Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
-
Hello,
We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3!
We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months.
Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
-
All though possible I would imagine Google would of sent out a warning or similar if there was some sort of penalty.
-
Could this possibly be connected to Google's Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent?
-
Hi There
This is definitely strange - does it still happen for you? I could not recreate the issue here. There's no doubt this is odd, but I'd ultimately be concerned if it was a page 1 result in which you were missing the first search around. Doesn't seem like this is affecting any actual visibility though?
How are impressions in WMT? Anything off there?
-Dan
-
Thank you for checking this for us and confirming that something is not right, I thought I was going crazy...
I will try to contact Google via webmaster tools (perhaps filing another consideration request) to prompt a reply.
If anybody have any suggestions it would be much appreciated thanks!
-
Could be how Google are delivering their results as mentioned or a bug when they tweaked their algorithm, you could try and rock the boat and email them via webmasters though don't expect them to really help out much they are pretty secretive bunch. Have you found no change on the search with active SEO ? I presume there has been some sort of SEO going on though its a really odd thing
-
Ok Now I've just got home and did the search again on a different machine, and indeed you weren't within the first 10 pages on an initial search, but appeared top of page 3 on a second search.
How bizarre, but unfortunately I cannot offer a solution either.
-
That is strange. Using firefox I first searched for you and you werern't in the top 10 pages. I then performed the same search and you were right at the top of page 3.
I can't offer a solution/ reason but i'd be really interested if someone else could!
-
Unfortunately I could not recreate your issue.
I just did the same search and in firefox you appeared first time on page 4, position 32. I did the search in Chome on another machine and you appeared first time on page 4 in the same position.
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
-
Why is my site ranking so poorly compared to my competition?
I own a car shipping business (www.carshippingcarriers.com) and I was ranking very high last year, but around the end of August our site lost a TON of rank. Afterwards I had my SEO team at the time (no longer working with them) do a complete overhaul of the website (rewrote content, combined many pages together so no duplicate content issue, made it mobile friendly, etc.. Since then we continue to still lose rankings on Google. Yahoo and Bing seem to keep performing decently, but Google we are getting destroyed. I have been a member of Moz for a few months and I have been using the open site to check my competitors and their linking profile. One in particular, www.joescarshipping.com, has been ranking extremely well and the site looks horrible, doesn't have many links, hardly a social media presence, etc.. Compared my my website which has ton of content, articles on our website, social profile is great (tons of Google+ usage), not a ton of links so a decent amount of links, etc.. Why would a company like that be ranking so high while I keep falling? Any advice or reasoning as to what is wrong or what could be done to get better rankings? I am just at my wits end on this matter. 😕
Technical SEO | | Dutko23851 -
Google Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
Google not showing profile photo in search
I seen on google snippet review and it was showing profile photo in search but when i see directly on google.com it is not showing there.. what's the problem ?
Technical SEO | | xplodeguru0 -
Google sitemap just for a part of site?
Hi, I am about reorganize (content and seo-wise) a part of a larger site and I wondered if it is possible to use a Google sitemap just for some but not all pages of a site? Does anyone know if this has any impact on pages that are not included in the sitemap? Thanks
Technical SEO | | haest0 -
Can Google read onClick links?
Can Google read and pass link juice in a link like this? <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="#Link123" onClick="window.open('http://www.mycompany.com/example','Link123')">src="../../img/example.gif"/></a> Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
How a google bot sees your site
So I have stumbled across various websites like this: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/googlebot-spoofer/ The concept here is to be able to view your site as a googlebot sees it. However, the results are a little puzzling. Google is reading the text on my page but not the title tags according to the results. Are websites like this accurate OR does Google not read title tags and H1 tags anymore? Also on a slighly related note. I noticed the results show the navigation bar is being read first by google, is this bad and should the navigation bar be optimized for keywords as well? If it did, it would read a bit funny and the "humans" would be confused.
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?
Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0 -
Adding Google +1 To My Site
This may seem like a silly question, but I had my site designed by a third party and I don't know how to find this info. I want to add Google +1 button to my site. I've already added the script that makes it work in my , but don't know how to add the to the part of my site I'd like the icon to appear. If you take a look at my site, http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/, you will see the twitter and facebook icons that follow you around the site in the top right of the page. I'd like to drop in the +1 right next to them, but I don't know how to get to it. How do I access this on the server? What section of my FTP do these lil icons live? A folder? Any direction is greatly appreciated...thanks.
Technical SEO | | brentmitchell0