50% of my keywords just had a significant drop for no reason no changes?
-
I just looked at a report for one of my sites in moz pro and
35/75 keywords just dropped on google, I didn't make any changes recently
Ranking Changes
-
12
Improved
-
35
Declined
Many dropping 5 - 22 places!
Any ideas on whats up, thank fully it didn't effect traffic, its pretty low anyways, but it has stayed the same... But still dropped to page 5 for lots of stuff. Strange. Did google just update or something?
Thanks for any ideas.
-
-
Hello Willem,
Yes, in my opinion you should submit languages. I'm not sure but think that main site on .com should be set as basic NL site.
For each sub-site (language ver) sitemap in particular language is needed, I have no idea how your sitemaps are created. If on automatic way (plugin or other way) it seems to be a bit complicated, but it's better to have sitemap than not to have, it is worth your effort.
Use meta tags "alternative" in section on each site.
And ... ask other people, maybe there is something new. Theres a lot of stuff in the GWT blog and forum...
Marek
-
I do have 3 different sub directories on the main domain. /NL, /DE and /EN, one for each language.
So I should add a GWT 'site' for each language and set a target geographic location to the righ region and delete the hometextileshop.com GWT 'site'(that is the main domain for 3 languages)
That would mean remove the sitemap too since it has 3 languages in it too.
As for the sitemap: would it be better in my case to remove the sitemap all to gether and let the bots just crawl the site and index?
Or should I have the sitemap module reprogrammed to use the "alternative" tag.
And how would the sitemap be applied if I had 3 GWT sites (one for each language)
For each language a sitemap with the target language and the other 2 as 'alternative', or just one sitemap for all 3 GWT-sites with 1 main language and the other languages as "alternative'?
-
HI Willem,
I'm not a prestashop specialist but i know that on one licence you ca do something like that shop-en shop-cs - it is from Polish prestashop forum ... forum.prestashop.pl
My " use rel="alternative" for language versions" refers to the situation when you have language versions and you want to prevent from duplicated content.
When it comes your situation - rankings, in my opinion it is better to have 3 different subdomains or subfolders for different languages.
As I understand your site uses language switcher... and a versions are in main domain subfolders. For GWT doesn't matter which method you use - subdomain or folder.
Key thing is that you should submit to GWT 3 different language versions (subfolders) and do a verification with different GWT meta tag (if you use this method for GWT verification) or code or with three diff GA accounts.
So 3 lang ver -> 3 GWT "sites" -> 3 verifications by GWT
And last but not least ... you still should use "alternative" tag to ensure crawl-bots that it is different site version not duplicated content. remember that not only text can be duplicated content... images or other stuff too
It should work...
Cheers,
Marek
-
Hi Marek,
Your comment on the rel="alternative" got me thinking.
I run a prestashop in 3 languages and use a sitemap module, and it doesn't use the alternative tag
( www.hometextileshop.com/sitemap.xml)
I always had trouble to rank in more than one language, the standard language in the shop seems to affect the language priority and since I use a multi langual sitemap I see english sites rank on dutch keywords (although the standard language is dutch), the dutch keyword is not even on these sites.
Somehow the multi language part of the site brings trouble and search engines seen to have trouble with it althoug each site is differtent in each language. (one url per language, own title and description and (translated) content)
Any suggestions?
-
Hi Syndicate,
As you wrote - you did change nothing. It is possible that one keyword still has a good support for content, links etc... but other not.
Your competition probably did changes. Few tips:
-
you should analyze bounce rate in correlation with time spent on page
-
for pages with low bounce rate and short time spent and low traffic is better do them noidex and nofollow - they decreases site quality
-
implement microformats,
- big impact has rel="author", "author" links should provide to author's site not to publisher site
-
social media are the key to modern SEO position
-
G+1 is not a social media but it helps a lot
-
employ responsive site content (mobile) more than 20% of the internet traffic is on mobile devices (usage of CSS3 and HTML5 is a need)
-
use rel="alternative" for language versions
-
use Google Map Maker
-
and many many more, I advice you to read mentioned conference materials
You have to change your site - it is a must.
Just imagine that you start on Ford Model T in Formula 1 ...
The distance between Ford T and McLaren MP4-27 (2012) is the same like between internet five years ago and now.
Marek
-
-
Anything is possible but I have a site that I haven't touched ANYTHING for about 5 years now and it still holds #1 for its main keywords. So not sure but seems not all sites are punished for old content, that content is nearly 10 years old but it still ranks #1 and top 5 for most all of its original keywords. Makes it real hard to figure things out!
