Lost ranking and can't figure out why
-
My page http://www.drschulmanplasticsurgery.com/body/buttock-lift-augmentation-new-york-city/ recently moved from first page to past the 15th. I was never penalized on the last update and have very few links pointing to this page. I can't figure out why i just moved so far back. Can anyone offer some advice?
-
From my experience with this latest update (not even 24 hours old, mind you) it seems to be more of the latter than the former. I'm seeing sites that had a mix of good/poison links sit around the same placement while sites with nothing but spam links dropped off the face of the earth.
Again though, this is early and one teeny tiny little example out of the billions of pages out there.
-
Tom,
Most of the links are from his internal blog. They are adding in the catagory pages and tag pages which i have set to not index in my seo plugin. There are only a few external links from sites that are general health blogs that have good page authority. The anchor text for those has been different every time. Is there a different tool you are using to see backlinks. I am using open explorer her on seomoz.org.
-
Tom, would you state that Google takes the spammy links into account and devalues website rankings which have good links with them as well, or is it simply Google removing those spammy link domains as any relevant source of link importance and thus making the websites loose rankings just for the simple fact these domains hold no real value with Google now? Thanks!
-
Hey there
As you'll probably be aware, we have just had the latest Penguin algorithm update, aimed at devaluing low quality and manipulative links.
Of the links pointing to your page, I'd say that probably all of them look manipulative and look to have been built for a search engine.
The sites in question look like link farms - a blog network that links out to a number of unrelated health niche websites (and some random ones). There's very little value on show for a user, each article looks placed to provide an optimised anchor text backlink to a number of websites.
In addition, each domain looks like it has once expired and been bought up someone and turned into a blog network, probably on the premise that the domains were old and carried PR, DA and PA, so would pass decent link equity. The anchor text pointing to your website all look targeted as well.
Basically, nearly every link to that page looks artificial, placed for a search engine and intended to pass PageRank, without offering anything for a user. It's exactly the sort of link that this Penguin update would try and target, so it's no great surprise to me that you have lost your rankings.
My advice would be try and get the links removed ASAP. Last resort would be to use the disavow tool. You may need to wait until the next algorithm refresh to see the effect of removing/disavowing the links take place - the last time Penguin refreshed was 6 months ago prior to yesterday, so we can only hope the new version will refresh monthly.
In the mean time, I would concentrate on earning links by offering quality content, resources or guides to your users. Contact webmasters and bloggers in your field that could benefit from your expertise, or alternatively promote the content on your own blog and use marketing, PR and social media to attract attention to it.
Hope this helps.
-
Simple answer (which you wont like) is that nobody has a good idea why it happens. I had a site where no links were created drop significantly in rankings. Why? Have no real idea. Content is good, your social media signals are good, wait a few days and check it out then.
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
-
How to use Google search console's 'Name change' tool?
Hi There, I'm having trouble performing a 'Name change' for a new website (rebrand and domain change) in Google Search console. Because the 301 redirects are in place (a requirement of the name change tool), Google can no longer verify the site, which means I can't complete the name change? To me, step two (301 redirect) conflicts with step there (site verification) - or is there a way to perform a 301 redirect and have the tool verify the old site? Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated. Cheers Ben
Technical SEO | | cmscss0 -
Unknown Subdomains Ranking
In spot checking some pages that I recently launched, I found subdomains ranking in place of the domain. The strange thing is, we never set up these sub-domains and they don't exist on our server. The pages, though they're indexed with the proper title and meta-description, time out when clicked. We're operating on Drupal 7, pages launched at the beginning of the month. The other pages within the series of content are ranking properly. Any thoughts or tips to resolve this?
Technical SEO | | JordanNCU1 -
Using Wix and the keyword grader tool isn't working.
After reading other posts about Wix and SEO I think I need to change the web design provider to something I have more control of SEO options. Does anyone have any suggestions of something I can use?
Technical SEO | | benjacksoncook0 -
Help!!! Website won't index after taking it over from another IT Company
Hi, A while back we took over a website that was built in Wordpress. We rebuilt it on another platform and switched the servers over whilst retaining the same domain.I had access to the old GA Account however so did the old IT company. Therefore I created a new GA account and used that in the new website pages.Recently we found the website had been blacklisted (previous to us taking it over) and now after being crawled a lot, only 2 pages have been indexed (over a 2month period).We have submitted a request for revision (to relist the website) buthave had no movement.**Just wondering if having a old, active account that was still linked to their old website would affect our Google listing?****Will dropping the old GA Tracking code/script into the site and deleting the new account enable Google to index?**Also, there is ample content, metadata and descriptions on the site.I welcome any help on this please!
Technical SEO | | nimblerdigital0 -
Can Google move up my ranking without caching it ?
Is it possible that my site was last cached in Google on 9 Oct (it was ranking 23 that time) and today on 29th oct its ranking position 3 for a kw though still showing cached on 9 oct. Its not cached since 9 oct, does that mean its not crawled since then? How can Google move up my ranking without caching it ?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
My webmaster doesn't shows backlinks data why???
Hi every one I have 2 websites with same domain with targeting different country name for example www.domain.com.au and the other is wwww.domain.co.nz . So my question is that in webmaster tool my one domain doesn't shows back links data or search query data. why this is happen?
Technical SEO | | SanketPatel0 -
When I look in OpenSiteExplorer, it says that it hasn't followed any of my internal links... WTF?
When I look at my site in open site explorer, it says it has followed 1 internal link.. I know that opensiteexplorer has updated, because my domain rank has changed since the last time i looked. I figured it just hadn't fully crawled and indexed my links, but considering I have had an account here for over a month, and the site is over 7 months old, I doubt that is the case. My site is www.ontracparts.com can anybody help me here?? Thanks, Tyler
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860