Cannot find reason for drop in ranking
-
One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is.
On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie.
So, trying to find the problem:
- I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A.
- Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page.
- Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary.
- The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought?
- I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine!
Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking.
Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear.
I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance!
Michel
-
Hi there, has this question been answered? Please let us know yes or no, thanks! ~ Christy
-
Hi there, thanks for your question! Has it been resolved?
-
Feel free to PM me any examples if you want. But after some thought I still feel that any page with that many links on it will be weighted negatively by the engines. Google dislikes link-farms and your link/content ratio may be too high for their liking. To that end, you may accidentally be swept up in a downranking effort based on that ratio.
I do think this should raise the question in your mind as to why you are focused on rankings. Since they are no longer the same from person to person, outside of GWT they aren't very effective in making good strategic decisions. What I would be asking is has the web traffic changed? Conversion rates? Any on-page activity see any shift? There is alot that can be determined from that sort of data. Rankings, in my opinion, are phasing out as a useful metric in determining business impact.
Dig into GA or whatever analytics tool you like and see if the drop in ranking is correlative with any shift in page/site performance and that can offer you a better view of the situation.
-
Hey Sean,
Thanks for your response! The pages are all category landing pages, and with a mega dropdown for navigation, faceted navigation on the left and a footer, the total number of links adds up quickly. They're all internal links though, and it was my understanding that a high number of internal links does not directly harm the value of a page?
I used the SEO Workers website to count the links by the way. According to them, the lingerie page has 342 links (they call it URLs but I guess they mean links), the swimwear page has 199 links and the nightwear page has 190 links. So, the number of links for the swimwear and nightwear pages are roughly the same, yet the swimwear page does not currently rank for swimwear, and the nightwear page is ranked #5 for nightwear.
What's strange though, is when I copy the source of each of the three pages into Notepad++ and count hrefs, I find 203 occurances in total for each of the pages. That's strange in the sense that SEO Workers apparently does something different, but not strange since the page templates are exactly alike, but the content is different so the number of subcategories, filter options etc will be a little different.
I'll PM you the links, just in case you're curious and want to see for yourself
-
Thanks for that info. Obviously, any advice offered here is weak without looking over the actual data, but something stood out to me. Why are there 342 URLs (do you mean links on that page)? If one page has that many links, it could be perceived as a link farm...alot depends on the content amount, how the links are listed out, and more. It does sound like far too many for one page (do you paginate?). Do the other pages that haven't seen any negative impact have a similar amount of links?
Can you also list some differences in your data research between the affected and unaffected pages? How are they different?
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
-
How important is it to rank for a product category?
We make a product in a category of products -- let's say "donuts". There are really only 4 major donut companies (lots of artisanal donuts out there, but they're not really competitive yet). One of our competitors has systematically achieved top rank for "donut" and lots of adjacent keywords like "donuts" and "buy donuts". My question is, does their success ranking for the product category keyword "donut" influence their success ranking for long-tail keywords like "powdered donuts" and "tastiest donuts"? Or, to flip that question, should we try to compete for "donut" before worrying about "decadent delicious donuts"? Other factors: In terms of search volume, as you would expect, "donut" sees 10 to 1000 times as many searches as most of the other keywords adjacent to it. We can definitely compete for "donut" -- just trying to figure out if doing so should be our top priority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Website dropped out from Google index
Howdy, fellow mozzers. I got approached by my friend - their website is https://www.hauteheadquarters.com She is saying that they dropped from google index over night - and, as you can see if you google their name, website url or even site: , most of the pages are not indexed. Home page is nowhere to be found - that's for sure. I know that they were indexed before. Google webmaster tools don't have any manual actions (at least yet). No sudden changes in content or backlink profile. robots.txt has some weird rule - disallow everything for EtaoSpider. I don't know if google would listen to that - robots checker in GWT says it's all good. Any ideas why that happen? Any ideas what I should check? P.S. Just noticed in GWT there was a huge drop in indexed pages within first week of August. Still no idea why though. P.P.S. Just noticed that there is noindex x-robots-tag in headers... Anyone knows where this can be set?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Sudden drop in index, is this a bug?
We haven't made any sort of changes to the website recently and we had a 10% drop in indexed pages. I know there is rumors of a bug, has this happened to anyone else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Drop in indexed pages!
Hi everybody! I've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/ for a little while now. Until recently, everything was great - good rankings for the key terms of 'bird hides' and 'pond dipping platforms'. However, rankings have tanked over the past few days. I can't point my finger at it yet, but a site:thewilddeckcompany.co.uk search shows only three pages have been indexed. There's only 10 on the site, and it was fine beforehand. Any advice would be much appreciated,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
A question of rankings (with actual domains)
Working with the main site featured in this Open Site Explorer comparison (you'll need a pro account to view this), and have been for quite some time. Recently we've slid behind Ebay (huge brand, I get it), but the other competitors don't really make sense to me. Main phrase is pontoon boats, and maybe I'm too close to this, but we seem to be in the best shape overall in terms of the domain, the page itself, and even our social media is pretty successful (we're closing in on 5,000 likes and have a pretty engaged audience). More internal linking is an opportunity, but I'd like another set of eyes (or several for that matter) to weigh in on opinions. I'm a bit stumped. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
I try to apply best duplicate content practices, but my rankings drop!
Hey, An audit of a client's site revealed that due to their shopping cart, all their product pages were being duplicated. http://www.domain.com.au/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/ and http://www.domain.com.au/shop/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/ The easiest solution was to just block all /shop/ pages in Google Webmaster Tools (redirects were not an easy option). This was about 3 months ago, and in months 1 and 2 we undertook some great marketing (soft social book marking, updating the page content, flickr profiles with product images, product manuals onto slideshare etc). Rankings went up and so did traffic. In month 3, the changes in robots.txt finally hit and rankings decreased quite steadily over the last 3 weeks. Im so tempted to take off the robots restriction on the duplicate content.... I know I shouldnt but, it was working so well without it? Ideas, suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
How to increase rankings?
I know to increase rankings involves link building, but what kind of link building is worth it and what type is not? At the moment most of my link building effort is focused on guest blogging, which has worked well for me, I have seen some good movement on a range of keywords using this tactic but I cant help but think I could get a lot more movement in the serp's if I mixed it up a little. A few other link building techniques I know of are below, but I don't really use them, so my question is what ones should I be using combined with my guest blogging to give my rankings that little extra help. 1. Directory Submissions 2. Article Submissions 3. Press Release Distribution 4. Forum Signatures 5. Blog Comments 6. Social bookmarking 7. Social Sites (Squidoo, Weebly, Wordpress, blogger) If I have missed something please let me know. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0