Huge drop for main branded keyword
-
The past week the main branded keyword for a site i am working on has dropped from the top three on Google US to page 7! It is still ranking in the top three on Google in other areas. I recently redirected /index.php to / using .htaccess. Could this have caused a problem?
If not, what else could have caused such a huge drop?
-
Can an EMD update remove SERPS for all keywords, or just the exact matches? We recently lost all our foreign language domain serps, roughly on the 4/5th
-
Quite a lot of traffic lands on the listings pages so im reluctant to set them to noindex. There are only approx. 4,000 listings pages. I'm trying to find where these other pages that are being indexed are coming from.
-
If most of your organic search traffic lands on your homepage, you might want to consider setting all the listing pages to noindex. That'll get the duplicate content out of Google's index.
-
The duplicate content is a problem as a lot of teh listings are pulled in via XML from agent sites. I've been trying to find a way to make it all more unique without editing each listing manually.
-
Thanks for this.
What is the best way to find where all of these links are coming from? The only place i can see is the search results page. I have set this 'noindex, follow'. Should i set it to 'noindex, nofollow"?
-
Good point. All those sub-pages (listing pages) have content that is duplicated across multiple other sites, too.
-
I don't think anyone has mentioned this but your number of internal links is borderline nuts. I found about 190,000 internal pages.
If you remove those internal links and Google this:
"www.phuketproperty.com" -site:www.phuketproperty.com
You'll see that your site has 13,000-ish backlinks. Take a look at the highest ranked ones. They're mostly all cheap/low quality inbound links. You don't have a huge backlink profile based on the tremendous size of your site.
To put it in perspective
www.microsoft.com has 688,000 internal links and 28 million incoming links.
www.century21.com has 11 million internal links and almost 50 million incoming links.
www.phuket.com has 5530 internal links and 287,000 incoming links.
Internal links are not usually 10x incoming links. That could be part of it. You have 13,000 not-quality inbound links. And 200k indexed pages.
-
Thanks for your help. It looks like I'll just have to keep doing what i am doing and hope it bounces back quite quickly.
-
Generally speaking, you want to remove bad links while building good, new ones.
-
Before i took over the site the owners had taken on the service of some link building company. The links the company added where just added in to any wiki type site they could find. it seems that they only used four different types of key words when they were doing it. I have managed to remove over 600 of these links and the site was just starting to rank well for a variety of keywords, then all of a sudden this week the site has dropped back for its main keyword.
Do you think the best strategy is to keep removing the bad links? Apparently the site ranked better before these links were built.
-
I was thinking the same thing, you got hit with the EMD update recently especially if it happened this week.
-
Sounds like you got hit by the EMD update: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change
-
I doubt a 301 redirect from index.php to / would have done that.
An EMD issue could be the reason, as could an automated penalty (Penguin, Panda, anchor text over-optimization, etc.). If we had your URL and keyword, it would be easier to make specific suggestions.
-
Hi
Can you provide me your keyword which dropped and URL of your site?
I think if index.php contains backlinks and you have 301 redirected then some % of link-juice may be loss but it does not have huge affect as you said. Have you contain EMD?? After EMD algorithm updates by Google it may be possible your domain was affected by this update.
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
-
Alternate Spelling of Brand
Our brand is called The Queen's Lace. Based on Search Console, more people search for it by "Queens Lace" than "The Queen's Lace". Any suggestions on how I can improve SEO on "Queens Lace"? Search Console (last 28 days) "the queen's lace": 206 impressions, 60.7% CTR, 1.1 avg position "queens lace": 518 impressions, 46.3% CTR, 2.2 avg position Note: our domain is thequeenslace.com and I use a redirect from queenslace.com. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | pmk0
Patrick0 -
How does a keywords difficulty increases? what are main factors?
for wxamp keyword A has difficulty of 40 and monthly volume of 100 keyword B has difficulty of 30 and monthly volume of 500
Technical SEO | | calvinkj0 -
My site ranking has dropped in recent 2 weeks ?
I have a quick question to ask you guys,
Technical SEO | | Mustansar
I have my site (www.webuycarstoday.co.uk) It used to rank very well for all my target keywords. But recently all keywords dropped massively. I can't seems to find a good reason of this drop. We have not change anything which may have caused such drop.
Any suggestion or advice to get into the problem. I would appreciate your kind responses.0 -
Ranking dropped after domain change
Dear Moz Community, first of all excuse my bad english, i am from europe and my english is not the best 😉
Technical SEO | | domiji
I use Moz Analytics for several days and try to figure out why our "main keyword" totally dropped after our domain change. We started this year with a new company name and a new domain. Our old domain was dp-hochzeitsfotograf.de and the main keyword we try to rank for was "hochzeitsfotograf" which means "wedding photographer" here in Germany. Last summer we reached position 1 and short before our domain change we still ranked on position 6. We register the domain change in google webmaster tools and redirect all urls via 301 redirect to the new domain. Our new domain name is yourheyday.de and all rankings adopted pretty good except our main keyword (now position 62) which could break our neck the next few month. I would be so so happy and really appreciate if anyone of you have an advise for us. Thanks and many greetings from europe
Dominik0 -
Keyword Targeting with Dynamic Pages
We have a large e-commerce website made with .net. so all of our category and item pages are made dynamic. Most things like title, some of the words and a few other things are done with scripts. I want to be able to target certain words and have more customized words on certain pages. Has anyone dealt with this? I know .net is pretty common so I can't be a unique case.
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Major drop in visitor numbers?
Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service . We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress. What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits? Would appreciate feedback.
Technical SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Keyword Difficulty Tool
Hi Mozzers! Randfishkin just posted yesterday a very nice important and helpfull post, about keyword difficulty. I will be happy, if you can write here the metrics from reports of keyword difficulty, to know more about position of our website on SERP, and to know more what to engage if someone is ranking higher than me, with same metrics of the report of keyword difficulty. It would be very nice, if we talk on this topic here about keyword difficulty how to's. Thanks
Technical SEO | | leadsprofi0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1