Sudden drop in ranking for major search terms
-
Site bumpbabyandbeyond com au. Help! We have been operating for six years and had steadily built up our ranking for major terms like maternity clothes, maternity clothing, maternity wear, reaching highs of 6, 8 and 10 respectively for AU sites AU wide about six months ago that we have steadily maintained. All of a sudden we have dropped away. A week ago I noticed we had dropped from 6 to 12 for maternity clothes. This morning we are 21! I can't see any obvious reason for this, but believe the eCommerce module of our inventory/pos software has had a recent update - I'm awaiting answers on this. We haven't actively had anyone link building or working on SEO after being badly bitten and shelling out a small fortune for an AU company to do very little over six months - rankings improved rapidly when I sacked them and did some on page minor work myself. But I don't have the time or knowledge to look after the seo, and am on the hunt for reputable white hat assistance. Is there anything obviously wrong that I need to fix ASAP? Any help would be much appreciated
-
Thanks so much Marcus! Webmaster tools - no messages or notifications, this is the HTML Improvements section... what other info would be useful? HTML Improvements Last updated Oct 11, 2012 Addressing the following may help your site's user experience and performance. Meta description Pages Duplicate meta descriptions 18 Long meta descriptions 0 Short meta descriptions 10 Title tag Pages Missing title tags 0 Duplicate title tags 11 Long title tags 0 Short title tags 0 Non-informative title tags 0 Non-indexable content Pages We didn't detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site. There has been an increase in 404's from 0 to 61 - I wonder if the update to my ecommerce package removed my redirects from the previous php version of the site to the current asp? Number 1 is the previous sites main page! Will get on this today... What info is most pertinent from my campaign? Happy to provide reports etc - but also don't want to overload with TMI - let me know Thanks again Marcus! Cath
-
Hey,
The first thing to do is to determine if you have any obvious problems or technical problems and I would start by setting up an SEOMoz campaign for your site. This will crawl the site and report on any obvious issues that you can address. Additionally, review google webmaster tools and see if there are any notifications or problems being reported there.
From a quick review, there is nothing obvious from a technical perspective. Likewise, your anchor text and link profile look okay from the quickest of looks.
We did have a penquin update around a week ago and it could be that sites that link to you have been removed or lost equity and you are seeing a knock on effect. This could suggest why you dropped a bit, then a bit more as more and more links to your site get devalued as external pages are removed.
You certainly have some sub standard links for the keywords you mentioned:
http://brandedfeel.com/432869-Are-maternity-clothes-necessary-in-order-to-look-good-during.html
http://www.exportimportaustralia.com/directory/apparel_fashion/women_wear/
Likely thing here is that you have lost equity from some of these weaker keyword links and that has knocked you for some of your big searches. You may possibly have some technical issues as well so get that site set up in the campaign manager and report back on your findings and lets see what we can do to help.
Marcus
-
You are 22 in Sydney and 21 in Perth. No local results there because you're not located there, of course. It's possible that your improved Melbourne (local) results are forcing your other national results down to page 3. I'll ask around but never heard of that happening.
I can't imagine it would be better for you not to rank locally but anything is possible with Google.
-
Thanks for your response :). What about for Australia wide, which is how I usually check? Our online sales are normally at least as much as our instore sales, so results from other states/areas are pretty important to me.
-
Hi!
I'm attaching a screenshot from Melbourne, just now. You're in the Local results. That means many ranking trackers will give you the wrong results. I see you 21st for the term in organic results but because you show up in the 7-pack you are pushed down a little more. Google wants to see different domains on page 1 - not many of yours... so they tweaked it down a bit a few weeks ago. This is Matt Cutts' Twitter report on it:
**"**Just fyi, we rolled out a small algo change this week that improves the diversity of search results in terms of different domains returned."
I think you're only a few minutes north of me - if you ever want to talk SEO, let me know.
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
-
Short description about our search results drop + forum moving to subdomain question.
