Single, high ranking pank disappears from Google?
-
Hi all,
The question I have concerns a high ranking page on my site that has disappeared from Google. It was in the top 5 for the target keyword and it currently ranks 3 on Bing.
I recently migrated my domain (one month ago), but it seems to have gone very well. No other pages have taken a hit like this. The 301 redirect is in place and working well. I've used the Moz Tools to see if anything is weird, but it all looks fine.
Oh, and yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools - no messages and other related pages on my site are ranking on the second and third pages for the terms. Also, the site is consulting services - nothing dodgy.
Any ideas? Why just this one page? What are my options?
Thanks for any advice you may have.
John
-
Thanks for the update! I am glad it worked out for you.
-
Ultimately, what I had to to was go into GWT and request that the URL in question be added to the index. It reappeared today, three days after my request and three weeks after disappearing.
-
I hope you're right...it's been about a week. Thanks for the encouragement!
-
I think it will reappear in a few days anytime I have made changes like that Google will usually remove it for a few days and then re-list it. It is weird just that one page took a hit though.
-
I checked this. This page is a popular tutorial on a technical topic that was kicking ass in the rankings and has utterly disappeared. I did the backlinks check and honestly, Opensite Explorer is not very useful most of the time. Outdated and very incomplete. I checked GWT and Bing Webmaster Tools for backlinks and it came up with with relevant links I was really happy to have. Hundreds of good ones, nothing obviously spammy. I'm at a loss with this...very difficult to understand and hurting my site a lot.
-
They're good. I'm wondering if Google has a penalty in place, but can find no evidence of it. But other pages with similar content are ranking. It's good content, in fact one of my most popular pages. Weird.
-
The next thing I would do is check the backlinks to the page in Google Webmaster tools, Opensite explorer and Bing Tools. Are they of low quality? Lots of spam? Do you only have anchor links pointing to the website? I suspect that one of these are the case if everything else is well.
-
Everything is exactly the same. I was very careful and since it took the hit, I've triple checked. It's the same. Very curious.
-
^ This
Also make sure that your canonical tags (if you had any) aren't pointing to your old URL. Common issue if transferring over all content.
-
Did you greatly change the page's content, headers, titles etc . when you made the switch to the new domain? Did you keep a lot of the same internal linking as well? All of these are things that I would check into for the page. Also, make sure that the page is craw-able by a Google bot. These would all be first things that I would look at.
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
-
SEO Value of Google+?
Hi Mozers, Does having a Google+ page really impact SEO? Thanks, Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Organic Listings showing Google Tag Manager + Google Page Title...?
I'm a bit stumped with this. I optimise all my titles etc for Australia - and now the organic liatings are showing something strange. For example ( we sell health supplements ) Meta title = "My Product , Buy Online Australia" If I type "My Product" - the title in the organic listings says "My Product - My Company Limited" - and the only place I can see it getting that from is a combination of Meta Data used in Google Tag Manager + the Name on my Google places page. This is much more obvious for categories.. but it's a pain in the butt. If I type "My Product Australia" Then the original "My Product , Buy Online Australia" comes up. Any ideas on policy etc? I have taken the "Limited" off the Google business page - so hopefully this will change over time - but I can't find any information on why google would do something like this. If you had shed any light on this - would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back. We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to: perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
How to improve my rankings?
Hi guys, I'm targeting a specific country NZ to start off with as my site is only new 3months old - whilst I'm trying to rank for various keywords such as - psychic readings, online psychic readings, love psychics, clairvoyant, astrology, tarot card readings etc I can see I'm slowly ranking around 18, 20,30,40 through my blog page, but nothing from the site. I know the site is content thin and were currently working on improving this, is there anything else you can suggest that perhaps I might need to be aware of? Or any tools I could use to go about getting information that could help put me ahead lol Thanks all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Hide Aggregation from Google?
Google isn't a fan of aggregation, but sometimes it is a good way to fill out content when you cannot cover every news story there is. What I'm wondering is if anyone has continued to do any form of aggregation based on a category and hide that url from Google. Example: example.com/industry-news/ -- is where you'd post aggregation stories but you block robots from crawling that. We wouldn't be doing this for search value just value to our readers. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | meistermedia0 -
Google snippet chosen why?
We have a page about buying property in the Megeve area of the Alps in France. We are No.2 on Google.co.uk for the term "megeve property for sale" and No.1 for "megeve property". http://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/MegeveProperty/Properties.asp If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet: Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR. However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page: A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ... Does anyone know why Google would serve this particular snippet instead of the META description. Is it the number of strong and descriptive words used, or some other reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PPGUKLTD0 -
Google+ Pages on Google SERP
Do you think that a Google+ Page (not profile) could appear on the Google SERP as a Rich Snippet Author? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | overalia0 -
Purchased a high ranking domain and want to transfer my site to the new domain
I recently purchased a highly ranked domain. The link profile is very good and I don't want to lose to many links however I want to transfer my site to that domain. What is the best way of doing this without losing the current rank on search engines? Also how much does the transfer of registrar information impact my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydop0