Why did my rankings drop?
-
Hi all,
In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links.
Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen:
1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see.
- Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites.
3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too.
-
A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3.
-
I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse.
Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net.
Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from?
Any help would be appreciated.
-
I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content
That is clearly a large change which should have been mentioned up front.
When you drop a page from your site, you will of course lose any traffic that page generated. Even if those pages were low traffic pages, they did generate some traffic.
When you say the old content was replaced by fresh content, exactly how was this change done? If you have a page named "homes currently for sale" and you update that page with new information, the URL remains the same, the backlinks remain and the overall effects should be positive. Even a normal change such as this one could have a negative impact on traffic though in a corner case such as you listed a popular address or area before, the house sold and was replaced by less popular listings.
There is a lot of analytical data to analyze. How much traffic were the old pages generating vs the new pages which replaced them. How many back links did the old pages have pointing to them? Were all these pages properly redirected?
With respect to links, if your client has money to spend use it on other methods of traffic generation. Pay for high quality content to be created. Pay for advertising. Pay to be entered into the couple of directories that actually make a difference. Pay for A/B testing of the site's pages. Don't pay for junk directory submissions.
-
A closer look at the Analytics: Yahoo traffic seems to be down by 60%, especially on long tail terms. The shift happened on the 4th August. In the 10 days prior I had added about 10 paid submissions but I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content and replace it with fresh listings supplied by the client. I wonder!
Overall there is a slight reductions in most keywords but as you say this could be because competitors are building links too.
-
I started building links from these directories
The overwhelming majority of directories are a complete waste of time. They offer absolutely no value at all for SEO, and real visitors will never see and follow the links
I started buying submissions to directories
Buying links is a violation of search engine rules, If and when you are caught, you will suffer a penalty. In the meantime, understand that the search engines know which directories sell links and most likely offer those links no weight at all. If they see your site has acquired links from multiple paid directories they could take that as a sign you are attempting to manipulate rankings.
Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen
There are so many factors involved to even begin to properly respond to this statement. If you had 1000 links previously and build 20 links, then you have increased your links by 2% which may not have any effect on traffic at all. You need to research what is driving visitors to your site. Is it organic search results? An advertising campaign? Social networks? etc.
Once you break down the traffic drivers, you need to further investigate the overall traffic. For example perhaps the keyword "vitamins" is the top driver of traffic to your site. You can check to see how much overall traffic the search term provided this month compared to last month.
What are your competitors doing? If you built 20 links and your main competitor built 30 links, or received 1 high quality link, then you may drop in rankings. Your search results are always a competition with your competitors.
In summary, any time you spent with directories is not likely to add value to your site. If you want to use directories the main ones I would suggest are Yahoo, BOTW, DMOZ and Business.com. If your industry has any high quality niche directory that can be considered as well. Otherwise your focus should be on creating very high quality content which is useful and touches upon important industry topics, then obtaining links to that content.
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
-
Sudden Drop from #1 to #12
Hello Moz community,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcmayo
I am really happy to be here and I start right away with a quite tricky question I'd say. We are running Star-Registration.com and in March switched platforms to Shopify. All the Redirects etc were done according to standards. Nevertheless, Star-Registration.com dropped in May (2 months after the switch) for "name a star" and "buy a star" from #1 to the 2nd Page of Google Results after being on #1 for almost 3 consecutive years. We had a similar case with their german website but the german one is back on the top 3 rankings again for all the important keywords. I attached a Screenshot of the Search Console stats
Any suggestions? yv6pep0 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
How to rank my website in Google UK?
Hi guys, I own a London based rubbish removal company, but don't have enough jobs. I know for sure that some of my competitors get most of their jobs trough Google searches. I also have a website, but don't receive calls from it at all. Can you please tell me how to rank my website on keywords like: "rubbish removal london", "waste clearance london", "junk collection london" and other similar keywords? I know that for person like me (without much experience in online marketing) will be difficult task to optimize the website, but at least - I need some advices from where to start. I'm also thinking to hire an SEO but not sure where to find a trusted company. Most importantly I have no idea how much should pay to expect good results? What is too much and what is too low? I will appreciate all advices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gorubbishgo0 -
Not Ranking - Any Tips?
Hi guys, I have a client site that I've recently come onboard with that was published late last year, not really optimized for anything, and in a moderately, but not very, competitive, search space. Early April we optimized the home page and a couple of other pages and have since built about 5-6 (high quality, partial match) links to it, and a press release was done mid last month. The only other thing we did was change the site from non-www to www and set this as the preferred domain in Search Console. Over 6 weeks since that all began, and we're still not on the radar at all for any of our main keywords - nowhere. The only thing we are really ranking for is our brand name, but this is the wrong (press release, not home!) page, and it's bouncing a lot. All of the pages seem to be indexed, and we are ranking for one other (inconsequential) keyword, but 99 is the highest it has reached. An SEO friend told me to build some citations, but this is not a local business, nor are we trying to rank locally. Can anyone please suggest why it might be taking so long, and what else I could try? I imagine more links will help, but results from our outreach are hard to predict, so if there were another safe link type that could help me figure out whether this domain is in trouble or not ASAP, that would be ideal. Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide. Ulla
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Ranking strangeness
Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client. Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve. Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on. Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages). The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1! Bang -straight to top spot. However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition. Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one. We still need to fix thin and duplicated content! I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre. Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Branded Links : But not got any ranking..
Hi there. I'm SEO expert myself. I am building quality and authority backlinks with branded anchor text. My website has now over 1.5k backlinks with branded anchor text and generic keywords. But my website still not showing in SERPS with my targeted niche or anchor text. Do i need to build backlinks with exact match anchor text if yes then how much? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalitsoft0 -
Rankings dropped - lost 3,000 backlinks (but from same domain)
lost a lot of rankings. 2 things have happened to my site over the past 2 weeks and I am trying to establish which may be the case: My site has 30.000 links from a top news site (on main bar across all pages - not for SEO, it just happened). My site lost 3,000 links from this site last week, when they were doing some cleaning up, which means I still have 25,000+ links from them. My site - job site - has published another job board's jobs so I get paid per click. This means ratio of my job vs external jobs is 1 to 5. So basically, I added last week 5 times more jobs that is already live on external site to get paid per click. In other words, my own site's unique content went down big time. Which of the 2 is more likely to cause the massive drop in rankings since last night?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
Hi all, We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower. One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www). Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August. We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor: We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks. Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day. GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact. Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tact0