Weird SERPS
-
Hello mozerz, I have a question regarding my SERPS that I just can't figure out, maybe one of you had this problem before or has encounter a similar problem.
So I have a website on Scotland, and I have a page for each major city so the structure is scotland/city/glasgow or scotland/city/edinburgh or scotland/city/aberdeen.
Now every city page is w3 validated, page speed validated, has around 1000 words of text, all with h1, h2, image alt, nice title and nice description, all have grade A on moz campaign, original content, all with canonical links, no ads or spammy links.
The title , description, h1, h2 and img alt are the same only replaced Aberdeen with Edinburgh or Glasgow. or so on ... so all pages are identically just replaced the city word.
In terms of link building I have done none ! and in terms of promotion I have done none... so theres no scenario where by I have done something more for one city then the other
Now my problem is that all cities are doing well in SERPS, only Glasgow has come up till 14 position and then has dropped suddenly to 74, and remained there for 2 weeks now. I know this sounds like a penalty, but it can't be because I haven't done anything, I've tried all the tools possible to analyze the Glasgow page, though that it was a code problem or a broken link or that google-bot doesn't get up to this page to crawl it and classify it, but all is fine.
Can anyone suggest anything that I might do. I'm 100% sure that I have no penalty, I've checked even the webmaster tools, open site explorer to see if anyone tried to link to my site with spammy links ( has happened before, I had about 1000 links about viagra from a competitor pointing to my site ) .
-
And in terms of Links I would just let them came naturally, I will establish collaboration and if anyone links to my site or my content I will know that came absolutely natural a i will not have any problems with penguin or any update that Google will produce in the future. Actually I had one link to my homepage, which I got from a charity that I've contacted and ask them if I can support them by adding some info about them on my site, in return and without asking they added a link to my site
-
Well yes I have my social accounts , and i have about 30 followers, about 250 on Google + and 40 on facebook, i builde engagement, had them to answer some polls, they even had some of my blogs shared and liked .. so I'm doing well in there, and I do focus on my brand, eventually they will all direct link my site and not google search for it
-
yes sorry forgot to mention, of course I checked the competition, and actually Glasgow is a lot easier then Edinburgh, and as mentioned, I just know I should rank somewhere between 10-20 on Google without any links, because the other Serps are just horrible, I mean the first 3 sites on Glasgow, do banner exchange and spammy comment links :), and they don't even have social accounts ...
And about the serps, yes my snipped is showing as it should, keyword Glasgow | brand name ,
I have the keyword included once in the description also, once in the h1 and h2 and 3 times in the body with different forms, all should be good ...
-
Ah huh, I misunderstood. If the content is good and unique, and the only duplication is as you describe then it wouldn't seem to be a duplication issue. However, it's not unusual to see such drastic changes in ranking from time to time and that page could pop back up to its previous position at any time.
When you say you haven't done any link building, does that mean you don't have any natural back links either? If that's the case I'd recommend you do some work to build your authority.
-
Ive had experienced that multiple times with clients lol
- First thing I would do is check the competition. IF it's harder than the rest of the other cities/localities. Some cities have specific keywords that work better, too. Local is very easy to spam so there might be some competitors that are battling it out there. You might just be collateral damage from the recent updates to local.
- The next thing i would look at is how search results show. Is google showing you different serp results vs the other cities? Google might show more images/carousels or whatever for that city vs the others. Google is crazy like that.
- Links. Start building links (just a few of them will do) to test and see if you improve within the next week. If you do, then you need to start bothering yourself with competition + link building for that lol
Those are the basic things that id do first, assuming, like what you said, that everything on-page related and technical side are ok.
-
Thanks Chris , as I said, all pages have unique content ( text, photos, etc.. ), just the meta title -> meta description h1, h2 and img alt are the same only with the city keyword replaced
example : i' trying to rank for keywords glasgow and keywords edinburgh, all pages have the title keywords glasgow | brand name or keywords edinburgh | brand name and so on ..
It's a common practice, I have around 300 pages that are for different cities just imagine having to manually type every piece of info there :)) that's why we have the php script that auto generates this.
-
I might see that as a portent of things to come for your other pages. I mean, from what you describe, none of those pages should be ranking due to either thin and/or duplicate content--Panda type stuff. Sorry to say, there's really no reason for you to believe your rankings for the other pages will hold up unless you get original content on those pages.
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
-
Ranking in .com .fr .de but not in my target .cz serp?
