My rankings are up and down like a Yo-Yo. Any ideas why?
-
One of the companies that I work for sells the latest smartphones.
It ranks fairly well for key terms in an extremely competitive field. Recently the rankings of one particular handset have been extremely erratic and do not follow the pattern of other products, I am wondering if anyone can offer some insight as to why this is happening?
When the handset was first announced, it ranked fairly well (20th). This is good when you bare in mind that it is an ecommerce site competing with top tech sites. Prior to release, the ranking gradually declined to 33rd. I believe this may be due to reviews being publsihed (as a result of review handsets being sent out prior to release) as Google has started to favour reviews and news updates.
I have seen a similar pattern with other handsets, reviews and news are favoured by Google prior to release, but once the product is available, my rankings rise and remain on the first page provided that links are still coming in.
However, the rankings of this handset dropped from 27th to below 50th upon launch. The next week the ranking rose from >50th to 7th, dropped to below 50th again the following week, rose back to 9th the week after and has now dropped again to below 50th. These are by far the biggest changes in rankings I have seen on a week to week basis.
The page has a strong link profile in order to achieve such a high ranking in the first place. With this being the case I have no idea why ranking can drop off so much in the space of a week?
Update: I forgot to mention initially that I have the variant listed twice, one for each colour variant. All content is the same apart from the colour being altered in the appropriate places. This has not been a problem in the past, but perhaps it is due to recent changes to Google algorithm?
-
No I don't have more than one variant...
-
That sounds similar to my experience. I have just realised that what is in fact happening is that it is picking up a different variant each week.
So one week it picks up the black handset in the top 10 results, the next week the black handset has dropped to below 50, but it is picking the white up on the 4th page.
Have you got more than one variant of your product listed at all?
-
I have had exactly the same experience- my ranking report on SEO moz report said I dropped >45 places; from 6th to somewhere outside the top 50 for a search term that I had been doing well on- I made no changes to that page, when I look in google now though I am back to 6th where I had been last week. So the question is; was SEOmoz report wrong or for the date in question 23rd of March or did Google drop my ranking down 45+ places and bring it back in less than 4 days?
Any help grately appreciated.
thanks,
Sinead
-
Thanks for your response Vinod.
I have been adding back links over time so I'm not sure why it is so erratic.
-
In general, when there are frequent ups and down then backlinks made over time helps getting stable ranks.
Not sure if backlinks will help you, still you can try it. No harm.
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
-
Image ranking plummet help
Hi Moz Community, I need help understanding why my site is dropping rankings and traffic significantly. We were hit the hardest with doing a image query filter ~6/2-6/3 (image attached). We also had a site migration on this exact date, but didn't change URL structure or domain names, just switched hosting sites. I'm assuming this plummet is from the migration, but can't figure out why. I may also not be understanding this filter clearly so let me know. Shoot any questions my way that could help your understanding of the problem be more clear. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | IceIcebaby
-Reed yVzQRTK0 -
Why would our client's site be receiving significant levels of organic traffic for a keyword they do not rank for?
We have a client that has received 100+ organic visits for the keyword 'airport transfers', yet the site does not rank in the top 100 search results for this keyword. We have checked that it is not untagged PPC traffic. Truly baffling. Can anybody help?
Reporting & Analytics | | mrdavidingram0 -
Improved keyword ranking but less traffic
Hello fellow mozzers! My collegue and I are a bit puzzled in regards to our recent website statistics. In november 2013, we upgraded the technological platform of our website to be fully HTML5 coded, and implemented the schema.org Products scheme to systematically tag all our products on the site. To prevent too much loss of visitors, we created a 301-redirect table from almost all our old URL's to the specific new ones, as we implemented a new URL structure as well. The first few months were bumpy as expected, making a huge drop in rankings before rising up again. Our keyword rankings are better then ever (60% of the keywords in top 3, average competition, 25% more on first SERP) but our number of visits dropped by about 10%. Our bounce rate went down from 20% to 14%, our returning visits are stable, but our new visitors stats dropped by 25% as well. This comparison was made between equal periods in the current year and last year, using organic data stats. (new technical platform vs. the old one) What could be the reason that our number of visits dropped 10% while our keyword ranking is better then ever? We don't have any manual penalties in GWT and can't understand why visits would drop so much while ranking improved. May it be so easy that there's just less search volume on our ranked content or does anyone have other ideas? Thank you all in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | EconostoNL0 -
Have i got a manual action on rankings?
