Why did I lose my Page 1 ranking for my main term?
-
My site is http://www.killthezombies.com. I have historically ranked on page 1 for the term "zombie games" up until the beginning of 2012, since my site was launched in 2008. Now I am not in the top 100 at all, since Panda.
Over the last year, I've tried many things to answer and solve this problem. I've cleaned up onsite issues, and I've tried to be more active in link building since I historically allowed my users to build links organically.
While I don't expect to rank #1, since many of my competitors have the term "zombie games" in their domain, and they are far more aggressive on backlink building than I am, I do not understand why my domain is not even in the top 100.
It's clear I used to rank, and that Bing and DuckDuckGo still think KillTheZombies.com belongs on page 1.
I have reached out to Google to see if I've been penalized, and they actually got back to me to say I have not been. Google Webmaster Tools shows no crawl issues or warnings.
I have many #1 rankings for terms like "zombie killing games", "kill zombies", etc.
Does Google now think my site is about "kill the zombies" and somehow not about "zombie games", which is clearly my subject matter and something I've optimized for?
-
Can anybody provide insight from the timing in my search history graph?
-
Here's the history of SE traffic. The jump earlier this year is improperly labelled Adwords traffic.
-
Thanks Marie, I believe you're right about needing more help than just the forums. It's a start. I'm willing to hire if the right person sees this. The site itself doesn't make much money, but it's a labour of love.. it's been with me for 6 years.
I think the answer is in the gaps of my own knowledge. I know enough to feel like I'm covering all of my bases, but I'm not a studied Panda or Penguin expert - reading a few articles over the past year, but that's about it.
The redesign was a vast improvement in SEO over the previous site, but I'm too close to it to know if there was one key strength of the old site that I ignored.
I really think that google gives my competitors a pass on using link test like "zombie games" because it's in their URL, while if I use it, they see it as unnatural. I've never been warned though, so it's hard to say. It seems the landscape really favours using "zombie games" in the url right now. Everyone in the top 20 has this, and I don't.
-
If you're not in the top 100 then there is probably some type of penalty or filter going on. My best guess, again, is Panda. Here is some information that may help you understand Panda: http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/
Not having the word "zombie games" in your url is not going to make you drop out of the first 10 pages. Plus, if you dropped at the end of Sep it either has to be EMD (which it can't be because your domain name is not exact match) or Panda. Panda will cause a whole site to drop, or sometimes just a section. But, if Google perceives that the majority of your site is either thin or duplicated then it puts a Panda flag on the site and won't allow you to rank well. A few good pages in the midst of hundreds of thin pages are probably not enough to help you escape Panda if this is what it is that's affecting you.
"I think it's a legitimate backlink text though because my website is literally a list of zombie games." - Things have changed in the last year about using exact anchor text. It's not good practice and can get you penalized. Whether it has, in your case is hard to say. If you were penalized it would be either an unnatural links penalty in which case you'd have a warning in WMT or it would be Penguin and you really should have had a drop on Apr 24, May 25 or October 5. So, again, I'd focus more on Panda than Penguin.
I fear that you may be over your head though in trying to tackle this. Forums like this are great for getting tips here and there, but you're not likely going to get a solution as this would probably entail someone spending a good 5-10 hours going over your site, your redesign issues, your analytics and your backlinks.
-
Some issues I think I might have:
- Too many internal links. I have 80 games on my homepage and both have both an image and a text internal link - that's 160.. maybe I can join them in the same A tag?
- I don't use any canonical tags - yet I have a lot of "duplicate" content, such as every game has both a regular and "full screen" version, and every category of games has pagination.
-
Wow, you're a wealth of knowledge! Thank you so much for taking the time with me, this can be overwhelming and it's easy to make mistakes when you think you're making things better.
Webmaster Tools says that most of my backlink text is for "kill the zombies", but I have spent time trying to create backlinks for "zombie games". I think it's a legitimate backlink text though because my website is literally a list of zombie games. All of my competitors get the same backlink text, but the difference is their url has "zombie games" in it.
When these problems happened, I grabbed onto the advice that the best SEO was to create good content. I hired a copywriter who writes descriptions of games for the inner pages, and blog posts. She writes new content 3 times a week. For this reason, I don't expect that onsite text or content would be my problem, because my competitors that outrank me definatily do not do this.
The biggest and most clear drop was September 28. I also remember that being when my ranking went out of the top 100. It is likely best to focus on that one.
So, I come back to my first question - why am I not in the top 100? I would understand not being in the top 5, or even the top 10, but not in the top 100 points to a definite PROBLEM. Something is wrong with "zombie games". Google is purposely excluding me from that group.
-
The first point I'd like to make is that you've got a lot of different things going on. I'll give you my thoughts but I wouldn't take this advice to the bank because there may be multiple factors.
September 28 was EMD, but you don't have an EMD. An EMD would be if you had a very poor domain that was ONLY ranking because it was called zombiegames.com. You were not affected by EMD. When EMD hit I asked people to send me domains that were affected. Most of them had Panda issues. It turns out that Google sneakily refreshed the Panda algorithm on Sept 27. It was a big one too...I've seen a lot of sites that were severely affected by that Panda refresh.
There was no major algo change June 1. It's not Penguin unless it happened directly on May 25 which was a Penguin refresh date. Penguin didn't cause a gradual drop. There was no algo change Aug 30 or December 24. You mentioned you redesigned your website. If you didn't put url redirects in place properly then this could cause issues. Or if you changed your title tags.
Regarding anchor text, I'm talking about the links pointing to your site. For example, the link pointing from this site to yours is anchored with "zombie games": http://www.pokerunderworld.com/. And this one: http://www.tantraonline.ph/forum/showthread.php?8465-Forsaken-Guild-of-Shiva/page2
If your drop wasn't on a Penguin day then I wouldn't go removing links though.
