My Ave. position and ranking is dropping!
-
Hi,
I added canonicals last two days, and made a tiny change is our meta titles. (adding a secondary keyword). Now my ave. position and visibility has dropped very much. Can it be canonicals or is it the keywords? Can canonicals affect the website so quickly?
My other question is can it be temporarily so should I wait more? how long?
I should mention that our website content is not really good and I'm working on it. When I added meta tags we had a big jump in our ranking and then we stopped getting better,. But now we are going down! Can it be the content? Sorry I know that it is actually all, but i do not know which one matters more and do not understand why it happened immediately after adding canonicals.
Our website is: www.pacificsmoke.com
Appreciate your advice.
-
@DonnaDuncan Thank you for this reply. In a way it answers my long time query with my website https://www.bestcarhireuganda.com/
I am really thankful as this will help my page improve great -
Thanks Donna a ton
-
"Are the following hreflang tags correct? "
Yes
"Or now that we do not have french version yet, should I delete the first line? Because, for instance, we do not have such a URL yet: https://www.pacificsmoke.com/fr/wholesale."
You don't need to add any hreflang tags until you add translated pages. I only mentioned them because you have an /en/ page and you're in Canada. If you don't plan on adding translated pages, then you don't need the /en/ page and you don't need hreflang tags.
-
Hi,
I have another question and very much appreciate your advice. Are the following hreflang tags correct? Or now that we do not have french version yet, should I delete the first line? Because, for instance, we do not have such a URL yet: https://www.pacificsmoke.com/fr/wholesale. In this case, I do not understand why I should add hreflang.
For our homepage:
And an example for other pages:
Should I use instead of rel="canonical"?
Any advice would be a great help.
-
Thank you so much Alex. Appreciate your help and advice.
-
I appreciate your detailed answer Donna! Very helpful
-
I had a client with the same issues and yes, canonicals are a huge problem. You should sort that out first and see how the website reacts with rankings. Google is really punishing websites with errors these days and canonicals are some of the worst ones.
-
I'd start with the canonicals. They're not set correctly.
Your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com) has a canonical of www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It's missing the "https://" in front and "/home" should be dropped from the end.
The English version of your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/en/) is canonicalized to www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It too is missing the "https://" in front and should be canonicalized to itself.
I'm assuming because of the /en/ page at the end of the page above and your location (in Canada) that you plan on creating a French version of the page. If that is the case, you will also need to introduce hreflang tags. If that's not the case, the /en/ page is a duplicate and should be removed.
If you need help with hreflang tags, Gaston Riera previously answered in a question in Q&A about hreflang tags and listed a bunch of helpful resources. You can find them here - https://moz.com/community/q/hreflang-tags-and-canonical-tags-might-be-causing-indexing-and-duplicate-content-issues.
Other pages may have similar problems.
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
-
Unknown Subdomains Ranking
In spot checking some pages that I recently launched, I found subdomains ranking in place of the domain. The strange thing is, we never set up these sub-domains and they don't exist on our server. The pages, though they're indexed with the proper title and meta-description, time out when clicked. We're operating on Drupal 7, pages launched at the beginning of the month. The other pages within the series of content are ranking properly. Any thoughts or tips to resolve this?
