Google Indexed URLs for Terms Have Changed Causing Huge SERP Drop
-
We haven't made any significant changes to our website, however the pages that google has indexed for our critical keywords have changed to pages that have caused our SERP to drop dramatically for those pages.
In some cases, the changes make no sense at all. For example, one of our terms that used to be indexed to our homepage is now indexed to a dead category page that has nothing on it.
One of our biggest terms, where we were 9th, changed and is now indexed to our FAQ. As a result, we now rank 44th.
This is having a MAJOR impact on our business so any help on why this sudden change happened and what we can do to combat it is greatly appreciated.
-
Google makes about 500 changes to their algorithms each year. It is likely that either one of those changes, or a change made with your site or backlinks, caused the change in results.
If you can share the URLs and keywords involved then more direct feedback can be offered.
-
Thanks for the link, we are on that already. I was just wondering why all of a sudden the pages that have been indexed for years changed.
-
Your answer will likely be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
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
-
Should we change our URLs for SEO benefit?
Hi, I'm currently covering a maternity marketing role at i-escape and one our main objectives is to increase organic traffic to the website. i-escape has a selection of hand-picked boutique hotels, villas, lodges, guesthouses and apartments for people to discover and book. At the moment each hotel page URL follows this structure: https://www.i-escape.com/hotelname We'd like to change this to include some searchable words in the URL dependent on the type of hotel. For example: https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-hotels/hotelname or https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-apartments/hotelname If we do go ahead, we know we need to make sure all old style URLs canonically redirect to the new style. Is having the keyword in the URL important enough for us to change over 1500 URLs on the website? We have quite a high quality links pointing to these hotel pages URLs. Also, will this help us with navigation/user journeys/crawls as there will be a /boutique-hotels/hotelname rather than just /hotelname? Thanks so much all! Clair
Technical SEO | | iescape0 -
Google crawling but not indexing for no apparent reason
Client's site went secure about two months ago and chose root domain as rel canonical (so site redirects to https://rootdomain.com (no "www"). Client is seeing the site recognized and indexed by Google about every 3-5 days and then not indexed until they request a "Fetch". They've been going through this annoying process for about 3 weeks now. Not sure if it's a server issue or a domain issue. They've done work to enhance .htaccess (i.e., the redirects) and robots.txt. If you've encountered this issue and have a recommendation or have a tech site or person resource to recommend, please let me know. Google search engine results are respectable. One option would be to do nothing but then would SERPs start to fall without requesting a new Fetch? Thanks in advance, Alan
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Problem with Google SERPS
I am running yoast SEO plugin in WP. I just noticed when I google the client, none of their meta data is showing. I see that I had facebook OG clicked, which looks like it made duplicates of all the titles etc. Would that be the problem? I have since turned it off. I am hoping that was the problem. Also, when the client searches it says in the meta desc - you've viewed this site many times". What is that?
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Can backlinks from advertising cause a traffic drop?
Hi, I recently noticed that our organic traffic has started to drop and maybe coincidently our adwords traffic has increased. I was asked to investigate the drop. I know that from the google update that unnatural backlinks would be penalized so I thought it might be the backlinks from a site that we advertise on because of the sheer number we have required from them in the last month. Would you think that would be the cause? if not, what could it be? and if it is, how do I go about correcting it as fast as possible? Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | digital.moretogether.com0 -
My company is changing ecommerce platforms. What are image URL considerations?
My company is switching from osCommerce to Magento. What should I do about my image URL's? Should I try to recreate the filenames and directory paths from the old site on the new one? How bad is it for our SEO if I can't do that?
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M0 -
Different URLS for our multi language pages caused penalty?
Hi all, We have a website www.phoneboxlanguage.com with 4 different language versions (Spanish, French, Italian, German). We have all the different versions on totally different URLS. E.G the French URL is www.cours-telephone-anglais.com. Recently this month we saw a huge drop in SERPS for all the 'foreign' language pages. This had happened before for the Spanish and French, which we put down to keyword density issues, so created new URLS for those pages. However now all 4 foreign pages have dropped. Could this be due instead to a penalty for duplicate sites? The content is obviously different due to different languages, but the coding and templates for the sites are the same. How can we find out this is the case and what should we do? I was thinking after some research on the forum to create subfolders in the original (phoneboxlanguage.com) and then create 301 redirects, from the old dropped sites, or would their penalties be bad for our original site, if this were the case? We are obviously very keen to not further damage the site and the original site which remains o.k. Many thanks for your kind help. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Index quickly a website? (Google,Bing..)
Hi, I would like to know what are the best practices in 2012 to index our website in less than 24 hours? (or less..) Thanks for your answer 😄
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0 -
Duplicate Content from Google URL Builder
Hello to the SEOmoz community! I am new to SEOmoz, SEO implementation, and the community and recently set up a campaign on one of the sites I managed. I was surprised at the amount of duplicate content that showed up as errors and when I took a look in deeper, the majority of errors were caused by pages on the root domain I put through Google Analytics URL Builder. After this, I went into webmaster tools and changed the parameter handling to ignore all of the tags the URL Builder adds to the end of the domain. SEOmoz recently recrawled my site and the errors being caused by the URL Builder are still being shown as duplicates. Any suggestions on what to do?
Technical SEO | | joshuaopinion0