Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Recent Algo Change
-
I was wondering if anybody can shed some light on any recent changes to the Google algorithm in Australia. A competitor, www.manwithavan.com.au has always been number 1 for the most competitive search term in our industry "removalists melbourne". However, in the last week, they have fallen out of the the SERPS and are now (according to MOZ) ranking outside the top 50.
As far as l can tell, they have a really well optimized site with good structure, great text and updated content. They are very active within social media circles and have some really good external links.
Can anybody tell me why they would have been hit so badly. The reason l ask is that i want to make sure we don't make the same mistake.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
-
Elementary, my dear Mosley.
-
Good work Holmes
-
Checking Ahrefs it is clear they have been hit by a penalty. They have over 700 exact match anchors for "man with a van" for example from just 30 domains, which makes up 67% of their backlinks!
-
Hi Robert
According to Algaroo, a tool that tracks the level of volatility in Google AU, there doesn't look to be anything out of the ordinary in the last few days.
I jumped into MajesticSEO to have a look at their backlinks, and what struck me was that out of their top 50 links (according to Majestic), around 20 of them have been deleted on the 21st and 22nd of September.
I'm also looking at their links on a whole - there are a lot of blogroll links, which looks quite unnatural, plus a number of directory links (which aren't necessarily bad but may have been devalued). A number of these blogrolls were site wide, so the deleted ones will have resulted in a very sharp fall in the number of links.
I can only speculate as to why those links were removed - whether prompted by Google or not - but it's clear that either removing them has caused the drop, or they have been prompted to remove them by Google after finding out about their link scheme (if it was one). Similarly the massive amount of directory links could be the cause - not because they're penalised, but because they have been devalued.
Hope that helps.
-
Are they in the SERPs what so ever? They may have been hit by panda or penguin, how about any of the other rankings have they changed ? Have you checked outside of Moz to confirm ?
If you go by the webmaster guidelines you can't go far wrong.
It could be they were up to some shady practices and got penalized for as such.
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
-
Changing Url Removes Backlink
Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson210 -
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Changing domain for a magento store
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please... We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results. While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain. My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that? Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too? As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site. Thanks, Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting
I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows: mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets mysite.com/directory/widgets-services The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides" In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it: mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those. I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course. My question is: Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting? Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Changing Server IP Addresses. Should I be concerned?
Hello Mozers Our site has been on a dedicated server for about four years now. (no other sites, just ours on the server) I have made the decision to move it to a much better and faster server than the current server we are on for more than one reason. My big fear is Google will lose trust for my site because of the IP change. Ip's stay with the server at 1and1 they do not follow the website. So, I have done my due diligence and copied over all code and databases and have tested it completely to insure there are no issues when I change the DNS to point to the new server. Made sure 1and1 is giving me an IP that has never been used, I am Keeping the old server on until cached DNS records expire for it. Is there anything else I need to do to make sure I do not lose current rankings in Google? I have heard nightmare stories about making these kinds of changes but at this point for our site there is no turning back this is a change that must take place. Any pointers and advice would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbie82991