Why did I fall off the SERP for my url query? Im i being penalized?
-
The website is privateequityfirms.com, We would rank as high as 4th behind wikipedia from the query "private equity firms" but recently dropped to 77th for no reason. All my other keywords seem to no affected? whats going on, Im i being penalized?
I attached GWT search query info
Thanks,
-
I cant pinpoint the date but it has been in the last 3-4 weeks. We have never purchased links in the past. As for the Panda algorithm we were ranking as high as third for the term with all those slim content pages so i dont think that is it, but ill look more into it. We have two versions of the site, a paid and example. So it shows 2x the pages when a site: search is done, the HTTP and the HTTPS. That is something we are working on fixing.
Thanks for you help and if you have any other idea what could be causing this please share.
I also added another picture showing the drop, maybe its more helpful
-
Hey,
First off thanks for the response, We recently added a sitemap to the site. It is an online database so its a custom site map that changes constantly and Yes im seeing a drop on yahoo and Bing. I do not have any messages in GWT. I don't believe we have both, but like I said before it was ranking around 4th before the drastic drop.
I also added another picture showing the drop.
Thanks again for the help.
-
Can you pinpoint when the drop happened?
Have you purchased links in the past? A number of link networks have been deindexed lately.
It's possible that you could have issues with the Panda algorithm, although don't take this info to the bank as I have only spent about 10 minutes or so looking at your site. When I did a site: search I see that Google has over 94,000 pages of your site indexed. The majority of them have what could be called thin content. I see a lot of definition pages that contain one or two lines of text and also company portfolio pages like this one (http://privateequityfirms.com/portfolio-company/Captain+Tortue+Group) that don't really contain much info. Having tens of thousands of pages in the index that don't offer significant value to readers can be a sign of low quality and can cause the Panda algorithm to look unfavorably on the entire site.
If this is the case, then the answer could be to noindex all of the definition and portfolio pages.
-
Have you made any changes to your site recently that might have affected this? Perhaps put a robots.txt file or robots meta tag in that blocked the page that was ranking for this term? Have you seen traffic for this term drop in Bing and Yahoo at all? Do you have any messages at all in GWT?
Do you have both www and non-www verified in GWT? Maybe the non-www is ranking for this term, and you've only verified the www, which isn't ranking?
-
Hey,
I fixed the image and no i did not receive a manual penalty.
Thanks!
-
Can't see the image.
Please use imgurl as suggested by Moz.
Did you receive any manual penalty? (check in GWT).
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 should you determine the preferred URL structure?
Hi Guys, When migrating to a new CMS which include new pages how should you determine the URL structure, specifically: So should we include www. or without it? Should the URL have a trailing slash? How would you determine the answer to these questions? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Status Codes - Deleted URLs
Hi I have a dev team 'cleaning' their database and from what I can tell deleting old URL's - which they say are not in use. I don't have much visibility on how our URLs are managed in the back end of the site, but my concern is these URLs should never be deleted, they should have a 301, 404 or 410. This includes product pages no longer available and category pages - my concern is losing authority. Am I worrying over nothing or is this a big issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
Website (.BE) showing up in .NL SERPS
Fellow mozzers, we need your help We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country: flowtracksurf.be → Belgium flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL. Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobe
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be. .BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering. Data shows us that .NL : In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA) In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools) We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks) When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on? On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be. Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?0 -
What are partial urls and why this is causing a sitemap error?
Hi mozzers, I have a client that recorded 7 errors when generating Xml sitemap. One of the errors appear to be coming from partial urls and apparently I would need to exclude them from sitemap. What are they exactly and why would they cause an error in the sitemap. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes
Hi, Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes We identifies 500+ titles with some issues like spellings and punctuations and short or too long. We want to change them, but the titles are connected with the URL's when we change the titles the URl's change as well. My questions are 1. Is it a good way to change them all in one shot or do few daily 2. As the URl's change will Google index drop the old pages as they would be 404 and index new ones? 3. Will we have chances to have drop in traffic due to this? 4. Any way to redirect? as we have a Drupal website Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Duplicate page content query
Hi forum, For some reason I have recently received a large increase in my Duplicate Page Content issues. Currently it says I have over 7,000 duplicate page content errors! For example it says: Sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Content http://dikelli.com.au/accessories/gowns/news.html http://dikelli.com.au/accessories/news.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sterls
http://dikelli.com.au/gallery/dikelli/gowns/gowns/sale_gowns.html However there are no physical links to any of these page on my site and even when I look at my FTP files (I am using Dreamweaver) these directories and files do not exist. Can anyone please tell me why the SEOMOZ crawl is coming up with these errors and how to solve them?0 -
Long URL with QueryStrings
Hi, I have a search page that generates some querystrings (with the term, current page, number of pages etc). This long url is something bad for Google indexing? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GDB0