Drop in non-branded organic search April 1
-
I saw an intense drop in non-branded organic search for major pages on my site on April 1st this year. The homepage wasn't affected and it's not an annual thing. I've attached a screen shot showing the drop.
I'm new to the company and recently learned that they had hired a pretty black hat company last year and I'm worried that this is Panda...although the timing seems wrong. Has anyone experienced panda effects between the two updates?
I'd love to get some feedback!!
-
What happens when you look at non-branded organic search by engine? I want to make sure that we're talking about a Google dropoff here, and not that suddenly you've been de-indexed from Yahoo and Bing and we're looking at the wrong issues.
Were there any code changes to your site recently where something might have gone wrong?
Did you run Adwords or some other type of paid search advertising that wasn't correctly tagged (thus showing up as organic) that ended and is now showing a huge drop?
-
I can't explain the reason for the drop, but if you want to get it back up you need to get some more links for the individual pages. You've got some great links into the domain, plenty of domain trust and authority, but the pages themselves such as /teach don't fair so well. This means they'll get passed link juice internally but they certainly do do with more external links coming in, and with keyworded anchor text at that (though don't over-do it and make it look unnatural):
Currently, for that page you have: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ciee.org%252Fteach%252F/a!anchors
It would be well worth you changing the anchor text on internal links too. i.e. at the moment, it's just "learn more" from the main link on the homepage.
I'd use the campaign tool on here and run a crawl test too, whilst the site looks great... it seems problematic in many ways (gut feel from a brief look), I wouldn't be surprised if you got a lot of crawl errors back in the report.
Maybe take a look at Rand's stuff on keyword cannibalization too, your page titles have many similar keywords in. i.e. "Teaching English Overseas" on pretty much every title for each country. Whilst there are different keywords in the titles too, I don't think this would help... maybe "Teaching English in <country>" would be a better option.</country>
-
ciee.org. ciee.org/teach was affected the worst, but also was .org/study, /highschool, etc.
-
What's the URL?
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
-
My Brand new website shows 79% spam Score, what is the reason and how should I deal with this?
Hi, I have just launched my website 1 month before and I have used all paid images, Uniquely written contents, Everything is genuine for better SEO experience in the future. The actual problem is its showing spam by 79% in MOZ bar, I don't have a single link on my website also my content is unique, Images are unique. Why its showing so much spam on this brand new website? Can you please help me? I am very stressed due to this problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rahat640 -
HOW!??! Homepage Ranking Dropped Completely out of Top 100 on Google....
So I'm competing for a very competitive keyword, and I've been on the bottom of page 2 for a while now, ranking for my homepage, which is very content rich and has GREAT links pointing to it. Out of nowhere, last week I dropped completely out of the top 100 or so, yet one of my article posts now ranks on page 6 or so for the same keyword. I have great authoritative links, my on-page is spot on, all of my articles are super super high quality, I don't understand how my homepage, which has ranked for the main keyword for months on page 2, can just completely drop out of the top 100 or so.... Can anyone help provide some insight?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
1 business targetting multiple local locations
When researching a new client - I just came across a site in the same field which is ranking really well for all the local towns/cities/villages in the area. Each page for each town is a duplicate only changing out the town name (which appears 13 times on the page) - all pics and videos are the same. His url structure is along the lines of: budget-business-domain.com/budget-business-area/budget-business-town/ The domain was registered in 2012 - all backlinks are internal - anchor text is the same. I think it shouldn't be working.... but it is 😞 Why is this working?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | agua0 -
Big Brands Still Paying For Links!
We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Why is the rankings for certain targeted keywords dropping sharply in the past few weeks?
Excuse me here I can't reveal the website url here due to the confidentiality. Background: This website has about 100+pages, and is a wordpress site. Out of 15 targeted keywords, there are few ranked first on Google.co.uk. others are ranked between 3rd and 50+. In the past couple of weeks, we have been submitting to various websites/directories. and 4 main keywords' rankings are improving steadily from 50+ to 20+. We don't buy links, or pay for link exhcanges. We only exchange links on rare occasions. Symptoms: 1. 2 out of 4 main keywords dropped its rankings from 20+ to 80+ 4 weeks ago over night. 2. We kept on acquiring links from directories and websites, and 2 weeks after the drop, the rankings of 2 affected keywords had gradually made its way back to 20-30. Just we thought the glitch was over, these 2 keywords has dropped rankings to 50+ once again. 3. The change of rankings looks too suspicious to us, so we went to use the Moz tool, and discovered the domain authority has also dropped 25% of its value in a month time. We never experienced such violent changes in terms of rankings in such a short period of time. My question is: what factors there are to have caused such violent shifts? Why the value of the domain authority is dropped by 25%-30%? What elements affect the domain authority the most?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robotseo0