Hello, our website is targeted for the Czech Republic. When I monitor our rankings, we have very high rankings in all of the other SERPs like .com and .fr .de but we are in the very end of CZ serp. Not CZ is the only SERP where we have two languages (Czech which is on subdomain cs.domain.com and domain.com which is for english). Now i am concerned about the example.com. Why is it not ranking at all (very low in czech serp like 130 vs 10-15 in other serps) We have used href lang tags to specify the language I think Can it be because of my cs. domain is optimized for a keyword which is not the example.com keyword ? (I think this is not the reason) - my example.com domain optimization is for "Kids clothes in Czech Republic" but cs domain for "Used clothes in Czech Republic" is it a linking issue? Should I have more local Czech links? Im out of ideas.
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Google SERPs Show Different Title
Hi Guys, Can anyone please help with my situation. My domain is www.greedybins.com.au. I had title setup in every pages differently, and it has been 2 months since I made the changes. I keep checking by using site:www.greedybins.com.au in search. So far, only 1 title that been show correctly in SERPs. I used SEO Yoast before, I changed to All In One SEO Pack plugin, the titles are changing, but still not accurate as I made it. Somehow Google altered it by itself. I have tried fetch and submit sitemap couple times from Google Search Console. Could anyone please advise?
Technical SEO | | ray.soms0 -
So weird sudden drop in rankings
Hi All, ok so at the beginning of July we launched our new website, SEVEN weeks later we have dropped completly off all rankings what-so-ever, (except brand) but weirdly if i pan between browsers we dont use (for saved searches/cookies etc) sometimes the rankings show up where they used to be. Whats strange is we get crawled daily but it took seven weeks for our rankings to drop, ive done all testing i can - no manual actions, no updates when we dropped (15th Aug) no real differences in webmaster tools, no crawl errors, no massive rise in 404s, 500s etc etc, im really a bit stumped! Any help would be mucho appreciated in diagnosing this stumper!
Technical SEO | | Kennelstore0 -
/home-2 showing in SERPS but not the homepage
I'm in the process of having a site built using WP as the cms, and keeping SEO in mind while it's being produced. Because I'm experimenting with title/meta desc I'm checking rankings each day on whatsmyserp dot com. During development I noticed one day the ranking for websitename.com had disappeared and websitename.com/home-2 was ranking. I went into pages of the wp account and deleted the 2nd homepage that had been created for some reason, and that was over half a week ago now. /home-2 is still ranking even though it's non-existent and the actual homepage url isn't ranking at all. Any suggestions on what I should do/why this is happening? Thanks for any help
Technical SEO | | xcyte0 -
Sudden 50% drop in SERP rankings
Hi, Our website is well established and has been growing every month until around Jan. 6th 2013. All of sudden our search rankings on Google dropped dramatically (nearly 50%). We getting tens of thousands fewer visitors through search results than normal. At the same time as the drop (almost to the day) we changed our forum software from Vbulletin3 to Vbulletin4. The forums are on a different subdomain, and our forum developer said there is no way the change would affect the main site. Is that true? So far, we have not been able to figure out what caused the sudden change. Maybe a Google update?
Technical SEO | | AVman0 -
Site blocked by robots.txt and 301 redirected still in SERPs
I have a vanity URL domain that 301 redirects to my main site. That domain does have a robots.txt to disallow the entire site as well. However, for a branded enough search that vanity domain still shows up in SERPs and has the new Google message of: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt I get why the message is there - that's not my , my question is shouldn't a 301 redirect trump this domain showing in SERPs, ever? Client isn't happy about it showing at all. How can I get the vanity domain out of the SERPs? THANKS in advance!
Technical SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Have my SERP listings been hacked?
When you Google my site the organic search results look normal. The preview site images even display my actual site when you roll over the results. However, when you click a result you are directed to various Spam pages, not my website. How is this possible? This only happens when you click through from search engines. If you type the URL directly in your browser, you are not redirected to a spam site. the site: funeralhomeoptions.com Have any of you seen or experienced this before?
Technical SEO | | emmyjo0 -
Max number of results from domain on a SERP
I have read in many places that the maximum number of results that will be displayed on the SERP from a domain or subdomain is 2. Is this still the case? I have seen many instances where there are well more than 2 results from a domain displaying on the SERP. For example, search 'cvs pharmacy' on Google. There are 7 results from the cvs.com domain. Is it the case that the search engines will display more if it's a branded search?
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0