Technical SEO | | JordanNCU1 -
Ranking and Indexing Issue
We have an established site www.getinspired365.com that previously wasn't SEO optimised. We are currently in the process of testing out some new pages to see if we can get them to rank in Google, however we are seeing huge fluctuations in where they rank. Within the first few days we saw our page rank on the first or second page, however it has now dropped out of the top 250 search results. We are wondering if we have made any mistakes with our optimisation ? Example Page : Keyword to target - "If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special." URL : http://www.getinspired365.com/if-you-laugh-you-think-and-you-cry-thats-a-full-day-thats-a-heck-of-a-day-you-do-that-seven-days-a-week-youre-going-to-have-something-special We can see it has been indexed by Google but is now not ranking in the top 250 search engine results. We have run the On Page Grader from SEOMoz and it ranks the page as an "A" so we suspect that we are doing the SEO ok on the page, but can't work out why it isn't ranking, despite ranking on the first or second page after a few days ? We have other pages that aren't SEO optimised that rank better than our newly SEO optimised pages e.g. Keyword - "THE BEST LOVE IS THE KIND THAT AWAKENS THE SOUL AND MAKES US REACH FOR MORE, THAT PLANTS A FIRE IN OUR HEARTS AND BRINGS PEACE TO OUR MINDS. AND THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE GIVEN ME. THAT'S WHAT I'D HOPED TO GIVE YOU FOREVER" URL: http://www.getinspired365.com/20130528 Any advice you could offer would be great. Thanks ! Mike
Technical SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
My rank suddenly drop
Hi before i subscribe for MOZ i have hired a seo expert to do an optimization for my escort website, it was really hard since im not knowledgeable and have no clue about it also my niche is kinda hard as what everyone says. The SEO did a good job ranking my site but in less than 2 weeks my ranking goes down and every time it happen what i do is call him and tell him about the situation and in just few days my rank goes up again and im in page 1 of google. My question is, is that normal? like ranking drop in less than 2 weeks and he could easily rank me up in just few days? I pay just to make sure that im on page 1, so every time he put my site on page 1 i pay for it. Gawd i still have no clue whats going on, i have a lot to learn, black hat, white hat, proper back linking, etc etc so i'd really love to know if its normal cause if it is then no point for me to learn SEO as he is doing job well done. I was just afraid that he is doing this to rip me, not that i dont trust him but you know this days everyone needs something for a living 🙂
Technical SEO | | geefex6nsy0 -
Wordpress versus html and google ranking
My current SEO has always recommended that I take my site to wordpress. I really don't want to move to wordpress. I don't like it... I just like writing code in raw html, css, and script. I feel like I have more control that way. Wordpress just seems like a platform for blogs (I have my blog in wordpress). My question is, do wordpress websites typically rank better? Is there benefit to moving to it?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Rankings Bouncing Weekly
I have a client who ranks well for a number of keywords. This week we have about 20 keywords in the top ten on Google that we're tracking. But every week it seems, the keywords bounce around quite a bit. This week, for example, we had at least 15 keywords out of the ~90 we're tracking jump between 30 to 40 spots. The most any keywords increased was 43, a few 42s and 41s, in one week. Next week, they'll go down a few, then bounce up again just like this. This has been happening for a while. I'm trying to figure out what the issue is.
Technical SEO | | Millermore0 -
Home Page Not Ranking... Need an EXPERT
Hi, for about a year now, our home page seems to have been "removed" from Google (except for our branded keywords). The home page is clearly indexed, but none of the keywords for the home page rank in the top 500 (again, except for our brand, trophycentral). Other pages in the site are fine and we rank in the top 10 positions for hundreds of keywords. We are also okay on Yahoo and Bing. So the issue is the home page from non-branded words. There have been no manual penalties, but since the words, such as trophies and trophies and awards are all but gone, something is going on. It has been almost exactly a year now and I have tried everything from removing backlinks (although I still can't tell which are "bad links", to changing titles, to improving speed and structure. I have had quite a few really nice people try to help, but their suggestions don't seem to work or are too vague. I really need an expert as the impact to the business of not having a home page performing is very damaging. Thank you!!!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
What caused my huge drop in search ranking?
On February 8th, 2012 my site's non-branded search traffic dropped overnight by over 80%. It appears I've been hit by a Google penalty. I submitted a reconsideration request and one of Google's staff replied letting me know it was NOT a manual penalty. So it's clearly a result of an algorithm. What is the cause? I haven't made significant changes to the website in the previous months do to being out of the country and the holidays. I'm extremely careful not to out source SEO so there is no chance of questionable link building strategies, unless my competitor launched an attack on my site. I've considered these possible causes: Duplicate content - My site had some redundancy from a marketing plan before Google Panda launched. Last month, I removed all duplicate content. Unnatural link building - I've been moving slowly my site, page by page, from adbio.com to bioworldusa.com after a brand change. Perhaps the 301 redirects triggered a flag in Google's algorithm. I've since removed all redirects to see if that will fix the issue. Poor User Experience - I recently upgraded my Drupal CMS and had to change themes. Currently my theme is an ugly, grey theme which may cause a higher than usual bounce rate. I've been trying to compensate by making sure the content is high quality. The penalty affected these website: www.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) blog.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) www.adbio.com (2/17/12)
Technical SEO | | bioworld1 -
Redirect and ranking
Wehave 2 websites for the same keyword Website 1 is indexed on place 2 but we do not like that name any longer it does not fit our long term marketing Website 2 is indexed on place 5 and this domain fits better What will happen if we redirect website 1 to website 2? Fall down to postion 5 Fall down to position 5 and after a certain period we get back at position 2 or 3 thanx in advance for your reply
Technical SEO | | turnon0