Huge Ranking drop without touching the page
-
I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46. I haven't touched this page in a few months, so I don't think I messed anything up.
Any thoughts on why such a dramatic drop would happen?
Brian Clapp
Founder, SportsTVJobs.com
-
will do thanks!
-
Hi Brian,
I believe the recently introduced SEOmoz Ranking process is currently in Beta (I am in the Beta group) and Casey did specifically ask for feedback on any apparent anomalies during the Beta testing phase.
Just caught up with Casey and the answer will be slightly different depending on whether you are a member of the Beta or not, so just a correction to my original comment:
- If you are not in the Beta then you should email support [at] seomoz.org
- If you are a member of the Rankings Beta and forgot - email the Beta team!
This being the case, it would probably be a good idea to email him direct to bring the issue to his attention.
Sha
-
appreciate the response dvtruong - I worked with Angie for many years, back when I was the news director at Fox Sports Northwest - great lady. Anyway back to SEO - we've started getting more links for cnn.com, a bunch of edu's and some other big sports sites - so I hope to see our overall numbers increase. Quality content is our main priority so glad to see we are on the right track, we only lauched in NOvember last year so I know its a slow ramp..
thanks again for the insight.
Brian
p.s. we're in seattle too.
-
Someone else reported a similar issue with their SEOmoz ranking report. I would suggest contacting the Help Desk so they can investigate the issue. It seems like a bug.
-
interesting ryan thanks - I actually was referring to the ranking from my SEOMOZ crawl this past week... so no operator error. According to my ranking report I dropped from 5 to 46 last week and then from 46 to 48 this week.
guess its an seomoz reporting issue if you still see it ranked 5th.
-
I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46
I called a friend who works at Google and he restored your ranking to the #5 spot.
Ok, I am teasing but only a bit. I took a look and in Google.com I see you ranked #5 for the term "Become a Sportscaster". Perhaps when you checked the term was slightly altered. An extra space, a missing space, adding a plural, etc. can all change the search results.
-
It could be a lot of things. Google makes changes to their ranking algorithm about 400 times a year, so they may have turned a knob that happened to affect your site a lot.
I checked out your site and it looks like it has a lot of quality content so I don't think the Panda Update would have been a factor. I liked the Angie Mentink interview - I know her well since I'm in Seattle.
I would not worry too much about one single phrase because it is probably driving a very small percentage of your overall traffic. How is your organic search traffic overall? That is much more important than a single phrase since 70% of search traffic are from long tail searches. I would recommend continuing to pump out remarkable content that people want to share and you should be in good shape in the long run. It looks like your site has 58 linking domains according to Open Site Explorer. Increasing this number over time should help with more competitive phrases.
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
-
Fire a tag when element is loaded on page (Google Tag Manager)
I'm using an Element Visibility trigger to track a value that appears on a page. However, I want to track this value even when the user doesn't scroll to the area of the page where the element is (i.e. when the page is loaded, and the value is displayed below the fold, but the user doesn't scroll down there). Is there a way of doing this
Reporting & Analytics | | RWesley0 -
Big drop in organic traffic after moving the website-should we still do 301 redirects?
Hi,
Reporting & Analytics | | martin1970
We have a website that got redesigned with new urls in Jan 31, 2018. Since then our SEO traffic has gone down big time and to never recover. We did not do any 301 redirects back then (very stupid I know but I was not in charge then). So my question is would it be beneficial to 301 redirect old urls that were once ranked but now have all 404 errors or is it too late to do these 301 to gain any benefits? If a page that was once ranked and then have a 404 error, how long does google keep that 404 page in their database? I have heard information saying that although the page is a 404 it may still be indexed in their backend for some time and then it completely drops off all together. If so do you know how long time they would keep those 404 in their database? The old urls may have had good backlinks pointed to them because the organic traffic was good back then. So I wonder if doing 301 right now would help send some link juice over to the new urls? Or would this be a complete waste of time? Cheers Martin1 -
Why only a few pages of my website are being indexed by google
Our website www.navisyachts.com has in its sitemap over 3000 pages of information, and this is all unique content written by our team. Now Google Webmaster central shows only 100 urls indexed from 3500 submitted. Can you help me understand why and how I can fix this issue? The website has 4 years old, is a Joomla 3.3 up to date. It has part of the content in the Joomla core content systems and part in K2. Thank you. Pablo
Reporting & Analytics | | FWC_SEO0 -
Drop in google.com / referral trafic
Hi, On one of our sites (after the release of a new version, including redirections), we've seen a drop in referral trafic from google.fr (france). I know that this trafic usually comes from Google Images but it doesnt seem to be the case this time. The referal path is "/" and not "imgres" as it usually is when it comes from google images. The search trafic hasnt dropped tough... The site is a job listing site. We also saw a drop from indeed.com, I guess their crawler got lost in our new site... Any idea on the possible google site it could come from? Thank you,
Reporting & Analytics | | AdrienLargus0 -
Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product. Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same. I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Setting up Goals in Analytics when no common 'order confirmation' type page
Hi I'm working on a project/client and have asked them for the common url that shows whenever user finishes the purchase process so i cant set it up as a Goal in GA so we can track conversions etc Since site is dynamically generated it does not have such a page. Dev are suggesting setting up a new goal, generate a URL and script and they will append to a similar call. Does this make sense/sound like it would work ? And is it quite easy to do that in Analytics ? Normally i just add a URL as a goal and jobs done, don't know about scripts etc ! Cheers Dan set up a new Goal and generate a URL and script and send that to us and we'll append this to a similar call we already did for this at your request originally
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to Turn Google Analytics Into Your Own Rank Tracker Using Custom Variables
I followed the instructions here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables, but cannot see the report in Analytics under "Custom Variables". As I dont know JS syntax, I assume the code is wrong. I just added dohertyjf's code under my normal tracking code. Can someone tell me if and where the error is? | | Much obliged!
Reporting & Analytics | | zeepartner0 -
Nofollow page is being reported as a landing page for organic search in Google Analytics
One of my client's websites includes a series of pages for an enrollment process. All of these pages are blocked by robots.txt. In Google Analytics these pages are showing data as landing pages for organic search traffic, and have been for quite some time. There was recently a surge of organic search traffic landing on one of these pages, coming from multiple search engines. The pages appear to be blocked and I'm not finding any of them in the search results for the keywords that are being reported in GA or by searching for the url. Does anyone have any insights into why this might be happening?
Reporting & Analytics | | rgibson1000