Optimization | | PaulFraserCollectibles0