-
Hi Bron,
Maybe it was because you did nothing, remember the words "Change or die" said in 4th century by Claudian Claudianus and also in recent times by marketing guru John Porter from Harvard.
In 2011 google did 525 changes in algorithm. In 2012 they are still doing changes. Google new trend is to promote sites friendly for users not for robots. Backlinks are still have have impact but not as big as in the past. Now we're stepping in new world ... semantic search. Now for Google good article is article between 1000 - 2000 words with good quality and with minimum once a week publication on your site/blog. There are also lots of other changes and news ... you should take a look on SMX conference materials.
...so maybe you have to change something, do a site revision and next do changes...
Take care,
Marek
-
Yes something happened, not sure what. I have 3 competitors in my report.
Most of them dropped by only by a normal amount of 1 point not 25. None had more then 1 or 2 points in changes while the vast majority of mine were off the page.
I didn't do any linkbuilding, all I have done in the past month or so, it do some minor content changes to only the homepage. Really strange, maybe some of the links changed offsite or something. I cannot figure out what happened.
-
I noticed the same thing on my websites. (all of them)
What stood out was that alle the keywords that have more competition and had more linkbuilding over the past year dropped more than keywords with no linkbuilding on it.
Around met I heard more people telling me that their sales in their shop have dropped since middle of this week.
The key question is what to do about this? How to get ranking up again.
If there was a google update it did not seem to effect my competition. The people mentioned above all have websites around the same size as mine. Maybe that's got something to do with it (guess)
Please ask any question that arises, I'll be glad to answer if that leads to a solution to this.
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
-
Meta Keywords is relevant in SEO yet ?
Hello, meta keywords is relevant to use in SEO yet? If yes, how many words is recommended to use? Regards, Leandro
Algorithm Updates | | lmoraes0 -
Dramatic drop in SEO rankings after recovering from hacking
A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time. Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?
Algorithm Updates | | FPK0 -
ATTN SEO MINDS: Is there a way/tool to categorize keywords from an Omniture/GA report?
So ideally I would like to take the list of keywords I am currently ranking for, and group these based on what the user intent was in making that query. For example if I am a Thai delivery chain and I am currently receiving traffic from the queries "vegan dish" and "tofu thai food", I would want to have a column in a keyword report that says these queries fall into the VEGETARIAN category. I think what I want to know is how can I filter a massive list by a range of keywords? I want to know does this cell contain, "keyword A" or "keyword B" or "keyword Z". If so list the corresponding category. This way I can look at keyword performance by category or user intent/motivation. Is there a tool out there that will help me accomplish this, or is there a good solution in excel I can use?
Algorithm Updates | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Missing Keywords in Google SERP
We just got this attached image from one of our partners - has anyone seen Google putting 'missing' keywords in SERPs like this before? They said that it was not a plugin or anything and this is a screenshot of their organic search results. google%20screenshot_zpsgmwaf9e2.png
Algorithm Updates | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Frequency & Percentage of Content Change to get Google to Cache Every Day?
What is the frequency at which your homepage (for example) would have to update and what percentage of the page's content would need to be updated to get cached every day? What are your opinions on other factors.
Algorithm Updates | | bozzie3110 -
Rankings changing every couple of MINUTES in Google?
We've been experiencing some unusual behaviour in the Google.co.uk SERPs recently... Basically, the ranking of some of our websites for certain keywords appears to be changing by the minute. For example, doing a search for "our keyword" might show us at #20. Then a few minutes later, doing the same search shows us at #14, and then the same search a few minutes later shows us at #26, and then sometimes we're not ranked at all, etc etc. I know the algorithm changes a lot, but does it really change every couple of minutes? Has anyone else experienced this kind of behaviour in the SERPs? What could be causing it to happen?
Algorithm Updates | | d4online0 -
Title of home page is changed to domain name in SERPs
Hi, We have a unique problem, we are getting a totally different title in Google serps for a large site. When we search with domain name with space in google.com. We are getting title as domain name with space. We don't have any Open Directory listing. We don't have any cannonical issues and other pages with title as domain name. Can you please tell us what we have to do get our original title back in SERP ? Thanks, With Regards,
Algorithm Updates | | semshah1430 -
Major Slipping of highly important keywords in a few days
Realized some major slipping on some of my most important keywords- mn realtors and minnesota homes for sale- my site is joeandcindy.com After months of working on traffic, blogs etc, wondering what could slap me 10-25 spots in just a few days. There were no errors showing up on the report that I can see. Just looking for some quick advice on what I might be missing and some quick action steps I might take to reverse the trend. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | jjwelu0