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
-
Looks like keyword stuffing, but it isn't
(There was a similar older question on the forum, but it wasn't really answered so please forgive me if this looks like a repeated question) Looks like keyword stuffing, but it isn't We have a massive web store with 80k "commodity products" (and this amount will only increase) which aren't sold the same way normal products are sold (i.e. by brand and model). Commodity products are sold by specification, therefore their product names are actually descriptions of the product. In our case, industrial fasteners (nuts, bolts, washers, screws, etc) sold in bulk. If you click on the link below, you will see that our catalog involves a tremendous amount of repetition, where the products all appear the same, but are varying by dimensions and/or package quantities. The solutions the web store software offers to solve this problem cause issues for us (i.e. displaying the dimensions and quantities ONLY under a common header) but more importantly, we are concerned that search engines are seeing this as keyword stuffing and penalizing the pages. http://www.aspenfasteners.com/Step-Bolts-Inch-Standard-s/407.htm If we can't change the presentation of the page, should we be concerned and if so, how do we let a search engine know that the repetition is legitimate?
Technical SEO | | AspenFasteners0 -
First Link Priority - Drop Down Menu
Hey Mozzers Just want to make sure I have this right - If a website offers a service, say "digital marketing" - and has this link in a dropdown menu in the header, would this make any link in the body of a page (using different anchor text) pointless in SEO terms?.. e.g. a link with "online marketing" or "digital strategy" Cheers!
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Image Search / sudden drop in traffic
One of our sites in Germany had a very sudden drop in traffic (starting Oct. 7th). The site gets most of it's organic traffic from Image Search. Checking in Search Console revealed that search volume for keywords increased in that period our average position is stable our click rate dropped dramatically (we double checked - searching the keyword in "anonymous mode" still showed our results for main keywords in top image positions (first 2 rows)). As an example (see attached screencopy) - keyword had clickrate of 1% (average) - dan dropped to 0.06% while the position remained stable. Germany is still using the "old" version of image search (unlike the rest of the world) - which gives the site preview rather than just the image slider when you click on a result in image search. Our first thought that this was changed - but it seems that it didn't change. Ideas what might cause this dramatic drop in click%? There have been no major technical modifications on the site for the last 2 months. thanks, Dirk GjlV8CW.jpg
Technical SEO | | DirkC0 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Keyword Difficulty Tool
Hi, When can we expect the keyword difficulty tool to be operational again? Thanks
Technical SEO | | dt18072 -
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 -
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 -
Keyword domains
Hi everyone. Two questions regarding keyword domains (e.g. "widgets.com") If we have to choose a domain with an extra word, does it make a difference to have the added word before or after? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "widgets-now.com" Does it make a difference if the extra word is a generic vs a 'real' word? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "japanese-widgets.com" Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Technical SEO | | hectorpn0