Hi guys, so recently Google released the 'manual actions' tab under 'search traffic' in Google webmaster tools. Recently hit by panda i checked this and got: " Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole." However was this not the message before saying it was not a complete manual ban, just affecting a few bad links? I was hit badly in the rankings but still have some good terms and traffic is not that bad still from organic non-brand. I have fixed many of the bad links (horrible articles submissions that went out of control in 2009) - do i do a reconsideratikn request? i have disavowed the bad links that are left 3 weeks ago? so do i wait to see if disavow works or do a reconsideration request?I was sure this was like the message sent out before which meant it wasn't that bad for your site, just a few links ignored? Any advice much appreciated, thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | pauledwards0 -
How can I see keyword rankings past 50?
The rankings in the campaigns appear to be limited to tracking terms in the top 50. is there a way to view past that? I understand that for the most part no one is ever going to see past that so 50+ might as well be 5000. But a client has requested for a handful of key terms. If this is not possible, can someone recommend another tool I might use? Thank you! Kevin
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
What does "on first page" mean in seomoz ranking reports?
Hi - When reports here show numbers of keywords appearing "on first page", there must be some implicit assumption made about the number of results listed per page. 1. Can anyone tell me what that assumption is? Is it 10? 20? 2. What about universal results Local links? If the answer to number one is, for instance, 20 results per page, then are there any assumptions made about the number of universal results Local links included? I'm just trying to understand what the reports mean. Thanks, Tim
Reporting & Analytics | | tcolling0 -
Is there any way to see how one my keywords ranked historically before I started tracking it?
Hello there! I'm in need of some historical data on some keywords as they relate to my site. Basically, I'd like to track which events have had the most impact on moving me through the rankings, but I wasn't using Moz at the time I had made some changes to my website... Is there any way to see how I ranked for a particular keyword at a given point in time? Thanks! Gene
Reporting & Analytics | | BGroup0 -
Why did I loose all my product page rankings (e-commerce site)
This friday I noticed that I'd lost pretty much all my product pages in the SERP and also their rankings for the product names. These are products I both have introduced to the market (sweden) and also some that I've been the only one selling. I've analyzed a couple of different ranking-faults. Examples: **"super mario väggdekaler" should rank **http://www.roligaprylar.se/Super-Mario-Vaeggdekaler.html as #1 and has done for several years. Instead this search in my internal search engine ranks #10-#15 with no relevance. www.roligaprylar.se/?q=mario%20v%E4g "jedi morgonrock" should rank www.roligaprylar.se/Jedi-Morgonrock.html as #1 or #2 but instead this url ranks as #12 www.roligaprylar.se/product_detail.php?pid=Jedi-Morgonrock "Charlie sheen bobblehead" (in the swedish serp this should be the most simple term to rank on. previously #1) my internal search engine ranks for #8 with this url <cite>www.roligaprylar.se/?q=Charlie%20Sheen%20Bobblehead</cite>J So I've drawn these conclusions and actions Products that don't rank well longer but still ranks with their alternative non-rewritten url has gotten deep links from affilliates (i track affilliate ids and stuff via this link) and have replaced the original url which is rewritten. Action: Canonical urls for these non-rewritten products to the rewritten version. For example on this product page www.roligaprylar.se/product_detail.php?pid=Jedi-Morgonrock I've placed a canonical for this url www.roligaprylar.se/Jedi-morgonrock.html With the products not ranking at all or when searches in my search engine shows up I suspect some kind of dup content punishment where Google thinks the search result is more important than the product page. Action: All search-pages are now noindex,follow I also increased product name density in terms of keywords on the product page. But I'm still owned and losing tons of money during the holidays (buying adwords at obscene amounts instead hehe). So just wanted to hear with you guys. Are my conclusions and actions correct? What have I missed, what more could I do to reverse this? Thanks Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | nuttinalle0