Rankings Shifting for the Past 2-3 Years
-
For the past 2-3 years, my site’s organic rankings have been dramatically shifting, ranking well for a few days and then dropping for a month or two, then ranking again for a few days, and then dropping again. During the time of higher rankings, form submissions increase significantly. The ranking increases or decreases are typically between 10-30 spots each time. I’ve done everything I can think of to address any issues: improved speed, limited 404s, changed the architecture of the site, updated link anchor text, etc. Nothing seems to work.
The site has 88% of its traffic coming from desktop, with 9% from mobile and 3% from tablet. The disparity between desktop and mobile leads me to believe that the ranking issues are mobile-related, especially now that Google is using mobile-first indexing.
I thought dwell time could be an issue, but session duration is 2:07 minutes and bounce rate is under 60%, with an average of 2.27 pages per session. That doesn’t indicate any quality of traffic issues to me.
There are no warnings in Google Search Console, and speed is 58 for mobile and 86 for desktop on Page Speed Insights.
I’ve been doing SEO for 12 years, but this has me stumped. My top suspicions are:
- Speed issues on mobile
- Penalties for redirects from old website to the new website
- Penalties for anchor text for the old brand name instead of the new one.
The site is https://dragonflydm.com
Has anyone seen anything like this? Any ideas?
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
-
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Why I am loosing my ranking?
My website is lonestarperio.com, I am loosing my website ranking, Is SEO agency doing any black hat SEO or doing anything wrong to my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward1 -
Merging 3 websites into 1
Hi I was wondering if someone can give me a bit of advice - outside of my full time job I run three websites - all in the same area, but all do three different things 1. Directory (DA19) 2. Blog (DA 23) 3. Products (DA35) I want to merger all three website into one and all be on one website (rather do it now than keep working on three websites). I have included the DAs of each site ( I know they are not amazing, but i've only recently started working on two of them), but I want to place all three websites under the Blog url. Regarding 301's of the pages, would I be better doing at the top level and 301 all the pages to the home page, or spending the time and 301 the old product page for instance to the new product page - this is a much bigger project, but what are the potential gains. Is there anything else I should consider when switching the sites - all three are wordpress sites (I know it has its limitations but they are easy to create). Thanks in Advance Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Tagged URL ranking organically
I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elihn0 -
Blog home page and ranking
My question is in regards to ranking a blog under our domain www.xxx.co.uk/blog If we are targeting pc blog should the home page have some content in the side bar or somewhere that stays there contantly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
SEO Moz Keyword Ranking Tool
The SEO Moz keyword ranking tool is useful and fairly accurate but it would be more useful to know why the ranking changed. Can the tool provide any insight in this regard?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
What is the impact of excessive code on rankings
I am working on optimizing a page that utilizes a template that generates an excessive amount of code - 4 to 5 times what I am seeing with competitor pages. The entire site seems to have this problem and we have, according to webmaster tools a a medium to slow load time. In general, given the content and teh strength of the domain, I think this page should be performing better. I think the entire site should be performing better. Would it be worth it to replace the template I am using and replace it with a more lightweight page design? I would obviously keep the content and the url the same. Typically I want to try everything I can to improve rankings, but this change would take some time, so I don;t want to rush into it. Looking for some answers based on experience, not general best practices. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
De-listed? What happened? No rankings??
Was ranking on first page for over 80 terms with over 25 in the top 3 and my main keyword was ranked #4...now my twitter account has replaced my website for #4 in the rankings for the main keyword. I now have ZERO Rankings for all keywords for my website. I have no idea what happened. ** Is there anyway for me to check with Google to see why I have been wiped off the map in the search rankings? ** Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0