What Happened on the 17th?
-
Alright, what gives? Something major with Google SERPs went down on Jan. 17th. I have a site that was ranking well for 7 keywords - normal fluctuations from page 1-3, for 8 months. We never had any issues with Panda/Penguin and in fact, Nov./Dec. were excellent months.
Then BAM, on the 17th all but 2 keywords tanked...not even in the top 100! 2 remain on page 2/3 - very odd....I've seen lots of talk about something happening...anyone have a better idea or even KNOW what happened?
Thank you!
-
Oh this was/is major. I had one keyword go from # 8 to #480
-
My 2nd big key word dropped from #2 to 7-8 and now it is finally back up to two. I was so excited to reach #2...when the fall happened I just thought well time to start doing more SEO.
-
With my site - no not yet. However, Brian did shed some light on the issue and was very helpful.
-
Did you figure out what went wrong?
-
Brian, thank you for taking the time to call me and help me with this issue!
-
Yes, I know about Panda...but this stuff happened on the evening of the 17th - we dropped like a rock./
-
Barry Schwartz wrote about a new Panda update from Google, a couple of days ago...
http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-version-24-1-2-of-search-queries-impacted-146149
-
It's frustrating - not because it happened, but because I don;t know WHAT happened and if I don't know what happened I can't fix it!
-
Same problem here! All white hat in-house SEO work with nothing changing on our end, and then a big drop in early-mid Jan. Haven't seen any Google updates though that would explain this...?
-
Interesting! Traffic isn't too bad - my guess is that's because we use cpc too and maybe the keywords that tanked didn't bring in much organic traffic anyway but some of my keywords went from #11 to #370!
-
There was another post on this on the 19th or so. There was some sort of update and traffic to a few of my sites are down as well.
-
Hey there - I think we chatted in another thread Why wouldn't they mention this?? Hmmmm...
thanks for you help
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
-
What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners1 -
What will happen if my number of linking domains decline after a month by 70 percent?
I have heard that it’s linking domains or refereeing domains declined and the graph looks like its declining, i will look shady in engines eyes kindly elaborate thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | calvinkj0 -
Huge problem : All our Internal Links Dropped from 9.000 to 0.What happened?
Hi, I just noticed a huge large problem in our rankings. Our rankings suddenly dropped for more than 50 %. Of course, I immediately started to research the issue. And under Links, I found that we somehow lost all of our internal links! They have dropped from 9k to 0. Now, I am sure that we do have some internal links on our site ( since I put them there myself). Could you please tell me what is going on and how I can fix this issue? Our site is 1solarsolution.com and I will also attach screenshots bellow from Link Explorer, thank you. Fr08UGe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alisamana0 -
Mobile First Index: What Could Happen To Sites w Large Desktop but Small Mobile Sites?
I have a question about how Mobile First could affect websites with separate (and smaller) mobile vs desktop sites. Referencing this SE Roundtable article (seorountable dot com /google-mobile-first-index-22953.html), "If you have less content on your mobile version than on your desktop version - Google will probably see the less content mobile version. Google said they are indexing the mobile version first." But Google/ Gary Illyes are also on the record stating the switch to mobile-first should be minimally disruptive. Does "Mobile First" mean that they'll consider desktop URLs "second", or will they actually just completely discount the desktop site in lieu of the mobile one? In other words: will content on your desktop site that does not appear in mobile count in desktop searches? I can't find clear answer anywhere (see also: /jlh-marketing dot com/mobile-first-unanswered-questions/). Obviously the writing is on the wall (and has been for years) that responsive is the way to go moving forward - but just looking for any other viewpoints/feedback here since it can be really expensive for some people to upgrade. I'm basically torn between "okay we gotta upgrade to responsive now" and "well, this may not be as critical as it seems". Sigh... Thanks in advance for any feedback and thoughts. LOL - I selected "there may not be a right answer to this question" when submitting this to the Moz community. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Trying to understand why it happened
Hi there, Quite a lot of my keywords that were on page 1 for quite some time have just been pushed below page 5 on Monday 04/06/12 all at the same time, however some are still on page 1 maybe dropping a rank or two. The link building for these keywords have been pretty much the same, using blogs, product reviews etc. As a precaution I ask bloggers to take a lot of my links off as they were site-wide and keep them on homepage only, is this what has had the negative affect? please note Some of the keywords that were on page 1 and now page 5 were not part of the site-wide activity. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
De-listed? What happened? No rankings??
Was ranking on first page for over 80 terms with over 25 in the top 3 and my main keyword was ranked #4...now my twitter account has replaced my website for #4 in the rankings for the main keyword. I now have ZERO Rankings for all keywords for my website. I have no idea what happened. ** Is there anyway for me to check with Google to see why I have been wiped off the map in the search rankings? ** Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
My page has fallen off the face of the earth on Google. What happened?
I have checked all of the usual things. My page has not lost any links or authority. It is not black listed or any other obvious sign. What's going on? This has just happened within the past 3 days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormz0