Massive SERP crash
-
I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords.
Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms.
I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today.
Thanks
-
Hi Mike,
I did see that there was an update last week, but as far as I can see we weren't impacted until Sunday/yesterday.
In terms of pages indexed there has been a slight drop, but only 700 out of 19,900. So in line with the variance we get on a week to week basis.
The drop in ranking seems to have only effected non branded keywords. Would a penalty effect both?
-
Thanks for the input. I got another site crawl from Moz today (i have campaigns running on the regional subfolders and one on the domain) at domain level. We have 1,292 404 errors at a domain level. All of our links are broken, so every URL in the sitemap is pushing Google to a 404. If you actually browse the site it works but every URL has index.php injected into the middle of it.
I have manually checked every non-branded keyword we were ranked no.1 for in Australia. We were ranked #1 for 23 keywords I was tracking. We are now out of the top ten for 20, ranked #9 for 1 and #1 for two others.
-
There was allegedly a pretty significant update from Google last week (significant for ecommerce sites anyway).
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ecommerce-update-19832.html
Are you seeing a drop in rank, a drop in pages indexed or both? I assume you've done this already, but checking Google WMT will tell you some of the basics that will provide some insights (how many pages are being crawled, how many errors Google is encountering during the crawl, whether you have a manual action, etc).
If your site isn't under a penalty, I'd give it a few more days to shake out. We're still seeing several of our rankings jumping around quite a bit from this last rumored update.
As for the 404's, it depends on who you ask and who you believe. John Mueller at Google says that 404s will not have a negative impact on your SEO (this has been the official word from Google for years):
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm
Most believe that high bounce rates can cause a drop in rank and lots of 404s can cause a high bounce rate, so 404s can potentially hurt your rankings.
Mike
-
It's highly unlikely that a technical issue would drop rankings within a day or so, maybe drop from URLs from the index though. Check .htaccess, robots.txt and meta robots etc.
Firstly I would double check what is indexed and what header responses you are getting. Depending on the size of the site I would use http://intavant.com/tools/google-indexed-pages-extractor/. Compare with what you believe to be indexed and run the list through Screaming Frog to check the header responses for each URL.
Otherwise I would look at exactly what keywords have been hit, check GWT for any messages and do a thorough investigation of onsite content - Panda; and link profile - Penguin.
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
-
Why does the order of the keywords affect my SERP? And what can I do to improve?
Hi all, So, if you google "london life coach" my site appears #2 (www.nickhatter.com) But if you google "life coach London" my SERP seems to fluctuate between #3 up to #6. If you google "life coach in London" my SERP is a solid #2/3. I don't get it all. Would someone care to explain? Also, if you have any tips on how I might improve the EAT of my website please do feel free to weigh in! Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickHatster
Nick0 -
Google Adding Incorrect Location to the end of Title Tags in SERPs
I have an issue with the way Google is adding to a client’s Title Tag. Since we relaunched the website a few months ago, Google has been adding an indiscriminate “– London” to the end of title tags. That would be fine if the company was solely London based but we have stores outside London too, and it’s adding “– London” to the end of those individual store title tags there too. So, if you do a search for “location widget” our page title is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrewDaviesLondon
“location widget | Brand name”
but then Google pops in:
“location widget | Brand name - London”
Which isn’t great if the location is in Scotland! We are adding structured data to the store pages to try and combat this, the store pages are all well optimised for the location (and ranking well), but I’m wondering if I’ve missed anything obvious? I thought it might lesson as the new site became more trusted in Google, but the rogue “London” seems to be increasing... Thanks for your help!0 -
Fetch and render partial result could this affect SERP rankings [NSFW URL]
Moderator's Note: URL NSFW We have been desperately trying to understand over the last 10 days why our homepage disappears for a few days in the SERPS for our most important keywords, before reappearing again for a few more days and then gone again! We have tried everything. Checked Google webmaster - no manual actions, no crawl errors, no messages. The site is being indexed even when it disappears but when it's gone it will not even appear in the search results for our business name. Other internal pages come up instead. We have searched for bad back links. Duplicate content. We put a 301 redirect on the non www. version of the site. We added a H1 tag that was missing. Still after fetching as Google and requesting reindexing we were going through this cycle of disappearing in the rankings (an internal page would actually come in at 6th position as opposed to our home page which had previously spent years in the number 2 spot) and then coming back for a few days. Today I tried fetch and render as Google and was only getting a partial result. It was saying the video that we have embedded on our home page was temporarily unavailable. Could this have been causing the issue? We have removed the video for now and fetched and rendered and returned a complete status. I've now requested reindexing and am crossing everything that this fixes the problem. Do you think this could have been at the root of the problem? If anyone has any other suggestions the address is NSFW https://goo.gl/dwA8YB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GemmaApril2 -
SERP Ranking
Hi everyone, I'm struggling to figure out why our website has dramatically changed and is ranking far worse than ever. We were top for around 10 keywords, and had over 4 high traffic keywords in position 1. I think the website needs updating (as it's magento 1.7), and that the competition is increasing. Taking our eye off the ball has been a huge mistake. Could anyone advise on what the next steps would be to start increasing to a better serp rank? These two are own main ranking pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mg33dev
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/budget-roller-banner.html Any advice or pointers would be absolutely awesome. Thanks0 -
I have never seen this in Google SERPs before?
What is this that I am seeing in the Google SERPs? It's a bank of 3 separate articles from one site, but they are grouped together like an organic listing. Checkout the link to see what I'm talking about http://imgur.com/xbUk1NG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Effect SERP's internal 301 redirects?
I'm considering installing Wordpress for my website. So I have to change the static URL's from /webpage.html to /webpage/. Yet I don't want to lose in the SERP's. What should I expect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz1 -
Improve change my Meta Description shows in SERP
I feel my meta descriptions are descriptive and fairly represent the info on each page of my site. However, Google frequently includes this "20+ items" in front of the snippet. I run a job site and each page list 20 jobs. What if I include a bit of coding in the Meta Description to include "Latest Jobs Posted TODAY's DATE" - since the jobs listed on the page will include a date. On each page there is also option to "Create Email Alert" and "save Jobs" maybe I should include writing about that as well? I have read all Google's documents on the importance of making Meta Des relevant for the page etc, so any good insight how increase my chances of getting the meta des displayed in the SERP would be appreciated. thank you, Kristian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
My site links have gone from a mega site links to several small links under my SERP results in Google. Any ideas why?
A site I have currently had the mega site links on the SERP results. Recently they have updated the mega links to the smaller 4 inline links under my SERP result. Any idea what happened or how do I correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | POSSIBLE0