Positions dropped and do not recover
-
Hi all,
Site: https://www.fascinators.com.au
k/w: fascinators (this is the main one I am looking at)
About 2 years ago, I redesigned the site. It used to be on first positions in Google Australia. After redesign, positions dropped and never recovered. No matter what I do, I can not get them back. I even involved professional SEO agency for the last 6 month to help build links, but nothing works. (old site used really old non mobile-friendly engine)
As far as I know site is technically sound with no issues. In the last few month position for my main keyword 'fascinators' jumps really wildly. From position 9 to not being in Google first 100. And jump can happen overnight. As of today it disappeared from first 100 again.
I am really tearing my hair out on what can be wrong.
Link building is underway. This is one area I am aware of.
Thinking of keyword spamming, i removed lots of 'fascinators' from URL, but that did not seem to help much.
Any ideas will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Rudolf
-
Thank you for replying.
Backlinks are the issue and this is the main reason I got external SEO agency to step in. They are working specifically on link building.
Is there any way to do a "health check" for keyword spamming? I already removed a lot of those, but selling fascinators it is difficult not to use the word a lot.
And yes, I looked at competition also -- In mot respects I beleive my site is a better fit, but Google obviously thinks otherwise for some reason.
Rudolf
-
I have pretty much the same issue with one of my clients websites. It was ranking no.5 for a highly prized keyword, after a redesign to mobile friendly, kept URLs, redirects etc, improved content, https and "best practises" etc our rankings continue to drop. wtf.
I had a look at your site and it seems to be optimised how I would approach SEO also... long form SEO text, keywords in h1, h2, alt, meta etc.
I also saw that https://www.fashionaddict.com.au/hair-fascinators.html ranks no.1 without long form seo text. Again wtf?
And http://www.fascinators.net/ ranks no.2 with a similar structure to your site.
The main difference I noticed is you mention "fascinators" a lot in headings, which does seem a bit unnatural, maybe even spammy. I believe I do that also on my clients website... causing it to drop.
What are your backlinks like compared to the competition?
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
-
Seem to have dropped completely out of the rankings
Hello there, I have a site that seems to have totally dropped out of the rankings i.e. it is now not even ranking for the name, at which it has been number 2 forever! In Moz Pro it is at 0% visibility and no keywords being ranked. No big changes in terms of the site, the pages appear to be being indexed and as far as I'm aware no dodgy backlinks. The only change lately is that we have linked it to Google Console, added 2 content pages and done a Google Adwords campaign. These pages have been used as the landing pages for this campaign - could that have had this effect? Could this be a RAG (Random Act of Google) or something else??? The site is homefarmlogs.co.uk. The is also a homefarmlogs.com - could this be causing a problem??? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Best wishes, Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frog-Marketing1 -
Keyword position history?
Are there any tools out there to see historical positions of keywords for competitors? I haven't been tracking the keywords, just wondered if there is any cached data anywhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Recovering from robots.txt error
Hello, A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone. It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT. In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok. I guess what I want to ask is: What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly? What time scales can we expect for recovery? More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RikkiD220 -
Site dropped rankings when changing host from US to Spain
My site was ranked very well in the UK & US for multiple keywords but we changed hosting from the US to Spain and since then the rankings in the US & UK have dropped between 5 to 35 positions on all keywords and are showing no signs of returning 3 weeks later. What can be causing this? The site was down for about 3 to 5 hours a few days before we transferred hosting (this is why we changed hosting due to the previous hosting being down too often). It does seem as though the new location of the hosting server seems to be affecting rankings but I need confirmation on this or any other ideas why the rankings may have dropped. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
Optimisation change caused a drop
We are a web design company and SEO has never been our main thing but we can do it for clients quite well. We were ranking under web design and our location quite well up until 3 months ago. We didn't really have much on our page for web design but targetted website design instead. Our SEO guy who has proved himself for getting some of our clients to the top of Google under very generic search terms recommended we focus on Web Design, so I changed the site accordingly. 2 days later Google has seen our changes and now we've changed our H1 and copy. However, our ranking has dropped 1 place yet again. Obviously I've now panicked and am stressing (even feeling sick) about what to do. He is away until next week so I can't ask him. Could it be that Google has seen we're targetting the word and pushed us down? Shall I wait for the link building he's doing? My own link building lately seems to knock us down a place with every new link I'm doing (and I'm only adding the odd link - not spamming at all). What's odd is that we're still doing extremely well for keywords that aren't even mentioned in our copy at all really. If you could help or offer advice I'd be very grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchez19600 -
Losing Positions
HELP!!! after implementing some changes suggested by SEOMoz Pro the only changed is that i lost some very very very dear positions. I had expected that my website would raise in position due to the changes but in fact it lost some. I live in the netherlands so i use Google NL and Bing NL for rank tracking. For some specific keywords like: kamperen bij de boer, boerderijcampings, boerencampings, Vekabo Campings, minicampings, kampeerartikelen, boerencamping frankrijk i only lost positions and thus visitors. Some of the keywords lost about 9 positions. What am i doing wrong? I do everything SEOMoz suggested including changing 301 titles on my website due to titletags with more then 70 characters and the only thing that happens is losing positions? Duplicate content is no longer an issue. No errors were found what so ever and still in stead of improving the rankings the declined. Who can help me because this is not what i expected from this program.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Drop in rankings, next step
So based on a question asked yesterday, I am wondering what my next step is. Yesterday's question was, I have made updates to Title and Meta Descriptions for my client's site and suddenly they are not showing up in the top 50 for numerous keywords that they used to. The only words in the page source that were edited were "fluff" words that were replaced with relevant keywords reflected in much of the on-page copy yet now the client is not showing up. Ideas? From responses and research, it seems there's a lag time in Google to pick up the updated titles/info and these changes can cause a drop in rankings for a short time - however, I can't very well turn to my client and say sorry your website isn't showing up for a few weeks...wondering what my next step should be, or is there a greater issue I'm missing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laidlawseo0 -
Suddenr Ranking Drop
Hello all . Im experiencing a sudden ranking drop for one of my websites . Keyword = Green Tea Search Engine = google.lk URL = www.eswaran.com/greenTea.html This page was at 7th on 1st page . Since coupe of weeks back its moving backwards . I didn't even do any link building for this page other than doing little changes to titles tags . What would be the reason for such a issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Osanda0