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
-
Google Only Indexing Canonical Root URL Instead of Specified URL Parameters
We just launched a website about 1 month ago and noticed that Google was indexing, but not displaying, URLs with "?location=" parameters such as: http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=great-falls-virginia and http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=mclean-virginia. Instead, Google has only been displaying our root URL http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/ in its search results -- which we don't want as the URLs with specific locations are more important and each has its own unique list of houses for sale. We have Yoast setup with all of these ?location values added in our sitemap that has successfully been submitted to Google's Sitemaps: http://www.castlemap.com/buy-location-sitemap.xml I also tried going into the old Google Search Console and setting the "location" URL Parameter to Crawl Every URL with the Specifies Effect enabled... and I even see the two URLs I mentioned above in Google's list of Parameter Samples... but the pages are still not being added to Google. Even after Requesting Indexing again after making all of these changes a few days ago, these URLs are still displaying as Allowing Indexing, but Not On Google in the Search Console and not showing up on Google when I manually search for the entire URL. Why are these pages not showing up on Google and how can we get them to display? Only solution I can think of would be to set our main /local-house-values/ page to noindex in order to have Google favor all of our other URL parameter versions... but I'm guessing that's probably not a good solution for multiple reasons.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nitruc0 -
Should you shorten very long URLs?
Hi Moz Community! If the nav architecture URL is long, like this: https://www.savewildlife.org/wildlife-conservtion/endangered-species-act-protections/endangered-species-list/birds/mexican-spotted-owl can I and should I shorten that new destination URL to make it easy for Google to see that the page topic is really the owl, like this: https://savewildlife.org/endangered-species-list/mexican-spotted-owl Thank you! Jane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalamityJane771 -
URL structure - which one is better?
We are creating a new website and got stuck while deciding the URL structure. Our concern is which url is better in terms of SEO i.e. pune.fabogo.com/spa or fabogo.com/pune/spa and why. Also which one would rank faster if someone searches for **spas in pune if both **pages are same.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabogo_marketing0 -
My SERP Rankings are unbelievably inconsistent, how is it possible
Almost all of the keywords i track in moz's keywords ranking report show insane inconsistency. nearly all my keywords (according to moz's rank tracker history) were in the first or second rank for a week or 2 during the last 6 month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | datawork
nearly all my keywords were nowhere in the top 5 pages in the weeks prior or after the week that the keyword was ranked at the top of the first page. I'm adding a image of an excel chart showing the ranking - each row is a different keyword, each column is a different date. 51 means 51+ (or - nowhere to be found in the first top pages) Could you please help me make sense out of this? How can it change so frantically? Thanks, eZDVEEW.png0 -
Ecommerce - Go to Basket 302 query
Hi I have done a site crawl and there are a lot of 302's on the 'Go to Basket' link when customers go through to pay. Should these be updated to 301's? On just the first part of the link so nothing after the ? /OrderCalculation? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Serps drop on 21st
Hi, This is my website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 Earlier i used to be on #1 and #3 page results for most of my results. But after 21st dec, my results went to 10th and 13th page of results. Is it due to latest panda update? http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-16121.html If so, can you guys examine my website and provide me your suggestions please... PS: i have followed only genuine kinda link buildings, my content is 100% unique. Will be waiting for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0 -
Wrong Page Indexing in SERPS - Suggestions?
Hey Moz'ers! I have a quick question. Our company (Savvy Panda) is working on ranking for the keyword: "Milwaukee SEO". On our website, we have a page for "Milwaukee SEO" in our services section that's optimized for the keyword and we've been doing link building to this. However, when you search for "Milwaukee SEO" a different page is being displayed in the SERP's. The page that's showing up in the SERP's is a category view of our blog of articles with the tag "Milwaukee SEO". **Is there a way to alert google that the page showing up in the SERP's is not the most relevant and request a new URL to be indexed for that spot? ** I saw a webinar awhile back that showed something like that using google webmaster sitelinks denote tool. I would hate to denote that URL and then loose any kind of indexing for the keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SavvyPanda
Ideas, suggestions?0 -
New AddThis URL Sharing
So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser. It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment. But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link. What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BedeFahey0