Hello, here is our story. Our niche is mental health (psychology, psychotherapy e.t.c). Our portal has thousand of genuine articles, news section about mental health, researches, job findings for specialists, a specialized bookstore only with psychology books, the best forum in country, we thousands of active members and selfhelp topics etc. In our country (non english), our portal has been established in 2003. Since then, for more than 15 years, we were no 1 in our country, meaning that we had the best brand name, hundreds of external authors writing unique content for our portal and hundreds of no1 keywords in google search results. Actually, we had according to webmaster tools, more than 1.000 keywords, in 1 and 2 position. (we were ranking no1 in all the best keywords). Before 2 years, we purchased the best domain in our niche. I ll use the below example (of course, domains are not the real ones):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dodoni
We had: e-pizza.com and now we have: pizza.com
We did the appropriate redirects but from day one, we had around 20-30% drop in search engines. After 6 months -which is something that google officialy mentions, we lost all "credits from the old domain.. .and at that point, we had another 20-30% drop in search results. Further more, in any google core update, we were keep dropping. Especially in last May (coronovirus update), we had another huge drop. We do follow seo guides, we have a dedicated server, good load speed, well structured data, amp, a great presence in social media, with more than 130.000 followers, etc. According to our investigation, we came to one only conclusion: that our forum, kills our seo (of course, noone in our team can guarantee that this is the actual reason of the uge drop in may-in coronovirus google core update). We believe that the forum kills our seo, because it produces low quality posts by members. For example, psychopharmacology in a very active sections and we believe, google is very "sensitive" in these kind of posts and information. So here is the question: although the forum is very very active, with thousands of new topics and posts every month, we are thinking of moving it to a subdomain, from the subfolder that now is.
This will help our domain authority to increase from 38 that is stuck 2 years now, to larger scales. We believe that althougth this forum gave a great boost to the portal, in the past 10-15 years, it somehow makes a negative impact now. If I could give more spesific details, I d say this: in all seo tools we run, the best kewwords bringing visitors to us, arent anymore, psychology and psychotherapy and mental health and this kind of top-keywords, but are mostly the ones from the forum, like: I want to proceed with a suicide, I m taking efexor or xanax and they have side effects, why i gain wieght with the antidepressants I get etc. 1. Moving our forum to subdomain, will be some kind of pain, since it is a large community, with thousands of backlinks that we somehow must handle in a proper way, also with a mobile application, things that will have to change and probably have some kind of negative impact. Would that be according to your knowledge a correct move and our E-A-T will benefit for google, or since google will know that the subdomain is still part of the same website/portal, it will handle it somehow, the same way as it does now? I have read hundreds of articles about forum in subdomains or in subfolders, but none of them covers a case stydy like ours, since most articles are talking about new forums and what is the best way to handle them and where is the best place to create them (in subfolder of subdomain) when from scratch. Looking forward to your answers.0 -
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Related searches volume
Hello, The related searches we see at the bottom of google search results. Is this what people also search for ? If it is why does the keyword so no volume for those related searches ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Ranking Ranking Factors!
When you look at the keyword analysis, you see the following ranking criteria: - | Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority | Root Domain Linking Root Domains | How do you rank the importance of each of these factors from 1-4? For example, PA, PLRD, RDLRD, DA Please explain. How many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Why traffic to my link has dropped suddenly?
Hi I would like to know why the traffic for the website link http://theindustrymeasure.com/2010/07/15/rediffmail-login has dropped suddenly on google.I used to get around 5000 page views on this page and then suddenly dropped to 15-20 . I still get good traffic from yahoo (around 500). Just before the drop I noticed that I started to get spammy trackbacks from Many questionable sources. I have not approved any of these trackbacks. The trackbacks are regular frequency of. 1 per day. is there any action which I can take to ensure that I get back my traffic. Traffic to other links are fine , only this page seems to have dropped off ever since the spam attack. As per seomoz tool I have a grade a for keyword rediffmail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShoutOut0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610