Sudden drop in ranking for important keyword? No penalty / other issues detected
-
Hi
For our site we previously ranked well for the term "botswana safari holidays" on the page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx
We've suddenly seen a dramatic drop for this term, currently ranked #43 on Google UK.
There are no penalty notices in Webmaster tools and the only edits to the page recently have been to include the term "Botswana safari holidays" in the page title and the on-page h2 (previously Botswana safaris and holidays).
Any suggestions why we have seen a large decrease for this term? We expect to see some fluctuation but this one seems a bit dramatic. We've not lost any backlinks to the page that we know of.
Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks Doug, that's really helpful. Good to see that phrase has bounced back up as well.
We've been looking at our backlinks as we are aware there are a lot of bad, irrelevant directory sites that we are clearing up. Historically the old sites were in a pattern of steadily declining organic traffic, from the end of 2012. This has transferred to the new site (keywords slipping a few places, less long tail traffic). We think this may be due to a poor backlink profile.
We will also look into doing some outreach to the linking domains on the old site and see if we can get these moved over to the new site rather than just relying on the redirects.
Thanks again!
-
So it might just be fluctuation following the consolidation. I wonder if this is just the ripples/disturbance as Google gets to grips with the changes to your site and the various redirects you may have been put in place.
I note that the page is currently ranking #22 on Google UK. which is a big improvement on #43.
If you've not noticed the same problems happening on the other keywords your tracking and as the overall traffic seems to to be stable/growing then I suspect that there's no need to panic.
Obviously links to the now consolidated domains are no longer being created so you'll get some degradation as existing links become stale and decay (Is there an outreach opportunity here? Did you contact sites linking to the old domains?)
The other thing to watch is any fluctuations in the search result pages (not just your own ranking position). Is it just you being affected or is it something wider than that. In a different niche.
So don't panic, keep an eye on what happens to your rankings over the next few weeks and see what happens.
-
Nice catch Travis. Really.
-
Excellent research Doug!
-
Hi Doug
The reason for the sudden increase in August was because we consolidated several product websites under our one, main domain. The content on the old sites was transferred to the main website and all the pages were redirected. This was done working in partnership with a fairly large SEO company to ensure that everything was handled correctly.
We've not been doing any link-building/acquisition since, other than working with some selected travel journalists and photographers. However historically it does look like there has been some bad link building done on the old sites. The traffic on these old sites had been dropping overtime. With the backlink profiles of these sites pointing to the main content, could they be passing on old penalties?
Organic traffic as a whole is up month on month, but down year on year. Most of our tracked keyword terms have seen slight increases recently, it was just this one in particular which has plummeted.
Thanks for the advice! Would you recommend that the backlink profile is the primary issue to look at for now?
-
Hi WIll,
Is it just this keyword/page that's being affected or is it many keywords across your entire site? What does your overall organic traffic look like?
Taking a look at your domain in SEMRush, I can see that you gain a whole bunch of keyword rankings in August followed by some volatility and lost/gained (more lost than gained) keywords between November and January. (both Google UK and US)
The data's about to creep off the left hand edge of the graph, but looking in ahrefs, it looks as if a whole load of links were acquired in August. The number of linking domains has been has been steadily growing since then.
See: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.naturalworldsafaris.com
What kind of link-building/acquisition have your been undertaking. I've not taking a good look at your backlink profile but did noticed a directory or two. I'm wondering if there is anything that might have reached a tipping point.
I also notice a blog that's sending you an "infinite" number of links! Looks like there's some recursive links going on. This is just one example URL so you can see the kind of problem (eek!):
There seem to be getting a large number of links from some domains (possible site-wide links or other problems?)
I'd take a deep breath and take a deeper look at your organic traffic (What does Webmaster Tools show you under Search Traffic -> Search Queries? What's happening to your impressions/clicks etc?)
Then look at any link building/outreach you've been doing over the last 6 months. I wouldn't focus on just the one page you've mentioned as it looks like other pages/keywords being affected too.
-
Hi Robert and Travis
Thanks for your responses.
We've not changed anything in the last 90 days, other than fixing a few issues with a duplicate subdomain. When I looked in Majestic I'm only seeing 9 external backlinks to that page. Open Site Explorer shows 35 inbound links from 4 domains. This hasn't changed recently as far as I'm aware.
Thanks for pointing out the issue with the duplicate domains, I thought this had been fixed but we will get back onto this. It isn't a new issue though so I don't see why this term would suddenly drop so dramatically. We've (fortunately) not had the same issues on other top traffic driving keywords/pages.
We are picking up some bad links in our backlink profile that may be contributing to a gradually declining SEO visability. We are cleaning these up but I'm still not sure that it would account for a sudden drop on a key term like this.
Any further insights are most welcome!
-
I would probably start here:
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx
Both URLs resolve. It's likely there's an issue with the rewrite rules which is creating duplicate content. Your mileage may vary, I don't usually work with ASP.net. I notice that the ABTOT page does the same thing on my crawl. The crawler also picked up /Newsletter and /newsletter.aspx, as well as an extensionless /register page.
-
Will,
That page shows 43 links to it in Majestic and only two of those are since late Sept. The only negative I see is one domain appears to be a sitewide with about 33 links from it. That may be affecting you.
Short of that, have you changed anything in the last 90 days?Good luck,
Robert
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 will ranking keywords add on my website
Its been a lot of time since I have launched my website but I am not getting any ranking keywords can you please help me about the following factor or provide some solutions my website is about selling third-party antivirus and technical service: norton.com/setup
On-Page Optimization | | Mehakayna0 -
Site appears to rank very low
Hi, A site we manage is ranking very low for it's main key phrases. The site is www.moremouse.com. For example for the phrase "orlando vacation rentals" it ranks around page 12 which seems very low considering the DA, PA, links, etc. compared to many sites ranking much much higher. Can anyone see anything obvious that is causing it to rank so low? Thanks Pete
On-Page Optimization | | QbicIS0 -
Optimizing for two keywords
Hi there, my question is: I need to optimze two pages related to almost the same concept but different orientations. One keyword is "emocional intelligence development" and the other word is "emocional intelligence workshops" I can't mix the two pages in one unique page due to web strucutre reasons. Is it possible to optimize each web for each keyword independently although they have the concept emotional intelligence in common? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Meta keywords and meta news keywords
I've got a question regarding this. So normally Meta keywords it is not relevant and we shouldn't use them, however there are opinions that we can use them as these are signals for other Search Engines. Meta news keywords - are ok to be used in the news sites. what is your opinion on using both of them on a news site? Can this help, or harm? thanks, Irina
On-Page Optimization | | InformMedia0 -
Best Tactics/Approach to Rank Keywords in Different GEOs
Hi Folks, I would like to have your opinion on the best ways/approaches we need to take if we want to rank the same keywords in different GEOs. To consider, I have a set of 100+ keywords which I would like to rank up in different GEOs, for example 6 different countries and some of these are not English, say france and UAE. What would be the best approach to deal in this case on a logical basis? Any suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | RanjeetP0 -
Ranking Issues Recently Popping Up
We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff. Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor. The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause. I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion. Domain: bonitaj.com My Thoughts On Possible Issues... 1. Text Content & Panda Update I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content. I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content. Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy. THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text. Do you think this is hurting us? THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages. 2. Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured. I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages. Do you think this is hurting us? I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic. In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages? 3. Lack of a sitemap? We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore. We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools. I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank? IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0 -
Keyword issue
On this site filmeonlinenoi.com the keyphrase "filme online gratis" its auto-cannibalizating?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexsmenaru0