No longer to be found for "certain" keywords.
-
I'd like to see if anyone could potentially shade a light on this rather strange scenario:
Basically yesterday I noticed that we are no longer to be found for 'certain' keywords that we had page 2-3 ranking. Yet, for other keywords we still appear on page 2-3. These keywords are very competitive and our rankings has constantly improved in the course of 5-6 months.
Now my question is that what could or may have contributed to the fact that for only some keywords we are no longer to be found? Another question is, can Google remove you from their SERPs for certain keywords 'only'? Thank you,
Maximilian. -
Thank you once again. I will get in touch with you. Please PM your contact details. We are located in downtown Manhattan.
-
Strategies for dealing with external duplicate content are overviewed here.
A much bigger concern is duplicating your OWN content. I know it sounds kind of silly, but it is a very real issue, especially since Google's most recent update (Panda). Is there more than one URL for any page on your website? Does http://website.com direct to http://www.website.com? Do you have canonicalization problems related to pagination or something similar?
These issues are discussed in-depth here.
If you think that your issues may be related to on-site or site architecture factors, the best thing you can do is hire a qualified SEO consultant that can assess these issues and make actionable recommendations for correcting them.
-
Anthony, our website has been online since 2002 and we have been getting organic quality backlinks for a very long time. Directory submission was just added literally 4 weeks in an effort to 'add more value'. It was never intended to use it as the only source, but just was an effort to increase the rankings. Who knew it would or could potentially backfire.
On another note, you mentioned that duplicate content may cause this issue. Our content is very reach and well-written and there are a number of sites who have copied/pasted our content. Despite all of our efforts and having had contacted their hosting companies to shut down their website, no changes have been made. Now my question is, do we get affected if "others" have copied our content on their website? Does Google have any algorithmic to define which site has copied which sites data?
Thank you once again for your insightful information.
-
Maximilian -
If Google has devalued some of your links, there's no way to "recover" these links. That's the bad news.
The good news is that this happens to websites every day, and it's not by any means a permanent penalization or anything of that sort. All it means is that the time and effort spent to build these links was squandered.
What can you do to speed up your recovery? Switch the way you think about link building. Directory submissions are useful, but they shouldn't by any means comprise the majority of your link building strategy.
I would suggest reading this article cover to cover. It will teach you the proper mindset you should have when approaching linkbuilding, and it will give you dozens and dozens of ideas to get started with building high quality links from relevant, authoritative domains.
Replace directory submissions with strategies like writing guest blog posts, creating amazing content (linkbait) and subsequently promoting it on social media and social bookmarking websites, and/or creating a widget that would be an invaluable addition to any website in your industry. All of these are covered under the "Content-Based Link Building Strategies" section of the SEOmoz Professional Guide to Linkbuilding that is linked to above.
-
"You have been building low quality links and they have been devalued by Google, causing you to lose hundreds (thousands?) of keyword-rich backlinks."
Anthony, thank you for your response. The above statement could potentially be the source of issue, considering one of our staff members been doing directory submissions (30 per day).
Now you mentioned that Google may have devalued the high-quality banklinks that have had due to gaining low quality backlinks. In your experience, what can be done to resolve this issue? Is this devaluation something permanent or a temporary? What can be done to speed up the recovery?
Thank you in advance.
-
There are tons of reasons why your website might see a drop in rankings for certain keywords. Here are a few:
-
Increased competition in your niche pushed your website down as new websites started to rank above you.
-
You have been building low quality links and they have been devalued by Google, causing you to lose hundreds (thousands?) of keyword-rich backlinks.
-
Your website has been affected by a Google algorithm update. For one reason or another (duplicate content? shallow or nonexistent content on some pages? too many ads / too big of a "footprint"?), your website is being seen as less trustworthy, and this has affected rankings sitewide. (Note, some rankings would be maintained, particularly for keywords with low competition.)
