Suddenly ranking dropped in US: What actions required to retain?
-
Hi Moz community,
Our website has global audience, visitors and clients. Suddenly our website dropped in rankings for main keyword in US; which is our primary targeting country. Not sure why? This is been happening for last 2 months, we waited it to recover and now trying to fix if we can do anything about it. Is there anything wrong with back-links? What might be the factors contributing here for global website?
Thanks
-
Hi,
There could be a variety of things that could have caused this, but I would start by asking a few questions:
- Did the drop happen quickly? Did it go from positions 1-3 to 20 below in a day or two?
- Is the SERP volatile? Has there been lots of movement for the SERP historically?
- Have other sites in your space seen negative drops? I know there has been a lot of movement in the last few weeks.
Some general things I would jump into to start looking:
-
Core technical elements.
-
Was the page de-indexed somehow?
-
Was the page canonicalized elsewhere?
-
Did the core on-page elements get re-targeted to another term or removed?
-
General health of homepage/site
-
Is your backlink profile healthy? Did you ever purchase links/did someone purchase negative links to your domain?
-
Is your content scraped or duplicated across other sites?
-
Is your website mobile friendly?
-
Does your site load quicker than 5 seconds?
-
As Nikki mentioned, it's also important to look at who is ranking now.
-
What is the DA of their site compared to yours? Is it much higher?
-
Is their quality of content better?
If the drop happened quickly it's likely that something technical went wrong or you've been hit with an obvious penalty.
If it's happened over months, it's probably less obvious and could be multiple things.
I know that's not a straight answer, but those are some starting points I could think of with the information provided. Hope that is helpful!
-
Check the websites of the competitors that outranked you. What's their on page like? Do they have a local presence in the US? Who are linking back to them? Do their sites have a better link profile than yours? Check their estimated traffic per month. Is it higher than yours? You can get the link and traffic data from AHREFS.
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
-
Backlinks to internal pages help website to rank better or vice versa?
Hi Moz community, We have our backlinks mostly pointed to our homepage. We are trying to rank better and not having minimum number of backlinks to our internal pages is one of the things I worry about. Backlinks to homepage alone help in ranking internal pages or backlinks to internal pages help in ranking homepage? Or both required? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
We have a terrible, severe loss in our Keywords rankings this week, can you please help us what would happen in only 7 days ?
On the date 3rd of October we had almost 55 Keywords up and 44 almost down, Today after 7 days there is a severe drop 90 keyword is down, 7 only are up, and that's one website. My other website had 57 words up and 175 down. Our strategy in building backlinks: Directory submissions, article submissions and some blog commenting, we keep into consideration to choose only websites with high page rank (Page Rank 2 and higher). Also we had an updated on one of our websites since 1st of June a new URL structure, content, new pages and sitemap. Both websites has tons of keywords that we worked on increasing its rank and some we haven't touch them and its ranks was decreased. Does the new Google "hummingbird" have something to do with that? is there anything wrong with our strategy? Please provide us with your feedback ASAP.
Algorithm Updates | | ali8810 -
Dropped out of Google top 50 - Jan 28 2013
On Jan 28 - 2013 google dropped many of our keywords from its index.Here is the history of Rank June 24 2012 - RANK 2 Nov 18 2012 - RANK 8 NOV 25 2012 - RANK 15 JAN 6 2013 - RANK 10 JAN 13 2013 - RANK 21 JAN 20 2013 - RANK 9 Jan 27 2013 - RANK 6 JAN 28 2013 - DROPS OUT OF GOOGLE Graph http://i.imgur.com/ABYJ3MS.jpg The ON PAGE is an A for the homepage, errors and warnings are all DOWN over time. Would the last Google Update have caused this? Bing and Yahoo went UP and google dropped right out http://i.imgur.com/vP8Uvu8.jpg The red box is the keyword in question, but many others dropped out of top 50 Anyone have any ideas on what I should look for or which update could be responsible? ABYJ3MS.jpg vP8Uvu8.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | syndicate1 -
Google.uk rankings plummet, .com improves. What to do?
Hey Guys, Seems so much has changed with international SEO I'm not sure what to do with our site. We have a huge site with many country level landing pages that perform very well on google.com searches (IE; keyword + Jamaica) etc. We are not using a .co.uk version of our site and now our rankings have plummeted in the UK. Should we just make a .co.uk with similar (or the exact same content) or is there some newer strategy to follow?
Algorithm Updates | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Monthly Searches in Rankings Tab
Hi everyone, I'm pretty new to SEOMoz, so my apologies if this is a very obvious question. I'm trying to find out how to do a report that shows both the ranking of my keywords as well as the monthly searches in Google or the other search engines. Is there an option for this? Thanks in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | seoppc20120 -
Dramatic Rankings Drop
We've been slowly working up the rankings for some targeted keywords, and though it's been slow we have recently moved up to pages 1,2 and 3 for some of these kwyrods. Friday I got the rankings report from SEOMOZ and we have completely dropped from all rankings. Everything is gone. We've dropped at many at 40+ positions almost overnight. I haven't gone into deep research as to why this happened yet, and I have not asked the client if he did anything off-site to hinder our rankings, but I know that I have changed nothing in terms of SEO techniques in the past week...and these techniques have been working and moving us up so I'm at a loss as to why all of a sudden we've lost everything. If anyone has dealt with this issue before or can take a look at this site I'd appreciate it: http://www.EraseDisease.com Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Linwright0 -
SEO ranking factors
Hello I am reading SEO ranking factor (very good informations) and I want to ask: what does it mean: of linking C bloks to page I think that: how many(#) links from the same server (C block) links to your homepage or some pages of your web... of linking IP adresses to page how many web links are going to my web and every links are from another server. if I understand it good, it is no different between, if you have links from webpages in one server (one C block) or from webpages on another servers as your web is, because both correlation is 0.25... THX Could anybody expalin me, what does it mean: # of External Links w/ Partial Match Anchor Text http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-5 The number of external links and all these external links contain partial match anchor text from my query: (I am finding in Google "tennis" and see in SERP domain www.usta.com. # of External Links w/ Partial Match Anchor Text: tells me the number how many external links contain partial match anchor text "play tennis, tennis school, tennis info..."? )
Algorithm Updates | | PeterSEO0 -
Is it hurting my seo ranking if robots.txt is forbidden?
robots.txt is forbidden - I have read up on what the robots.txt file does and how to configure it but what about if it is not able to be accessed at all?
Algorithm Updates | | Assembla0