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
-
Why is my inner pages ranking higher than main page?
Hi everyone, for some reason lately i have discovered that Google is ranking my inner pages higher than the main subfolder page. www.domain.com/subfolder --> Target page to be ranked
Technical SEO | | davidboh
www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus ---> page that is currently ranking Also in the SERP most of the time, it is showing both links in this manner. www.domain.com/subfolder/aboutus
-----------www.domain.com/subfolder Thanks in advance.1 -
Buying Domains with Keywords but no PA, no content
MOZ Community, I am trying to gauge both the potential upside and downside of buying a few (relatively long) URLs that encompass some new keywords that are surfacing in our industry and creating permanent redirects to our branded website. [This wasn't my idea!] These URLs haven't previously had any content or owners so their domain authority is low. Will Google still ding us for this behavior? I hope not but I worry that there might be some penalty for having a bunch of redirects pointing at our site. I have read that google will penalize you for buying content-rich sites with high DA and redirecting those URLs to your site but I am unclear about this other approach. It seems like a fairly mundane (and fruitless) play. I tried to explain that we won't reap any SEO rewards for owning these URLS (if there is no content) but that wasn't really heard. Thanks for any resources or information you can share! I would appreciate any resources.
Technical SEO | | ColleenHeadLight0 -
Multi page with title with same keywords
Greetings Team, I have a webiste home page optimize for the keyword ''example apartments'' and i have included in the title but that i have another page called site.com/exampleapartments and is optimize for the keyword example apartments How can i make them different ?
Technical SEO | | WorldEscape0 -
Organic Traffic Dropping. 404s found. Is this it?
My organic traffic has dropped 20% in the past month. I noticed some major 404 errors today on a very commonly clicked link on our website. I had the developers fix the error today, but then I thought I'd look in Google Webmaster Tools. That's when I saw the attached picture. 2454 404 errors were found. We only have 1500 pages in the entire Google index. Could this massive amount of 404 errors attribute to this drop in organic traffic? dU240 dU240
Technical SEO | | davewjones0 -
URL Structure: When to insert keywords?
I read the SEOmoz beginers guide and it said that it's beneficial to place keywords in the URL as long as you don't overdo it. However, this seems awkward for common pages, such as "Home", "About", "Contact" etc.... I've currently targeted a specific keyword for each page on my site, as follows: Home: "Green Screen" Work: "Greenscreen" About: "Event Photography" Pricing: "Green Screen Photography" Should I rename the URLs as: Home: ...com/green-screen-home.html Work: ...com/greenscreen-work.html About:...com/about-event-photography.html Pricing:...com/green-screen-photography-pricing.html
Technical SEO | | pharcydeabc0 -
Importance of keyword in the content to rank well
Well, I am very beginner seo. our website is www.theprinterdepo.com and our main keyword for the moment is refurbished printers, but there might be hundreds of more keywords. I was analyzing the SERPs and found that for our keyword, the first 2 websites that come up have very different content 1.http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=PRN They rank first, but I dont see a lot of text with the keyword in their text or links 2. http://www.valstarprinters.com/ They mention the keywords lots of times in the text, probably they are doing keyword stuffing? So this makes me thing, how the 1st one ranked there? just by link builiding?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Site drop in SERPS after domain down for three plus weeks
Have had a clients site that has been staple in the SERPS for the last four years that we have worked on it. However they had hosting issues a couple of months back which they didn't sort for two to three weeks. Since there the main keyword has bounced around between 24th and 44th in the google results. The drop ties in with the hosting issue but the client does seem to believe that this is the source of the issue. Can someone point me towards some online articles that would explain this for them. Some of the keywords have not suffered as badly but the one key term is still in the mid 20's. I am sure it is suffering a minus 20 for the keyword as it was normally 4th or 5th in the results. We don't host the site and the client had know idea were it was hosted. What is so annoying is that it is us who pointed out the site was down. Thanks in advance everyone 🙂
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Huge and sudden fall in SEO traffic
Hi, I’m writing you because we have noticed in Google Analytics account, a huge fall in the SEO traffic of mywebsite, starting suddenly in one precise day. The difference between this day and the previous one is: -46,36% . Traffic has fallen in all parts of the site in the same way. Some details: - we did not make any relevant change to the website - we haven’t been banned by Google (or we don’t have any message about it in GWT) - the number of the landing pages remains approximately the same - the number of indexed keywords falls from 9.000 to 4.000. - around 2 weeks ago we found out around 120 pages with 404 error, but the error now is solved and the pages are currently working we open the content to Google about 4 months but still we have not published our Site Map. I know that the 404 error could could affect the indexation, but do you have any other idea, apart of this, of what could have happened? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | bodaclick0