NEED HELP, Figuring Out Ranking Drop!
-
Hello, I need help from somebody, anybody, in trying to figure out why my site dropped so much for the keyword “wildblue” and “wild blue”. On the week of Feb. 13, 2012, my website jumped from middle of the first page to the fourth page, and then a week or two later jumped completely out of the index (or at least off the top 5 pages). We do not engage in any deceptive practices. Our entire website is centered around this keyword, and we are very relevant, and have informative and continually updated content for visitors.
I thought at first we got hit by Panda, but our overall organic traffic has not decreased, it has actually been steadily increasing compared to same time last year. I have tried over the past several months to get us back up, or at least figure out what happened, with no luck. If anyone could advise me on what might have happened, how to correct it, or even has any ideas of how I could figure out what happened I would greatly appreciate it.
Website is:
-
Trademarks can be registered in some countries, but not worldwide. Will it be any difference in selected country search if trademark is not valid there?
As i see in some results, google just hides the result if that page had official trademark violation, but does not penalize the website.
-
Well, we didn’t change URL structures or hosting or anything. However, Wild Blue is a trademarked term. However, we have permission from WildBlue to use the term for marketing purposes. This leads me to the same puzzler, which is that so many other sites similar to ours (many of the them much less relevant) replaced us in the rankings. I have tried for several months to figure this out. I hate to give up as this is so pertinent to the very core function our site and the information we provide, but I just don’t know what else to do. I even submitted a reconsideration request to Google. I haven’t heard back from them yet.
-
Is it possible that "Wild Blue" is a trademarked term? Just a thought, but I wonder if you could have been taken out of the index because of a DMCA takedown request?
Did you do anything else during the time period preceding the drop? Like change url structures, change hosting, etc.?
-
I appreciate your help. When our site was ranking for that term it was about 5 years old. We have ranked extremely well for that term for the entire existence of our site, with the exception of after February. This drop actually occurred even before Panda was released (about two weeks before I think). I did get one of the unnatural linkings Alerts In July (well after the drop occurred). However, I did a lot of research on it, and my conclusion was unless you got one of the warning messages related to unnatural linking don’t worry about it, as the site has not actually been penalized. From my understanding this message was more or less a “change what you are doing before it gets worse” type of message. Frustratingly we have never engaged in shady practices.
The only thing we have done that people now say has no effect is article marketing. Last year, we did invest some resources in creating some very high quality articles and submitting them to a few different directories. These were very informative and useful, and not the least bit spammy. Once Panda came out we stopped. To further complicate things, we didn’t focus any of these article efforts on the “WildBlue” keyword. Prior to Feb. we didn’t have to do much work for this keyword because we naturally ranked so well.
We actually use to have that keyword in our title, but took it out just a bit ago because we were not gaining any traction, and thought it best to reinvest that space with another keyword. The most puzzling thing for me about this situation, is that I understand gradually dropping for a specific keyword due to several factors. However, being completely dropped from the rankings in one week from a keyword that your entire website is designed to represent is still very puzzling to me.
-
There are a few things that stand out to me when looking at your site. First of all, you don't have the words "Wild Blue" in your homepage title, so if you are trying to rank your home page for this term that would help. I do see it on your inner pages, but do you have links built to the inner pages?
Your linking profile looks very unnatural, especially when you rank it by anchor text. However, if your drop happened in February of 2012, it wasn't because of Penguin because that didn't happen till April. Have you checked your webmaster tools for unnatural links warnings? This could be the cause. You've got a lot of anchor texted links as top anchors. A natural profile would have your url and brand as the most popular anchors.
When you were ranking for "wild blue", how new was your site? You may have gotten a honeymoon boost and then dropped down a few weeks or months later. However, it is a little strange...I don't see you in the first 8 pages for that term. I would expect at least one of your inner pages to rank...but again, if it's a competitive field and you've got no links to inner pages (I didn't check...just assuming), and don't have the keyword in your title then this could just be normal and not due to a penalty at all.
-
Why do you think other non-brand owners, would replace us? Looking at it from Google’s perspective it seems as if it would be counter intuitive to replace one website in the rankings with another one just like it.
-
I think that is a good conclusion.
-
Well, I thought about that too. However, many of the people that jumped ahead of us are not the brand owner either, nor are they in my opinion as relevant to the subject as we are.
-
Ive just this minuted posted a discussion about Google hurting aggregators on this very forum http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-google-making-life-harder-for-aggregators.
I think you may be seeing ranking drop for a branded term as I believe Google is working on reducing sites optimised for branded terms when they arent the brand owner.
-
No, wildblue.com is owned by another company.
-
Are you also wildblue.com? That site ranked in first when wild blue is search
-
What do you think caused your problems in ranking?
-
I kept adding new links and in time I recovered. I varied the links anchors to bring the direct to non direct ratio closer to 20%.
-
Any suggestions on what to do, or advice from what you did?
-
I had the same thing happen to a few of my keywords.
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
-
Our webpage has been embedded in others website using iframe. Does this hurts us in rankings?