The issue is most likely to be one of quality (which would fit with Panda). Look at your site through Google's eyes. When the crawl the home page, what are they going to see? They can't decipher images and you've got no text. And all of your inner pages are very thin...just 1-2 lines of text.
-
Hi Marie,
Thank you for your feedback. It's hard to look at the site as it is today in response to the original issue because I've reactively tried a few changes this past year.
The major drops have been:
September 28, 2012 - organic traffic dropped overnight from 1,500 to 750. This was the EMD update, and I actually expected my ranks would improve since Exact Match Domains tend to dominate my niche. It actually seemed to strengthen the value of domains with "zombiegames" in the URI.
June 1, 2012 - organic traffic began a gradual drop from 3,000 per day to 1,500 per day by August 30, 2012. This could be a Penguin issue, although the change was not sudden.
December 24, 2011 - February 1, 2012 - organic traffic dropped from 4,000 per day to 3,000 per day. This was around the time I had redesigned my website.
I don't actually see the "zombie games" anchor texts on my pages. Can you point to some areas that you think should be changed? The term "zombie games" shows up in my homepage 11 times:
2 - title tag (changed March 23, previously title was "Zombie Games - Kill The Zombies!")
2 - description tag (has been this way for a few months now)
1 - main menu
1 - footer menu
1 - in an <a>tag under the logo image, inside an</a><a>- could this be seen as hiding a keyword?
2 - in other headings. I should use
instead of **..
1 - in the copyright line
Thank you!
Ryan**</a> -
Are you sure your rankings dropped on a Panda day and not Penguin? You have a lot of links using the anchor text "zombie games" and that could easily get you affected by Penguin.
If it was a Panda date on which your organic traffic dropped then you've got to look for the two most common Panda factors: duplicate content and thin content. I think the latter would most likely be your problem. Your pages all have only 1-2 lines of text on them. If this is Panda then the solution is probably to beef up the text on each of your pages.
-
Thanks Scott for the thoughtful answer. I set up http://www.killthezombies.com/zombie-games/ last year for the purpose, but I never figured out how to 301 my homepage to that sub-page, and I wasn't sure if it was very smart to stop using my root directory.
What do you think about it? I like your feeling that using the word zombie more than once in the url could be bad.
Would 301'ing www.killthezombies.com to games.killthezombies.com be your best advice? Personally, I don't like it, but that's coming from my heart, not my SEO brain.
Since I'm not even in the top 100, I lean towards google penalizing or sandboxing me in some way. It's hard to imagine Google thinks 100+ sites are better for "zombie games" , especially when I've got the 2nd oldest "zombie games" site in the niche.
-
Sorry to hear about your troubles. From my understanding google puts more emphasis on contextual links that point to your site, where as Bing and other search engines will look more at your on page SEO, which looks good from what I can see for zombie games.
The only thing that I see right away is that zombie games is not in your URL, which would help you rank for that key word. The issue you face to me would be either to put more effort into building backlinks to your home page for zombie games, or to create a subdomain or another page with zombie games in the URL:
zombiegames.killthezombies.com or killthezombies.com/zombiegames
Which actually might be over kill I try not to repeat terms in the URL as it looks spammy to me maybe:
games.killthezombies.com or killthezombies.com/games
If you're not showing up in the top 100 this would be the tactic I would choose, but this would be like starting from the beginning and you would have to build links back to this page to really complete with other sites ranking for that keyword.
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
-
I have recently re-done my website. My buyers guide and my category page are ranking for keywords I'm after.
I have recently re-done my entire site (only a few days). I believe Google is still re-crawling and updating (however, the amount of movement on other searches has been significant). My buyers guide is ranking very high for its intended keywords, as well as high for the keywords of the category page. Both are at the beginning of the second page and I wonder if its dragging me down. What do you think I should do? Is it to early to take action as everything has been completed redone.
Technical SEO | | Code2Chil0 -
Should you change Temporary redirects 302's to a 301 even if page is not important/intended for ranking ?
Hi Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ? cheers dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
When we have 301 page is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex?
Hi, When we have a page as 301 (Permanent Redirect) is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex? Example http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 when clicked goes to http://www.Somename.com/blogs/whenittyam Should i noindex the below pages http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 and add Rel=Canonical Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Website ranking went from page one to not in top 50 overnight. Help/suggestions?
One of our customer's websites initially ranked very well. For approximately 3 months it sat atop of Google for their optimized keywords. Suddenly, on November 17th, the ranking dropped and they were no longer in the top 50 for any keywords. We went through Google Webmaster tools and found no violations, so we emailed Google to see if we violated something and if they would reconsider. They responded "We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google." This is a site built on WordPress, so we turned off a majority of plugins in case one was somehow affecting the site. They have an incredible amount of business partners that link their website from their partner's website menus, so they have about 15,000 links all with anchor text "insurance." (every page on partner site is seen as a different link). Think this is affecting it? Maybe Google sees it as artificial? (P.S. This has been set up this way for a while before they came on with us). The site ranks on page one of Bing and Yahoo, but nowhere in top 50 for Google. Any suggestions? Appreciate the help!
Technical SEO | | Tosten0 -
301 redirect dropped page rank
Hi, We have a www domain that I have changed to a non www domain. The www domain had been in place for some time and had a good page rank, PR4. After this change the page rank dropped significantly (PR0, and now recently back to PR2) despite it being a 301 redirect which I thought "should" carry over the page rank. Yes, I am aware I should have just left it be. Hind sight 20/20 .. ya ya ya 🙂 My questions Is the 301 the correct method for this? Why did the page rank drop despite the 301? Should we go back to the www domain at this point? Thanks Kris
Technical SEO | | adriot0