-
You were logged into your Google account when you saw these rankings, and your website was appearing higher than it typically does because of your personalized search data. When you logged out and checked your rankings, you noticed a "drop" in ranking that was not actually real. (Okay, this one is unlikely, but we've all seen it before.)
-
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
-
Keyword research
Do I understand it correctly ? Let's say my keyword is Piedmont bike tours. From what I understand I need to use synonyms of Piedmont bike tours that people would use to find my website such as bike trip in Piedmont or cycling vacation in Piedmont and then closely related phrases in my content which are not necessarily synonyms but that semantically related, correct ? Do I need to do that for every topic that I decide to talk about on my webpage. For example let's say another topic I have decided to talk about on my page about Piedmont bike tour is Barolo. Do I need to do the same process for Barolo ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Importance - meta title keyword
HI I want to find out how important people think it is to have the keyword as the first word in the meta title? Is this something that would even make a difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
H1 tag found on page, but saying doesn't match keyword
We've run a on-page grader test on our home page www.whichledlight.com with the keyword 'led bulbs' it comes back with saying there is a H1 tag, although the content of the keyword apperently doesn't contain 'led bulbs... which seems a bit odd because the content of the tag is 'UK’s #1 Price Comparison Site for LED Bulbs` I've used other SEO checkers and some say we don't even have a H1 tag, or H2, H3 and so on for any page. Screaming Frog seems to think we have a H1 tag though, and can also detect the content of the tag. Any ideas? ** Update ** The website is a single page app (EmberJS) so we use prerender to create snapshots of the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
We were under the impression that MOZ can crawl these prerendered pages fine, so were a bit baffled as to why it would say we have a H1 tag, but think the contents of the tag still doesn't match our keyword.0 -
How to structure links on a "Card" for maximum crawler-friendliness
My question is how to best structure the links on a "Card" while maintaining usability for touchscreens. I've attached a simple wireframe, but the "card" is a format you see a lot now on the web: it's about a "topic" and contains an image for the topic and some text. When you click the card it links to a page about the "topic". My question is how to best structure the card's html so google can most easily read it. I have two options: a) Make the elements of the card 2 separate links, one for the image and one for the text. Google would read this as follows. //image
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich
[](/target URL) //text
<a href=' target="" url'="">Topic</a href='> b) Make the entire "Card" a link which would cause Google to read it as follows: <a></a> <a>Bunch of div elements that includes anchor text and alt-image attributes above along with a fair amount of additional text.</a> <a></a> Holding UX aside, which of these options is better purely from a Google crawling perspective? Does doing (b) confuse the bot about what the target page is about? If one is clearly better, is it a dramatic difference? Thanks! PwcPRZK0 -
Bolding Keywords
A client has just switched from us to another provider and I have been checking up on the work done and the only change they have made is to bold lots of keywords on each page - I thought this was a practice that did not work - is there any evidence of this working or not working? Any articles/proof that we are not using out dated practices as we stopped doing this ages ago and yet the new provider is doing this. Who is right or wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
De-indexing product "quick view" pages
Hi there, The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure: www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700 where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number. Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be: Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=* Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
How much does "overall site semantic theme" influence rankings?
OK. I've optimized sites before that are dedicated to 1, 2 or 3 products and or services. These sites inherently talk about one main thing - so the semantics of the content across the whole site reflect this. I get these ranked well on a local level. Now, take an e-commerce site - which I am working on - 2000 products, all of which are quite varied - cookware, diningware, art, decor, outdoor, appliances... there is a lot of different semantics throughout the site's different pages. Does this influence the ranking possibilities? Your opinion and time is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Why DBDResults.com is #1 on Google for "Internet Marketing Agency"?
They have a new site, no links, no content, their page isn't optimized for this keyword (it's not even one on the page or their page title)... They only have 5 incoming links with the keyword in it, but its competitors have way more. Can someone solve this mystery?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elcrazyhorse0