Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword
-
Hello,
Our site
nlpca(dot)com
dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause?
Thank you so much,
Bob
-
It's dropped enough that it's not other sites doing SEO. Lately I've been carefully adding a phrase here and there to our articles' copy to match the keywords in our titles. A while back I added "and Utah" to our home page title tag, but that was a couple of months ago. No striking changes that I can see. We have 2 other sites and all sites have an "Our other sites" link to interconnect, but that's never been a problem before.
Any help is greatly appreciated
-
Hi Bob,
Use this tool in SEOMoz - http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization
As I suspected by simply looking at your homepage, the term NLP appears very frequently most likely affecting keyword density. To search engines, it looks like keyword stuffing.
Running the report check in SEOMoz confirms this. Once place in particular is your <title>tag:</p> <p><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> California and Utah | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Training | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Certification | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Courses</span></p> <p><span>You might try something instead like:<br /></span><span style="background-color: initial;">NLP Institute of California | Training, Certification and Courses</span></p> <p>Also, NLP is a very broad term that is probably highly competitive - for example, Google shows 84 million results for the term. It might be better to do some keyword research and focus on more targeted terms - perhaps in your case, NLP Training. I also assume NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming (oddly I covered this topic as my senior research project in college). On your homepage, that term does not appear.</p> <p>Something that might help others answer your question - when did the drop in ranking occur and did you make any changes to your website shortly before the rank drop?</p></title>
-
Have you made any changes?
Has the site that moved above you been doing SEO?
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 to rank for a keyword
Hi guys, I'm looking to rank a new blog for a search term which we currently already rank #1 for. I want to create a blog which provides a better solution to a searchers query and knock our current #1 page for this new one. Is there a way to do this simply without losing the real-estate the currently ranked #1 page has already accumulated? Or is just a matter of working on this new blog to find it's own way to the top? Thanks in advance, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameseacott0 -
Bad Backlinks to my website. Rankings Dropped
Hi guys, My name is Flavius and I work for a website named LaserPRocessing.ro from Romania. In april this year the site was infected with a virus and got around 1k bad backlinks. I found those backlinks on Moz Backlinks Tools. I added them on GSC disawow file. What next steps do you recommend to tell Google to block those links? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nojaflaviusalex0 -
Keyword keeps fluctuating between a high rank and no rank?
I've searched around and I can't seem to find anyone else describing the issue I'm seeing. Basically for a very long time our website (snappages.com) has always ranked in the tens and twenties for "create a website". It's a high volume keyword and we get a lot of traffic from it. Around May 16th it suddenly disappeared completely from search results on Google and now it will sporadically show back up with a SERP in the twenties every 5-10 days for a few hours and then completely disappear again. This pattern has continued to this day. I've checked and there are no manual penalties and nothing has really changed dramatically from a content perspective or anything like that. I would understand if we got penalized and our ranking dropped, or even if it just completely disappeared? This is the only keyword that this is happening for, all the others remain unaffected. Anyone know how I can find out why this is happening or have suggestions on how to fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stestone0 -
Linking to one of my own sites, from my site
Hi experts, I own a site for castingjobs (Site1) and a site for selling paintings (Site2). In a long time, I've had a link at the bottom of Site1, linking to Site 2. (Basicaly: Partnerlink: Link site 2). Site1 is for me the the only important site, since it's where Im making my monthly revenue. I added the link like 5 years ago or so, to try to boost site 2. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
1. Is it somehow bad for SEO for site 1, since the two sites have nothing to do with each other, they are basically just owned by me.
2. Would it make sense to link from Site 2 to Site 1 indstead?0 -
A specific keyword has dropped from #1 in Google to nowhere at all...
Hi guys, I hope you can help. We have a large ecommerce website which has different domains for each language - GB, USA, DE, AU & CA. I've been working my way through the errors that have been flagged in Moz and today I noticed something quite worrying. One of our strong keywords has dropped from 1st place to nowhere at all. However, the Canadian version is ranking in the UK desktop search and our mobile site is appearing in the desktop search too. The keyword is 'personalised macbook cover' and the page in question is https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/personalised-macbook-cover/ I'm confused as this page was ranking brilliantly a couple of weeks ago and now it's nowhere to be seen. We've added alternate and canonical tags to distinguish which site is mobile and which site is desktop. We've also submitted a sitemap so that it takes into account all of the languages. There are no harmful links and we've changed the content of the page across each language. I've attached what appears in the SERP's in the UK. (there is the mobile version ranking at the top and the Canadian version further down the page) Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Danny webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=personalised%20macbook%20covers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Why my site not ranking
Hello everyone, can anyone suggest me, where i am having problem in my site www.suntechengineers.com, i know content is less,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojathakar
but any other things that i am missing in my site? Is There any on page query please let me know, i need urgently getting up this,please help thanx in advance0 -
New website won't rank for branded keywords in Google, but does in Bing
We launched a website in October www.butterfly.com. The branded product name "Butterfly Body Liners" will not rank until page 2 of Google, but it ranks #1 in Bing. Organic traffic never really picked up so it's not easy to tell if it's been "hit" by any penalty. The strange thing is, this website: http://archive.is/PQZdO is ranking #1. This is an archived version of the site. Does anyone have any insight as to why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LaughlinConstable0 -
Site rankings dropped from ~15 to 500+ but Google says we were not penalized
2 months ago my site was ranking about 15 for my main KWs in the UK (my main market). On July 28 we dropped suddenly to ~500 or not in the top 500 at all in the UK for the 3 main keywords. However, these same terms are still ranking in other markets and we are doing okay in the UK for other terms targeted to the same pages. I cleaned up my links/content and sent a reconsideration request to Google. I then looked closer at my links and realized Google may be counting my affiliate links as if they were mine, so thought maybe that was the problem. I sent Google another reconsideration request and they wrote back the letter pasted below Any ideas about what happened or how I can get my rankings back? This definitely doesn't seem like it was just a simple algorithm change. There were no major changes done to our site, and we are still ranking in other markets. Dear site owner or webmaster
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider your site for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team0