Hi all, One of our partners have embedded our webpage in their website using iframe such a way that anybody can browse to any page of our website from their website. It's said that content in iframes will not get indexed. But when I Google for h1 tag of our embedded webpage, I can see their website in SERP but not ours which is original. How it's been indexed? Is this hurting us in rankings? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
SERPs Help
Hey Mozzers, Please can someone advise? I manage the on-line content for an estate of Gyms in the UK. We had an existing gym location in Birmingham - www.nuffieldhealth.com/gyms/birmingham and 5 months ago we opened a new location in Birmingham - www.nuffieldhealth.com/gyms/birmingham-central. The 2 pages have different in-page content, different H1's, different title tags, different citations in page both have a few back links from different root domains, however the 2nd page (birmingham-central) does not rank in the top 50 results even though our domain is strong that the vast majority of results? Our original page (/gyms/birmingham) also slipped from page 1 in SERPs to the bottom of page 2 when the second Birmingham gym page was deployed?? I am guessing Google does not know which page to serve in SERPs, bud i am at a lose as to how to fix this issue. Can anyone please advise?? Regards Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bendall0 -
Should i rank for one tail keyword or long tail keywords
Hi guys, for example i run a coupon site and would like to rank for the brand keyword ASOS, should i just rank for the long tail keywords for example "ASOS discount code" instead of just "ASOS"? even the traffic for ASOS itself is MUCH higher than ASOS discount code? And the relevancy of ranking at "ASOS" is fine too because is somehow relevant? would ranking long tail helps with one tail keyword too? And assuming that i am already on the second page for the keyword "ASOS" and knowing is not hard to be page one. should i just rank the one keyword?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Please Please Please help (not ranking any more)..
my website is: www.tcclinic.com it was a static website which was ranking well. total about 400 pages. I also had my blog hosted on another domain (www.shopify.com) about 800 pages. I was told if I bring the blog to my domain, then I will have more content on my site and will rank even better, and also was advised to switch to WordPress. so about two weeks ago I did the following changes: I moved the site and blogs to my domain (tcclinic.com). and switch to WordPress. total of 1200 pages Since it was changing to WordPress all the URLs was changed and named differently. I did 301 redirect for all the pages. all the URLs now contains "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" which is the name of my clinic example: www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-liposuction-surgery/ www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-tummy-tuck/ most of my pages are indexed by google now BUT Now as the result I am not ranking anywhere in first 5 to 6 pages. I am not sure what is happening. have I been hit by a penguin, panda or any other black and white animal ? if this is the case how do I know this happened. Haveing "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" in all the URLs is considered as keyword stuffing ? moving 800 pages of blog to my domain caused it ? (blogs are removed from shopify.com) Is it just the matter of time to come back to the first page? Please let me know what you think.... Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Redesign Troubleshooting Help
We launched a redesign at the end of May and soon after, our website was de-indexed from Google. Here are the changes that I implemented so far to try to fix this issue: 301 redirect chain - We changed all our URLs and implemented 301 redirects. However, these are multiple redirects meaning 1 URL redirects to a second and then a 3rd. I was told that this could confuse Google. For example: http://cncahealth.com 301s to http://www.cncahealth.com 301s to https://www.cncahealth.com We wrote a rule for each variation of the URL and not there is only a one to one 301 redirect and this was validated with urivalet.com. Canonical tags did not match URL - We created the new website in a CMS where the CMS generated non-SEO friendly URLs. We applied 301 redirects to those CMS URLs, but when we enable canonical tags within the CMS, it uses the original CMS URL and not the URL of the page, so the canonical URL doesn't match the page. For now, I disabled canonical tags until I can figure out a way to manually insert canonical tag code in the pages without using the CMS canonical tag feature. After doing these two fixes our website still doesn't seem like it is able to get re-indexed by Google even when I submit the sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools...the sitemap doesn't get indexed? Questions...there are two more concerns that I am hoping can be answered in this community: Cache-Control = private : I saw from URIvalet.com that our cache-control is set to private. Is this affecting us being indexed and should this be set to public? Load Balancer - Our old website was not on a load balancer, but our new website is. When I look in our analytics at servers, I notice that the site is being picked up on one server and then another server at different times. Is Google seeing the same thing and is the load balancer confusing Google? I'm not sure what else could be an issue with us not being indexed. Maybe its just a waiting game where after I implemented the 1 & 2 change I just have to wait or does 3 & 4 or other issues also need to be addressed in order to get re-indexed? I hope someone can help me. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rexjoec0 -
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?? If yes then how ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Can anyone tell me why this site ranks so well?
Site in question: cellphoneshop.net From what I can tell from their link profile, the links they garner don't appear to be particularly high value but they dominate organic listings for my vertical (cell phone accessories), esp. in the last 2-3 months when Google was supposedly increasing the quality of their search results. Can anyone tell me why in particular this site ranks so well for competitive short and long tail terms?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eugeneku0 -
Help! Why are my rankings down?
Hi, Over the last couple of days I have found a HUGE drop in traffic. I checked a lot of our rankings, and we are definitely out of the game for at least a few keywords (not on 1st page). Our ranking has dropped on other keywords. We even dropped to #2 (for the first time ever) for our branded keyword search term. What happened?! Could it have been the Penguin update, 1 month after it was released? Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MangoMan160