So many questions!
-
Yesterday was a jubilant day!
Our website http://www.farnorthkennel.com hit the #2 spot on google for one of our keyword searches "german shepherd puppies in Alaska." We are new at this and it took a lot of work and about 2 months to do this (I realize this is fast).
What happened overnight? We have new pages on page 1 towards the bottom, but our homepage fell to around page 4? What would make this happen? I didn't make any updates to the homepage recently.
Am I linking to it too much interally? Am I running too many categories? The "too many on pages links" warning comes up all of the time, but I feel like my site is structured user friendly.
I am blogging like mad and successfully getting guest blog posts on reputable sites like mad. I have 30,000 Facebook fans....
but will never understand google.
Any takers? What happened overnight?
-
Yes I think from the small snapshot I viewed your link profile looks very strong. Small, but strong. Just keep going at it and you'll be fine. Keep it relevant, keep your content strong, and you can't fail.
-
Thanks for telling me this, Takeshi!
I didn't know most of this information. Very helpful information.
-
It happened literally overnight today. The competitors seem a little shuffled. The people at the number one slot, who have a small DA seem to always be in that slot.
I'll get there!
-
Hi Jesse,
Thanks so much.
Did you look at my link-building to see that it's good? That'd be a major relief - I have been working hard. The backlinks are small - I've been doing this for about a month.
Am I linking within the site too much?
Thanks again!
-
Any number of things could have happened, just like these guys said. Takeshi's list is spot-on.
I would add that you really don't have a very large backlink profile at all. Your DA is weak. This is NOT a bad thing whatsoever. It just means you have some good ole SEO work to do!
The good news is you are not penalized and you will not be penalized if you continue building links the way you said you are. Keep it up and you'll have that page one listing back soon enough!
Good luck
-
First of all, Google rankings fluctuate all the time, so don't get too attached to your rankings. You don't control the search results, Google does, and Google makes changes to their algorithm all the time.
Beyond Google just being Google, there are plenty of other possibilities for rankings fluctuations:
- Competitors doing SEO on your sites
- New competitors entering the niche
- Losing links that you used to have
- A drop in PageRank for sites linking to you
- Google changing the value of sites linking to you
- Over-optimized anchor text
- Personalization/geo-specific rankings
- Etc.
You can try investigating some of these and seeing if you can determine the cause of the drop, but unless you're doing something completely wrong or blackhat, focus on making the best site that you possibly can for the query and continue building backlinks. Show Google that you deserve to be listed #1.
-
When did that happen? Google may have the results shuffled for a day or two while the index is updating. It's not a surprise to have a site ranked 2nd one day and the next day 17th and the next day back in 2nd place.
Did you check what your competitors are doing?
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
-
UTM tracking on a mapped subdomain, is it OK? (DA bonus question)
Hi, This is a technical question. OK, two technical questions. Please bear with me and I'll do my best to explain... We have a WordPress blog (business account, hosted by WordPress). We use it to blog and send traffic to our separate e-commerce site. We use UTM tracking to see which blog posts perform best. Our e-commerce site has a high domain authority. Our blog, not so much. In an effort to increase the domain authority of the blog we have mapped a subdomain of the e-commerce site to the Wordpress blog (still hosted by WordPress). Q1. Will this actually raise the blog's DA? If the blog does get a DA boost, I guess it'll be because Google now sees it as part of a powerful domain. But if it is technically part of the powerful domain... Q2. Should we remove the UTM parameters from the blog? I've read that you should never use UTM on internal links because it messes with your Google Analytics data. But I'm unsure if links on a mapped subdomain count as 'internal links'. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance. J
Reporting & Analytics | | JabeKay0 -
Google Analytics Question - Impressions & Queries Up, Sessions Down
I'm working with a client who, according to the Google Query report, impressions and sessions are up since we've started work with them about 6 months ago, but Google sessions are down. In moz, we're seeing a gradual, but steady increase in search visibility specifically with Google. Note: this is all organic. From when we started tracking queries, the first month we were tracking there were 43,581 impressions and 690 click throughs for the month. This past month there were 98,293 queries and 1015 clicks throughs for the month (granted not year over year data) - of these 1,015 clicks, 995 of them were from web. However, for those same time periods, sessions from Google are down over 30% - 1,750 vs. 1,189. I'm not sure how to interpret this. I realize that clicks and sessions are not a straightforward comparison, but I would think that if clicks were up according to the query report that sessions would also be up. Is it that some of these clicks are bouncing and therefore not being tracked as a session? Is there a potential issue with how data is being tracked?
Reporting & Analytics | | Corporate_Communications0 -
Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero
Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with... I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help? Any input greatly appreciated 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | Gokart0 -
Bounce Rate Question - The percent calculated does not add up
Hello All, I'm attempting to see why organic search bounce rate has increased by 5% when compared to last year for a certain section of my website. I am using a custom segment to filter the specific pages I want to look at. Once the custom segment is set, I go to Acquisition - > Channels - > Organic. Then, I click the Landing Pages tab. Because we don't have keyword data anymore the only thing I can look at is the landing pages that contributed to the change in bounce. Finally, I set my date range and compare to the same date range as last year. Once I set the date range I am presented with a list of URLs and the percent change in bounce rate for each URL. This is where I get confused. If you look at the average bounce rate at the top of the column (example 1 attached) it does not add up with the data below it. If you export all of the data to excel, and then do an "Average" function in Excel, the data adds up to 17.29% instead of 35.04% for Sept. 2013. Why does this not add up? Isn't GA calculating the Average? Also, I always notice several URLs with only 1 session per URL. Several of these 1 session URLs have a 100% bounce rate. Since the bounce rate at the top of the column (example1) is a reflection of the average bounce rate, wouldn't these 1 session URLs significantly distort my data? I ultimately just want to see the pages that are contributing to the increased bounce rate when compared to last year. Having a hard time figuring this one out. Thank you all, Dave zMfAGls
Reporting & Analytics | | DaveGuyMan0 -
Ok. I'm just going to cut loose with my stupid question. What is internal link equity? What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity?
What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity? Is there a limit to how many of these I want? What's the rule-of-thumb? Cheers, Wes
Reporting & Analytics | | wrconard0 -
Some questions on how to set up a multi-visit advanced segment in Google Analytics
Hi I would like some assistance / clarification on how to set up a user segment so that it can track user behavior over multiple visits. Basically I have a campaign set up and want to see conversions - even if they hit the site and then convert later on another visit. I've read that you can do this (over up to 30 days). So I start off by filtering TRAFFIC SOURCE - easy enough. But then I have to add under "advanced" correct? But then when I set the next filter to the GOAL I want, I only get "by session" and "by hit" as options. The blog post I read made it sound like only "by user" would then really do multi visits. Is "by user" only an e-commerce tracking option? (which I don't have set up) Is there another way/path to get the info I need? Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
Do Google penalise you for having too many 404's?
Hi There I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools. We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found. However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control. This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate. Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further. Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri.. URL Discovery Date
Reporting & Analytics | | ArenaFlowers.com
http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
Sep 12, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
Sep 9, 2011 I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control. Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves? Thanks! Sam.0 -
Reg Ex Question about Rewrite Rules
In this redirect rule, what does the "$1" mean? RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(oldsiteaustin|www.oldsiteaustin) [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://austin.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Reporting & Analytics | | SEOteamfl0