Rankings tanking fast and I cant figure out why. Any insight?
-
This site was created about a 18 months ago, and since then we did our own in house SEO. Well we did hire one recommended company on the Moz list for a few months and they did great linkbuilding but were super expensive. We always saw steady increase in organic clicks both via google and bing. We got to a maximum of around 25k organic clicks/month in July before we started to tank. We are now down to around 16k/mo and continuing to drop quickly.
Nothing has changed as far as what we are doing for SEO. The only thing that comes to mind was back in July we saw some negative SEO against us. Fortunately we keep a very close eye on our back links so we disavowed all of the toxic links pretty much as they were found. There was about ten of them from places such as:
sharklinks.info
bookmarkingforseo.com
compasslinks.infoWe don't have any manually actions in webmaster tools. Anyone want to help point me in the right direction? We have some competitors out ranking us with a horrible back link profile, beyond crappy website/content etc. I guess this is the nature of the beast and google doesnt always get it right, but I would love to hear your thoughts on why we are going backwards.
-
I would look at before and after dates in analytics and compare to see where your traffic loss is occurring.
Have you been manually tracking the rank of your keywords over time? have you noticed a drop off for a keyword that you would expect to be a high traffic driver?
It could be that you have lost a referring link that was sending over a lot of traffic, was/are you doing any PPC traffic that may have had an affect on your volumes, sometimes people forget that PPC spend also drives organic traffic, so you would see a natural decline in organic traffic if you slow down your PPC spend.
-
Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not provide a 'What's Changed' report, but you can somewhat easily make that report by exporting your Keyword information and traffic details to excel, then comparing your top terms over time.
I wouldn't suggest looking at all 1600 keywords. Instead, identify the keywords that sent 80% of your traffic and see what's changed among those. Was there a few specific keywords that sent huge amounts of traffic and no longer do so? Or can you identify a general decrease across all keywords (maybe signalling a seasonal change?).
-
I thought this might be the case, and it could be. When I run a semrush report, we went from ranking 1,400 keywords in July to 1,600 in Sept. So something is on the correct path, but obviously if the ranking is lower on aggregate for these keywords then we could be going backwards.
I am getting mixed signals I guess from the reports I am running and the actual traffic.
-
Are you referring to some sort of tool that will show you exactly "whats changed", or if I just took a look at the difference between the periods? I know that our top 20 traffic generating keywords stayed roughly the same in SERP positions, maybe an overall minimal drop when you take an average of them. We rank for some 1,600 keywords so cant manually check them all.
Is there an easier way of comparing now and then? I am importing into excel both time period and then just manipulating the data.
-
Given your scenario, there could me many areas to check and see what is has changed to effect your rankings. Have you done a 'what's changed' analysis to see exactly where your traffic dropped?
Month-to-month look at the keywords that were sending you traffic and identify which keywords have reduced their visits. Then track those keywords in Moz, see where you can improve on-page, and see what your competitors have done to outrank you.
Once you know why the change has happened, you can adjust to get that traffic back that you've lost.
-
Could it have something to do with your topic, rather than the site itself? When I look at "student debt relief" in Google trends, I see a big spike in July, and September is half that. I know on my site that traffic is related to seasonality.
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
-
Not ranking
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
so our website (www.18brandz.com) has been up for 8 months now and has not been ranking yet, we are indexing, moz crawler SEO issues are regularly fixed and we are down to about 25 non major issues, i started using google lighthouse to optimize and had made changes. we post GOOD quality in house written unique content, we follow an SEO templet of guideline i wrote for titles/meta title tags, structure, site speed has been optimized and as for the moment we rank A OR B with no major issues on all speed checking sites possible (gtmetrix/google speed insights/ webspeed... etc) but nothing. and i cant figure out why we wont rank, our field of digital marketing is a tough one and very competitive , i know, yet not ranking for so long seems odd. our only know fact major disadvantage is the lack of links and no link building strategy. any suggestions? any idea?1 -
Is anyone seeing excessive ranking fluctuations?
Has anyone noticed an unusual shift in ranking fluctuations starting around 20 hours ago? I have noticed some fairly major positive shifts on two different websites, interested if anyone else has seen the same thing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman102 -
Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website?
Hi, Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Why have I lost my #1 ranking?
Hello! Ever since switching to a new website back in late 2014, my rankings have suffered. My webpage https://www.shwoodshop.com was always the #1 google position for the keywords "wood sunglasses" and "wooden sunglasses". For a while my site bounced back a forth between the #1 and #2 spots, but in the last 4 months I have been stuck with a #3 rank for both keywords. I hired an SEO company to help fix the problem but after a year of work, there was still no positive change. I have had multiple experts take a look at my site, but to no avail. All signs seem to point to a stronger, healthier site than my competition. My domain authority and page authority are much greater than the competition with the #1 and #2 rankings. I have used the On-Page grader and other tools to try and help, and even though I am getting an "A" grade, I'm still not improving my rankings. I ran a link metric comparison for my website versus the competition and attached it to this post. The main area I seem to be lacking is the Internal Equity-Passing Links. The top competitor has a ridiculous amount, which I think may be due to their use of breadcrumbs. Is this enough to make the difference? My other thought is that I could be suffering from duplicate page content. My website is setup to be "localized" via Subdirectories With gTLDs (.com/us, .com/eu, .com/au, .com/international). The on-page content is the exact same, but the prices for the products changes depending on your location. Moz shows a ton of duplicate pages due to this. Could I be getting penalized for this? I am an SEO novice and trying to learn as much as possible while investigation this issue. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated! -Taylor wUiyU
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shwoodeyewear0 -
Ranking dynamic landing pages
I have a client and I'm working on a project with their development team. We're creating dynamic landing pages populated with their lead data. Similar to the style of linkedin. For example, someone searches for "demand generation manager" and one of our pages with contact information (some) shows up in the search results. www.leadgenius.com/demandgenerationjobs (or something like that. we have yet to flesh this out). We're also looking into different backlinking strategies to support optimizing the above mentioned pages in addition to their new site launching this month. What is the best way to optimize the dynamic pages as well as the main site in tandem or independently?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intergen0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
My site rank is not consistent. Once it at first page , then for the next week it is not found in top 100 position. Again two/ three weeks later it ranked automatically without any work. Why this is happening?
Here's the following are available in my site: robot.txt file is included sitemap available Natural link building going on. in a week total 100 links we are creating. 30 social bookmarks, 30 directory submission, 20 blog comments, 20 forum links All the blog and forum links are from relevant sources. Please help me ..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coldfireinc0 -
Rankings tanked after sitewide title tag changes
Hi Guys, One of our clients are a big brand but their brand is a keyword domain. After signing up to seo moz and utilising the recommended changes to the on page seo, something drastic happened. Every page of my clients site appended the site name at the end of the title tag. Example: <title>keyword | keyword 2 | domain name keyword</title> I felt, and also with seomoz reports, that having the main keyword appended to the end of every title tag was far too spammy and as seo moz suggested could possibly have different pages fighting for ranks on that phrase. We decide to remove the domain from the end on all page titles, and since google re cached the site, the rankings have tanked big time. The site is still indexed so thats good but when you consider a single lead is worth over £1000 to my client and with 20-30 leads per month, he isnt too happy. Has anyone experienced this before? My guess is google is re evaluating the rankings to reflect the new title tags, and thus put my clients site out until it's finished updating the rankings etc? Any help? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | glasgowseoguy0