Why is our site jumping all over the place?
-
Hi there,
We've been having some issues with our site recently where it seems to be jumping very erratically around the google rankings.
The site used to be pretty consistent on page 1/2 of google for certain term, but then in late April(ish) it took a dive down the rankings and flicked about between positions 30-70(ish). Late last month, it re-appeared suddenly on page 1 in position 10 and stayed there up until yesterday (6th July) and it now appears to have dived to position 287th or there abouts!
At the same time a deep link page has appeared at position 54, which seems a bit strange to me.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
-
When you put it like that it does seem a bit messy. Thanks for your help Ryan
-
A few general suggestions I can offer:
-
I counted 9 links on your home page to your home page. I can understand the "home" link in your nav bar and footer, and the link from your logo. All the other links seem excessive to me and I would suggest removing them.
-
Determine which key phrase you wish associated with each page. If you wish your home page optimized for "Guarantor Loans" then I would suggest not having the anchor text "Guarantor Loan" linking to your FAQ page.
While it is true the singular and plural versions of the terms are separate key phrases, it would take a solid focus on SEO to establish two distinct pages on the singular and plural forms of a word, and your site clearly does not have that focus. In fact, you link from your home page to your FAQ with the anchor text "Guarantor Loan", then your site uses that identical anchor text on your FAQ page to link back to your home page.
- The anchor text "What is a Guarantor Loan" is used on your home page to link to your guarantor_loans.html page. Once again, this is a partial phrase match and offers the opportunity for confusion if the phrase is not carefully handled. The handling in this case is poor. On your guarantor_loans page the anchor text "guarantor loans" is used to point towards the guarantor_loans page.
I can't speak to your past ranking. What I can share is the term shows as a highly competitive keyword, and your site is a mess with respect to SEO for this term. It seems someone made an attempt to improve the SEO and went link crazy. I would advise consulting with a SEO and creating a plan to apply basic SEO standards to your site.
-
-
Hi Ryan,
The site is http://www.guarantorloanscompany.co.uk and the keyword is guarantor loans
Google have confirmed in the past there's no penalty on the site and no rules have been violated.
No changes were made between the site being on page 1 and falling on each occassion.
We made some changes to the site the last time it fell (such as changing the links from graphics to text and cutting down on internal links to the homepage), but it's been back on page 1 since then.
We don't do anything with local search and as far as I know we haven't lost any major links. In fact, I would say we've gained some good links recently.
-
Without a link to the page along with the keyword involved, we are left to offer generic advice and make guesses. It's kind of like asking what's causing your stomach ache. It could be bad sushi, or it could be stomach cancer.
Some general ideas:
-
is there any reason for your site to be under any form of penalty? Have you violated any Google rules?
-
have you made any changes at all to the page involved?
-
have you made any site wide changes?
-
are you certain you are entering the exact term you are using for comparison?
-
is there any involvement at all with local search? Adding any term involving a location, or removing such a term, will provide dramatic changes to search results
-
any other changes or factors you can think may be relevant? Have you lost any major links? added new pages which might cannibalize your existing keywords? etc.
-
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
-
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
Google De-Indexed Our SIte for Branded Terms?
Hello all, As of 10am Pacific on September 12th, 2013, my team has noticed that our site, www.wirelessemporium.com, does not show up on the first 5 or 6 pages of SERPs for branded terms like "wireless emporium." We have not received any messages from Google via Webmaster Tools regarding this. Major activity that we've been doing to our site is updating content, meta tags, and h1 tags, along with removing/301 redirecting certain pages that did not meet Google quality guidelines. We've also been purging our backlink portfolio of toxic links and URLs, both manually and through the disavow tool. No blackhat has been done to this site for a very long time (more than 8 months now). One thing to note is that we did have a manual spam penalty placed on us back in July of 2012, it expired in early August of 2013 after a reconsideration request was submitted, and a 2nd manual spam penalty was placed on us again later that month. We are submitting a 2nd reconsideration request this Monday. Could this or the recent Panda update have anything to with this? We are very much in need of opinions as to why this is happening to our site. 5adbd14a31de3a78b998df94f0b6d2be
Search Behavior | | eugeneku0 -
Getting People to Leave Product Reviews, When they've reached our site in search of reviews
We have a product review website that has been showing a steady increase in organic traffic. However we seem to be having a disconnect between what happens when a visitor arrives. We essentially want a visitor coming to our website in search of a review, to LEAVE a review for another product they may have used... Any suggestions on ways we might encourage this? We are kind of newbies at this!
Search Behavior | | Sarah_Frantz0 -
Using Google Analytics to See What Time of Day Visitors View My Site
Hi folks, My company has Google Analytics setup for all of our websites, but I am a bit stumped on something. Now, this may not be possible, but am I able to see what time of day visitors most frequently view my blog? I would like to optimize blog post publishing for when I know we have in influx of visitors, yet I cannot find this information on GA. Any input would be much appreciated. Regards,
Search Behavior | | Instabill
Meghan0 -
Bounce Rate and Time on Site
What would be the best way to decrease bounce rate and increase time on site for a Real Estate Website?
Search Behavior | | bronxpad0 -
E-commerce SEO when products are shared between sites
We have a couple of e-commerce sites that sell the same product. One focuses more on a niche category of the products, while the others contains a wide variety of products. Will we be hit with a penalty from google if the product descriptions are the same? If so, how much of a difference in content does there need to be? There are only so many ways to describe the product and it is usually done in a couple sentences. The rest of the product description contains bullet points of the products and is the same for each product. We are also looking for a SEO company to work with and wondered if there are companies out there that specialize in e-commerce seo that can work with a small ($500 month) budget. I've looked through the recommended companies directory here, but it seems most have minimum retainers around $1000 a month. Also, what should I look for in an SEO company?
Search Behavior | | toomeycustoms0 -
Is there a site intelligence product that offers data on subdirectories of a competitor site?
Services like Compete and Quantcast provide information on competitive sites, but as far as I can tell only at the aggregated domain level. Is there a similar service (paid or free) that provides this type of data - especially demographics - for a subdirectory? For example, if my competitor has widely different product categories and I suspect that the audience for Product B is very different from his site as a whole (which is mostly focused around his major product, Product A) is there any way to get info on that without actually owning the site and having access to Analytics/Facebook OpenGraph etc.?
Search Behavior | | jliu.blitz0 -
Changing Site Structure Drastically
Howdy Guys, We are in the process of changing our sites structure dramatically, at the moment this is how an internal page / URL reads: Www.mydomainname.co.uk/ww.sys/pagename We will he changing our site over to wordpress very shortly and will have the correct permalinks in place. We are scared it's going to hurt our rankings as we are in the top 6 for a highly competitive keyword at the moment - the bouns is our domain name is 11yrs old and we have a PR of 4. We have setup all the 301s in web.configuration file just wondering if any of you have made a dramatic change like this and been dropped off the rankings.....
Search Behavior | | ScottBaxterWW0