What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
-
Hi,
9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places.
For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite.
I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop.
Any suggestions would be most welcome.
-
I appreciate that, thank you.
-
Anytime, if things don't settle down, private message me and I would be happy to help you further if I can.
-
Hi Monica,
That all seems very sensible. Thank you very much for your help.
-
Have you ever heard of the Google Dance?
I started working with a company in August and have been trying to fix some major SEO issues. What I noticed is that at the times I made several changes, 301s, on page changes, revising content, I would see a huge decrease in rankings one week and then they would start to level out over the next 2-3 weeks. This isn't atypical, it shouldn't concern you too much right now.
Here are a few suggestions. Google your keyword + the number of your company. There should be an arrow in the SERP next to your URL, click that and select "Cached". This will tell you if the engine has seen your changes yet or not. If it has been cached, just wait a week and see if it levels out a little better, or at least bounces back to where it was.
The second thing you should do is check your search impressions in webmaster tools. With the two big updates happening in the past 30 days a huge change in your search impressions could cause some of your keywords to move around until things even out. You want to look for search impressions that dip below your lowest average day before 10/17/14. This will tell you if Panda or Penguin are having an affect on your rankings. If they are, this could just be temporary as the rest of the penguin update unfolds.
I say give it a couple of weeks just to be safe. I wouldn't make any other changes just yet. You don't want to fall victim to over optimizing either.
Good Luck!
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
-
Should I redirect a domain we control but which has been labeled 'toxic' or just shut it down?
Hi Mozzers: We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.' Thanks in advance, dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Chinese Sites Linking With Bizarre Keywords Creating 404's
Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra". Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's. Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
What's the best way to hold newly purchased domains over 2 years?
Hi, A friend has just bought 3 domains and is not planning to build websites with them for around 2 years. He asked me what the best thing to do with these domains was...I have 2 ways of look ing at it: a) Putting a holding page on these and submit to Google Webmaster Tools - this way they are indexed by Google and hold search engine trust when the site finally goes up - HOWEVER, if they are not updated with fresh content would that work against them in 2 years time? b) Simply redirect them to their existing site and don't do anything else. Let me know your thoughts. Adido.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adido-1053990 -
Do pages with irrelevant keywords hurt the domain overall for ranking for relevant keywords?
I have been doing SEO for the University I work at. We are optimizing our degree pages on a page-by-page basis. So hypothetically we have a page optimized for "online accounting degree" and another for "online marketing degree", etc. Although our focus is on specific page optimization, we hope the by-product is that the whole domain will start to rank better for "online degree". First of all, is this a reasonable expectation? Second, if this IS the case, will pages full of irrelevant keywords hurt the overall strategy? For example, our registrar and financial aid PDFs that are full of legal/financial mumbo-jumbo. Are these lowering our keyword density of relevant keywords across the domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SNHU0 -
Quicksimpleinsurance.com is not getting any visibility in Bing/Yahoo! Any idea why? It's doing alright on Google.
I have a insurance wordpress blog that is not getting any visibility in Bing/Yahoo! It's roughly 2 years old and has been indexed in all three major search engines. It's doing alright in Google and actually showing some promising rankings. But it's nowhere to be seen on Yahoo!/Bing for any insurance related phrases. Any ideas what's wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chadwickc20