Sudden SERP drop?
-
I'm wondering why my mainpage of my site just disappeared from google while a post from my site ranks at #11 on google.
I currently only have 1 .edu backlink to it and the anchor text is my url site : http://www.domain.c0m
What is the meaning of this? I checked my on page optimization and I got an A. The only problem I saw with my site was keyword stuffing on the homepage because my posts contain the keyword and its listed 26 times on the homepage but that shouldn't be the problem.
-
Wait I thought if people are doing exact search, you don't use quotes?
-
"Except changing up the robots.txt, adding meta descriptions to everything and more...."
Seems like there could be a correlation to your changes and how your site is ranked to me.......... Not knowing exactly what changes were made its tough to say.
Can you provide more info or a link to your site?
-
How long was you ranking for the term before it dropped? week, month, years?
Try putting quotes round the term and see where you rank so "Swimming Fast"
-
Over the last two months all my sites (20) were down yet consistent in traffic.
Then last week I experienced a boost across the board. All separate sites all experiencing a very good increase in traffic.
Now - the last 7 days the drop in traffic has been steady and moving in a downward spiral, and yes, again across the board. What was significant that my anchor store (since 2002) was really dead in the water.
Site 21 (a political blog) with a PR 6 was beginning to show real signs of wear but it's recovering slightly.
Penguin, Panda, or whatever these sites are well monitored, all still very well indexed so maybe its the warm weather, summer fun, boredom but business is down, way down.
-
I know I didn't get slapped because I rank #4 for another keyword similar to it; for example:
my keyword is swimming fast
I still rank #4 for swimmingfast but I am not seen on SERPS for swimming fast.
I am not keyword stuffing though because my posts show up in the home page and several keywords pop up in the snippet portion and I cannot remove it. I can minimize my posts to the page to 1 but then my webpage isn't visually appealing. I haven't done any 'major' changes to my website except changing up the robots.txt, adding meta descriptions to everything and more.
So yes, it was out of the blue =(
-
Was this drop out of the blue or has there been some recent changes? Sometimes when there are significant changes made there are equally drastic changes in SERPs.
I do know that keyword stuffing is BAD and have seen it negatively impact pages on one of my sites in the past. Has this Key Word density always been high?
Not having any more information about your site, I would have to suggest addressing your KeyWord issue at hand and see if that moves things in the right direction for you.
If you can provide more information or a link to your site, I will bet many people will be happy to provide some great insight to your issue.
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 Serps Not Showing HTTPS in Front of URL
Hi Everyone, We implemented the HTTPS change to our four websites about 6 months ago. I have found something that I feel is strange. The homepage of each website shows www.domain.com, but all the internal pages show https://www.domain.com/page. If you click through it shows it as secure, but I feel that because it is happening on all four websites, that something was done incorrectly. Here is one Google SERP: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&biw=1920&bih=947&ei=gq9GWpizBuuF_Qa_p5e4Bw&q=tanzanite+jewelry+designs&oq=tanzanite+jewelry+designs&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l2.130446.136028.0.136152.29.17.4.7.9.0.207.2214.7j9j1.17.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..1.28.2350...0i131k1j0i22i30k1.0.BA5-meGmuA0 As you can see, our site displays with no https, but all the internal pages do. It just worries me as I have seen our internal pages increasing in positioning, but not our homepage. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?
On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson1 -
Product Images with organic results in SERP
Hey Mozzers, I've noticed that several of our product page results in Google have the product image associated with them. Today is the first day I've seen this. Does anyone know anything about these? Has Google put anything out about this? Here's a couple examples: http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/08a16dcf-505e-443c-866d-fae6d805743e/2014-03-31_1031.png http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/04972e7b-f6b2-4e78-ab11-95c52d69a200/2014-03-31_1056.png What's interesting is that they don't show for me when I use Chrome's Incognito mode. Any insights much appreciated! Will
Technical SEO | | evoNick4 -
Weird SERPS
Hello mozerz, I have a question regarding my SERPS that I just can't figure out, maybe one of you had this problem before or has encounter a similar problem. So I have a website on Scotland, and I have a page for each major city so the structure is scotland/city/glasgow or scotland/city/edinburgh or scotland/city/aberdeen. Now every city page is w3 validated, page speed validated, has around 1000 words of text, all with h1, h2, image alt, nice title and nice description, all have grade A on moz campaign, original content, all with canonical links, no ads or spammy links. The title , description, h1, h2 and img alt are the same only replaced Aberdeen with Edinburgh or Glasgow. or so on ... so all pages are identically just replaced the city word. In terms of link building I have done none ! and in terms of promotion I have done none... so theres no scenario where by I have done something more for one city then the other Now my problem is that all cities are doing well in SERPS, only Glasgow has come up till 14 position and then has dropped suddenly to 74, and remained there for 2 weeks now. I know this sounds like a penalty, but it can't be because I haven't done anything, I've tried all the tools possible to analyze the Glasgow page, though that it was a code problem or a broken link or that google-bot doesn't get up to this page to crawl it and classify it, but all is fine. Can anyone suggest anything that I might do. I'm 100% sure that I have no penalty, I've checked even the webmaster tools, open site explorer to see if anyone tried to link to my site with spammy links ( has happened before, I had about 1000 links about viagra from a competitor pointing to my site ) .
Technical SEO | | asmedia0 -
Why has one of my keywords dropped over 45 places since last week?
Hi one of my keywords is Aquaman Wetsuits and it seems to have dropped over 45 places since the last crawl - how can this be and how can I find out what the problem is? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Fitsensesports0 -
Slide show showing up as video in serp
Saw an interesting SERP today that made me wonder how this is working - A search for alaska train tours reveals the Flash slideshow from this page http://www.alaskatours.com/alaska_railroad_packages/alaska_family_tour.htm showing up on the second/third pages. I'm guessing this is the work of a video sitemap perhaps? Unsure how they pulled this off exactly, but I am very interested to see what people think as I could probably use this for a few different sites.
Technical SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
I had a massive ogranic traffic drop in the past 72 hours (80%). What should I do? I
I am very very worried as my organic traffic suddenly came to pretty much a halt last Friday. We have been working very hard on content in the last 2 years and have 0 duplicated content with many thousand travel guides, tips and other travel related info. We are also publishing a successful travel blog which used to get quite a bit off traffic. Everything stalled last Friday and since we are operating in the travel industry which is very competitive, this will be very hard on us. In fact, I fear that we will not survive this drop for more than 2-3 months. How do we find out about what happened and what can we do to get our SERPs back? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madsuh0 -
301 redirect dropped page rank
Hi, We have a www domain that I have changed to a non www domain. The www domain had been in place for some time and had a good page rank, PR4. After this change the page rank dropped significantly (PR0, and now recently back to PR2) despite it being a 301 redirect which I thought "should" carry over the page rank. Yes, I am aware I should have just left it be. Hind sight 20/20 .. ya ya ya 🙂 My questions Is the 301 the correct method for this? Why did the page rank drop despite the 301? Should we go back to the www domain at this point? Thanks Kris
Technical SEO | | adriot0