A Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking but why?
-
Hi,
I wondered if anyone has ever experienced anything like this before, one of our customers has a website JDB Events (http://www.jdb-events.com/). When he first came to us he was using Fast Hosts and he was experiencing down time pretty much every day in periods of up to an hour.
The first step before carrying out any SEO was to place the website on our VPS so that the downtime issue was resolved. It did resolve the issue and the speed of the website was also increased.
My next issue was to address the length of the Title on the home page because it was 157 characters, I usually keep these to 70 characters.
This is the old Meta Title:
JDB Events Limited - Event, Production & AV Hire Specialists | The West Midlands Dance Floor Hire, LED Furniture, DJ, Disco Hire & Event Services Specialists
Here is the my new Meta Title:
JDB Events | LED Furniture Hire for Parties and Corporate Events
I have attached a screenshot of the drop that I have experienced, would anyone recommend that it's ok to keep the title longer so that I can cram more search terms into it, I use Woo Rank as a bench mark and this recommends shortening the title but I would be interested in hearing anyone's views.
Other steps that I have taken:
- Shortened the home page description
- WWW Resolve
- Added Robots.txt
- Crawled all of the pages for 404 errors etc
The next step I'm thinking of taking is replacing the amended meta title and description for the old one and monitoring that, other than that I can't see why I have taken such a hit.
Thanks
-
Thanks for the response, I have taken your suggestion into account and swapped the position of the brand and the keywords.
I'll let you know how I get on.
Thanks
Chris
-
Hi Donna,
Thanks for the response, I have checked Google Webmaster and there are no errors. The link metrics are the same as when I started the project.
Regards
-
most recent best practices say title length should be around 56 chars...fyi....
have you checked your own length? it's 64 chars...AND you make the newbie mistake of putting brand before keywords....
I'd change that to be this (55 chars!)
"LED Furniture Hire for Parties & Corporate Events | JDB"
-
I was referring to your meta keywords, not the title/descriptions
For keywords like that, I would look at what changed with the results. Does it show local results now or does it show more images which could've pushed you down.
That's a big drop so it could be because the title got changed. You might've ranked there mainly because of your title tag (even without links) so you might want to try to incorporate that into the title again or do a completely separate page for it.
-
chrissmithps,
This might also be link or algorithm update related. Have you taken a look at your inbound links and link metrics recently? It appears as though the site has very few. Did it previously have more? Do you have any warnings in Google Webmaster tools?
-
Thanks for your reply Dennis, I thought my title and description had less spam than the previous but I will defiantly look into changing these.
One of the search terms "starlit dance floor hire" has dropped 44 places on Google and usually I wouldn't be as concerned but since starting the SEO they have been receiving half of the enquiries than when I started. It may just be a coincidence or the time of year.
I will go back to the drawing board with the title and description.
Thanks Again.
-
The title will not have that big of an impact to drop your rankings. I go with 65 chars, but 70 is fine. Your meta keywords area is spammed to death though lol so you might want to minimize that. Is the drop huge though? It's hard to say how you can get a big drop with tweaks like that.
-
Thanks for taking the time to reply, I changed it around 3 weeks ago. I will leave it a few more days and re-think my Strategy.
Regards
-
Hi
I always believe page title's should be written with the user in mind. When they are on google SERP you would like them to click through and find a page which matches both the page title and meta description that they have seen. The idea of "cramming" more keywords into a title would not be something i would be looking to ever do.
As Moz says "The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content"
Stick to this and you shouldnt go far wrong. When did you change the title? You may just require a bit of patience for Google rankings
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
-
What would the US traffic increase be for a website YoY if all Google SERP rankings remained the same?
This question has come up a few times with some of our clients and I've spent some time researching this question, but I can't find an answer online so hopefully, someone at MOZ has this data available to them with all the data they collect. The data points that would be needed to answer this question off the top of my head: Increase in the # of Google Searches in the US YoY The decrease in CTR for organic results "10 blue links" which take a searcher off of Google YoY, as Google continues to keep more searchers on Google.com with rich snippets, increased AdWords prominence, AdWords extensions, etc I'm sure this greatly varies per industry, but an average for all industries is all that is needed to answer this client question. Many thanks in advance and I've included a video which hopefully helps to better explain the search "plus/minus" that we can expect to see as SEOs in 2018. WF1yLlJC6LetnpbD3
Search Behavior | | WebpageFX1 -
Drop in Android organic search
Hay Moz Community, I have been analysing traffic fluctuations for a few websites and have found a noticeable drop in organic traffic from android devices. I initially thought it could be a generic mobile drop but iOS is holding its own? Can anyone share any insights they may have come across to explain the drop on android specifically. Thank you in advance
Search Behavior | | JBGlobalSEO
Alex0 -
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
Demographic Data For Keywords
Hey i was wondering if anyone is aware of any tools at identifying demographic data for keyword terms. Like age, gender, etc? Cheers, AZ
Search Behavior | | MBASydney0 -
Is it my back link profile that is affecting my rankings ?
my website www.funktiongolf.co.uk had been ranking well until January and i'm nearly sure its due to low quality links and poor back-link profile i.e over-optimized money keywords can someone guide me? thanks for anyone that replies. I really do appreciate the
Search Behavior | | funktiongolf
help.0 -
Will creating sub folders for foreign versions of the website, remove rank juice from the main site?
Hi, We plan to create sub-folders for our german, spanish and italian language versions. If we do will this pass rank juice to the new sites, but at the same time badly effect our main site, regards link juice/serp? Or is this not such a huge factor in people's experience? Many thanks. James.
Search Behavior | | Quime1 -
How is this Dr. Getting a Ranking on a National Site in a Local Listing?
Please follow the link for a visual. Any help would be appreciated. The query I used was "phoenix plastic surgeons". I have never seen a large national site like PlasticSurgery.org Rank in local for a specific Dr. Thoughts? Thanks! 7O1oK
Search Behavior | | Red_Spot_Interactive0