Ranking dropped with no page changes
-
My rank for a keyword went from ranking #1 to #22. The page grade for this keyword is A, there was no site structure changes. The only thing I can see is that tumblr and reddit and other sources are now listed for this keyword and it's difficulty went from the mid-low teens to 28%. However, even given that, I do not a see a reason for this keyword alone to fall so far. It was giving us a ton of traffic, in fact, most of our organic search results came from this term for nearly two months. And 2 weeks ago for no reason, we were pushed to page 3. Has anyone else had similar experiences how do you counter it, and what can we do?
-
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
That'll help you with page load times.
-
I am just telling you that I think Anthony's answer is one of the best ones out there.
Load time matters a lot you should look into what your visitors are seen by using RUM speed testing you can see exactly what any visitor had to deal with speed wise for free up to 20,000 hits a month
remember to add the RUM code to your site if you want to measure this.
that data can tell you if you need to switch hosting companies optimize your website code or if you're having no trouble at all.
Social signals from Google + tend to be more powerful than those from twitter and Facebook however definitely do not leave out twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn for that matter. All social traffic is a positive.
Have a good strong look at your analytics using a product like kiss metrics or mixed panel ( kiss metrics & mix panel is able to do track individuals) mixed panel has a free tier
looking at where people click on your website when it's visiting is extremely valuable. Crazy Egg is a fantastic tool to find out whether or not for UX for site layout is what's best for the visitor you can then use A/B testing with a tool like
Visual Website Optimizer to find the perfect layout to have your customers convert or sign-up do it ever does he want them to do.
You can save money on these tools using http://moz.com/perks
I hope this helps,
Thomas
-
This type of fluctuation occurs all the time. Google results don't stay static for long.
How do you get back on top?
-
Make sure your website is the best page on the web for that query. Truly think about how can you make it better for your users, not the search engine? Does it need to be updated regularly? Do visitors to your page show good engagement - can you improve it? Can you get your site to load faster?
-
Get positive signals pointing to your page. External links being the most important, social signals won't hurt.
-
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
-
Safari and IE killing our mobile ranking
My client's website does fairly well on mobile in a Google Search. So one day, my client is in a staff meeting and everyone does on search on their phones. The client’s website is nowhere on the 1st three pages. I get a call asking why. I tell the client that Google has maybe as high as 90% market share on mobile. Of course, their phones have the factory installed Safari and IE. Client says lots of people don’t change the factory settings on mobile . Question: How do we rate higher on lesser search engines?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
Big ranking drop after 12/Jan/2017
Hello, moz users. Has anyone confirmed that keyword ranking dropped since last few days? I've tracked several keyword ranking by Moz and SEMrush and the ranking dropped big time on both tools today. one of the keywords dropped its ranking from 10 to out of SERP. Mozcast has shown high temperature so I assume there is or has been algo update but I would like to know someone encountered the same issue. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Yuki-hero0 -
Can you rank without spending lots of money?
Hello Everyone, This is a general question, and its one I have been thinking about recently because I am working on promoting couple of websites. I want to know if it is still possible to make websites rank consistently without spending lots of money. I am self employed, and 5 or so years ago, I remember I did all my own link building/content for about 6 or so websites that I owned, and I managed to make most of them rank consistently. I am not in the SEO business, and I have not touched any SEO type of work for about 5 years now. And I always did it for my own websites/business. I know this is a fast moving industry, and my general knowledge may be a bit out of date. I kind of get the feeling that the days of when small business owners could make a website rank on a shoe string budget and make a bit of money with an online business may have died or is dying. I am a realist and I know that only a very tiny percentage of websites make really good quality/fresh content that everyone wants to reads. I know a common advise is that you should create a site with such amazing content that everyone talks about you and mentions/links to you without you even to need to do any link building. But in my opinion (I could be wrong), but I feel that this probably happens to less than 0.01 percent of websites. And I also know even third rate websites with blogs or content sites charge to post an article with a link. So this makes me think that nowadays you need a good budget and plenty of time to make a website rank. Am I wrong? In today's internet, do you need to spend money to rank? I genuinely want to know peoples experience and or opinion on this subject. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Ryan.Shahed0 -
Rankings Change
Hi I've noticed some ranking drops on 15th Jan, I saw there was an update on Jan 8th - could this have had a knock on effect a week later?
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Ahrefs - What Causes a Drastic Loss in Referring Pages?
While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs. I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though. Any thoughts on why this might happen? 56VD5jD
Algorithm Updates | | AaronHenry0 -
Recent Rank drop after Penguin 2.1?
Recently, a lot of pages from our website have moved from page one or ranking number one, to page ten or something. We got a manual penalty message from Google Team, we removed a lot of unnatural links pointing to our pages and disavowed the rest. This got the penalty removed and we got a message from Google confirming the same. Before the manual penalty we were getting about 140,000 visits per day, after the penalty about 80,000. However, after Hummingbird or Penguin 2.1 all our ranks have vanished. We are nowhere in Google for our primary keywords and we getting like 40,000 visits per day. Most are direct or from sources other than Google. We had another look at the links we disavowed, a list of about 11000 domains, we found about 3000 domains to be good. We fixed the disavow file about one week back, but no changes in traffic since. We checking the domains again to see if we have missed more good domains in there; yes, we have. There are still a very few good domains in there. But we are not touching the disavow list; waiting to see the change for the last submitted. We have a dedicated user base, good liking on Facebook, all the stats in Analytics speak good, about 40% repeat visits about 30% direct. About 3000 people search for the site using our brand name as reported in Analytics. I doubt the on-page optimization, the pages could be over-optimized. But the on-page factors for other pages ranking for the keywords are similar. The keyword density is similar, so are the usage of headings and stuff. We have not made any recent changes to these on-page patterns. Our team is not able to figure out what could have gone wrong.
Algorithm Updates | | Develop410 -
Sudden Page Rank Drop for Weight Loss Camp
My site BalanceME.com has been performing really well and continually climbs more and more but in the last 7 days we have had a drop this last week. We went from #2 for weight loss camp to #6, and even further on other terms. It is mid May and I cannot find any other explanation for the sudden drop. I am hoping someone could give me some sort if idea what could possibly be the answer. Recently we have had two press releases go out, target for keywords, and also installed images that navigate to new pages on the site. There have been few additions to the site, and nothing can explain the drop. Other companies in our group have not had issues with recent drops, and we use the same practices with the other organizations. Thank you for your time
Algorithm Updates | | FVdBeuken0 -
Do scraped or borrowed articles with my links still pass page rank?
I wrote some articles for Ezine Articles a few years back and i still see links in the ose to my site that are from these articles that were borrowed from the Ezine Articles bank. Do the links in these articles still count toward my site including link juice and anchor text or does google discount them as duplicate content? I was told that Google counts these links for about 3 weeks and then discounts them as duplicate content so it's like they don't exist. Any truth to this or should i make the articles on my site available for people to copy and paste into their blogs as long as they keep my links intact? Thanks, Ron
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100