Infographic rankings has nose dived? Anyone else experienced this recently?
-
I posted an infographic back in April, 2012 on my company blog.
I added embed code at the bottom, so people could embed on their websites (not many did that I can tell) I also submitted it to a number of Infographic directories and got links back from around 5-6 of them.The title of the Infographic is exact match long tail search term.(6 words)
By July it had hit Position 6 in Google.co.uk, where it stayed in the top 10 until December fluctuating between positions 6-9. I haven't done anything else to the post and yet since December it has started to trickle down the rankings, in the past 3 weeks it dropped from 15th on Feb 3rd to 93rd on Feb 17th, then bounced back up to 33rd on the 25th of Feb and has now fallen again to 89th yesterday.
Is this normal or have I been hit with a penalty of some sort?
Not sure if this matters but I have the word infographic at the end of my title??
Also when I run it through OSE I don't see some of the backlinks that I can see from GWT.
-
Thanks Tom,
I have looked at a number of other pages and it does seem that certain keywords have all dipped around February (some have bounce back to where they were before) However it doesn't seem to be the pages themselves as other keywords for the same page have moved up over this period into position 1.
-
The OSE crawler is a lot smaller than GWT, so some discrepancy is to be expected, I'm afraid.
Have you seen any other rankings of yours fall for different keywords and, primarily, different landing pages? If not, that would pretty much rule out any penalty.
Having said all that, I think your first paragraph provides the reason why your rankings have fallen.
My guess would be (provided that the links haven't been dropped) is that Google has devalued your links from the infographic directories. Like normal directories, I can't see much of a user benefit at all on a site like this, which makes it a stand-out target for Google to devalue the link. We've seen recently that Google looks to be heading towards continuous devaluation of links over a number of weeks/months, as reported in this article. I'd go along with this school of thought - for instance, on one site I've seen homepage keywords dropped while the rest of the site was fine - the homepage had a number of directory links which I now believe to be devalued.
Be sure to double check that the links have not simply fallen off and that other pages on your site have not been penalised. Should you draw a blank there, this is what my semi-educated guess would be - a devaluation of directory style links, resulting in a fall in rankings.
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
-
Website have Caching/Indexing / Ranking Issue
Hi, My Website (https://www.v3cars.com) is not cached or indexed on regular basic from last 15 days. before this it was cached or indexed on regular basic. We are uploading fresh content on daily basic. Currently my new content is not ranked anywhere in Google even after cached or indexed. Please help and suggest. Sandeep - Love to Cars
Algorithm Updates | | onlinesandeep0 -
Google mystery: Website ranks inversely proportional in 2 countries for the main keyword. Any ideas or thoughts?
Hi all, Our website ranking for mail keywords is inversely proportional in the 2 countries (US and India). I mean...if the ranking is improved in one country, it drops in other country and vice versa. The graph looks like exactly something triggered and making this happen at Google. I wonder what might be reasons for this? We have been facing this for more than a year and made number of on-site changes, so I presume if it's something to do with backlinks. Any clue or thoughts on this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
How important is Social Media for building domain authority / Google rankings? Are there any cases?
I really would like to know if someone tested the importance of Social Media for Google rankings.
Algorithm Updates | | Seeders
Are there some sites who build authority only by doing good social media?
Ofcourse, I know it is all about the mix (content, linkbuilding, social media, etc.) but how important is it?
I know many sites who rank good without any form of social media, but I do not know any sites who do only social media and rank high. I hope there are some good cases which give good insight. ps. I know it becomes more and more important...0 -
Google Rankings Dropped in Past Few Weeks
Hi All, I work for an online appliance retailer and over the past weeks, we've seen a drop in our google SERPs. This time last year we were ranking in the top 3 for our top converting key terms, but now we are ranking towards the bottom of the first page or even on the top of the second page with the big box stores now dominating for our key terms. Needless to say traffic for these pages has dropped off considerably. We still have quite a bit of traffic coming in for other key terms, but they don't convert as well. Is anyone else seeing the same thing? If so what are you doing to combat this? Do you have any suggestions? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | airnwater0 -
Why is site dropping in rank after we update it?
One of our sites - supereyes.com - appears to drop in rank after we update it. The client notified us of this today and I've verified that it did indeed drop in Google -- four spots since last week. He says this happens every time we make changes to the site, but then a week later it will go back up and is usually higher than where it was before. I have not verified this, but I'm very worried it may not rise again In the past week, we've posted a new blog entry to their site and we've changed some of the content -- specifically, added their locations to the header, added a contact page and put two testimonials in their sidebar. We've also had someone submitting their site to directories and local business sites like Angie's List and so forth. There are about 16 new backlinks established in the past 2-3 weeks. Also, I should note, traffic is higher than it's ever been, but the client doesn't look at traffic. They only look at their Google results. Can anyone offer any insight into what's going on here and if I need to be worried the site won't rise again in the rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | aloley0 -
SERP Rankings: Breadcrumb appears near URL
Hi mozzers, I was checking at the "carpet cleaning" kw national search and an usual result appeared(image attached): -Title Tag -Url + Breadcrumbs following The Breadcrumb showing up near the url is the first time I see that happening! Anyone has an idea why? Do you think it is a Google new trick or do you guys think it is the webmaster who added a hack to it? Thanks for letting me know Tf52L.png
Algorithm Updates | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
6 year old Corporate domain lost all rankings on EMD day.
Hello, our company's website goo.gl/7Q56G lost all our rankings after the EMD algo update. Our domain is NOT a EMD. At the same time, I found that we have about 6000 new, extremely low quality spam backlinks with the same anchor text ("loan"). I saw some of those a few weeks ago, but didn't really pay much attention because I didn't believe Google would think we build those. I didn't get any messages on webmaster central. If this occurred with the EMD update, is it because of the low quality backlinks? Most of the real spammers, brokers (we are the actual funding source) are now dominating the top 10 for our main keyword "merchant cash advance". We were in the top 10 for the past 4 years, why would we get hit so hard now? I really appreciate your advice.
Algorithm Updates | | DaveMri1