January 2016: Massive Rankings Fluctuations
-
Hi guys.
For past 2.5-3 weeks We've been experiencing lots of changes in our rankings, unfortunately, mostly going down. Our website is regexseo.com. I Know there was a January 12 "core update" in Google Algorithms, but there is no any specific information I can find.
Now, here is what doesn't make sense to me and it's the same reason I'm worried if we are doing something wrong (or not doing something right? - we've been rankings for "web design houston" in positions 2-4 for years, and recently after months of work we finally got to positions 4-6 on "seo houston". But during last two weeks we got down to beginning of the second page
Our backlink profile is growing, traffic to website is growing over all and stable to main landing pages (+/- 5%), new content is being released/updated every week, nothing stupid or drastic is being done. All the metric tools are saying we are "supposed" to do really good.
Now, while we are going down, our competitors have some fluctuation (+/-2 positions, but not anything close to what we are experiencing).
Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions?
-
I'd take a look at your content. Identify your most popular landing pages and look at the their bounce rates and time on page. Is the content delivering as promised? Has it earned any links? If not, consider deleting, retiring or updating the content with the goal of improving its engagement metrics.
I've experimented with this a bit and noticed improvement. Nothing scientific, but it's worth a try. Pick a couple to start and see what happens.
-
I'm so sad now
-
And this would be $1M question... even $1B.
As i said - it's core algo changes that's out of our control. I believe that top SEO experts (include Moz one's!) are trying to disassemble what's changed. So far there wasn't news that someone share it.
-
My question and worry why in the world it happened to "web design houston", for which we have been ranking in top 3 forever. And we haven't done any changes to pages recently.
-
However, if most of backlinks are nofollow, then it shouldn't be a problem, right?
And I attached the backlink comparison. There is a huge difference in do/no follow profiles between us and competitors. It can't be that 2% of backlink profile (and it's been like this for long time) all of the sudden made us drop 10 positions.
-
If they are nofollow, that eliminates the problem.
The ones that I looked at were... (1) keyword rich (2) site-wide (3) do-follow and (4) in the footer. Each of those 4 items are listed in Google's "Link Schemes" document that I linked to above.
-
Thanks everybody for responses.
Now, so what do I/we do? Is it just timely issue?
-
Would this be a problem if all those links are nofollow? Cause they are. Or at least 95%+ of them.
P.S. Also, if I compare our backlink profile to our competitors, they got 98%+ do follow backlink profile, from their clients footers mostly.
-
Hi Peter,
The same have happend to me.
I'm really concernd about some fluctuations that are drivign my clients crazyGR
-
Peter,
I have experienced the same.
-
Have seen it on alot of sites. The drop in rankings we are seeing is on less substantive sites generally.
Traffic signals are what we think has been impacted most plus some sort of sub domains/exact url impact. Not sure on the latter yet. We think the google update has upgraded how it is looking at traffic and how it interacts with the site. Where did it come from (did it enter via a search term), how long did it stay and what did it do next (did it share your content on social sites)?. Google seem to be giving maximum value to what we call High Domain Authority Referral Traffic. They seem to have upgraded their view of the quality of traffic being referred via backlinks.
The perfect backlink may now be one from a high Domain Authority site which refers traffic that stays on and interacts with your website.
We are getting ranking results via maximising the use of traffic signals. From maximising interaction and time on site to using traffic to turn previously dormant backlinks into ranking assets, there seems to be a range of ways to use these signals to generate ranking increases.
Anyway early days, but the fluctuations are absolutely there... we are seeing double dips and even double upswings, before it settles.
Hope that helps.
-
-
From the recently updated Google Quality Guidelines..... section on Link schemes.
- "Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites"
In reference to these.
-
Same here... first goes up and now (this week) goes down. Probably they tweak something like fine-tuning algos.
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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Is anyone seeing excessive ranking fluctuations?
Has anyone noticed an unusual shift in ranking fluctuations starting around 20 hours ago? I have noticed some fairly major positive shifts on two different websites, interested if anyone else has seen the same thing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman102 -
How to rank a page on established site quickly
Hi, I'm looking for information about how I can rank an e-commerce category page quickly from a link building perspective. It usually takes me 6-12 months to rank these pages within the top 3 spots with link building, but I would like to get results faster. My site is established for more than 10 years and performs well in Google organic search. Here is what usually works over a 6-12 month time span: 15-40 links within articles on DA 15-60 sites, built within 6-12 months More than 75% of the links are from blogs Variety of anchor text Combination of follow/nofollow Deep links to product pages within the category we're trying to rank Might be important to note that it was easy for us to get category pages listed in DMOZ categories, when it was still around but it didn't seem to play any role in getting ranked faster. Note: We only build links on real sites with real traffic and decent performance metrics. No PBNs or other crap sites. I'd sincerely appreciate it if anyone can make any suggestions or point me towards helpful info. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
Subfolder ranks worse than the rest of the site
We have the strangest problem. The blog for our website ranks very poorly: www.lifeionizers.com/blog = average position in SERPs = 200. The site itself has an average position in SERPs of 12. The blog has a few terms it ranks #1 for such as branded terms and: is mineral water alkaline = 1.3 kangen water vs alkaline water = 2.6 kangen water pyramid = 1.2 ph of redbull = 1.1 (Used by Google as answer in knowledge graph) But the blog ranks terribly for most search terms. This blog has about 440 pages of in-depth, well-written authoritative content. Readers are well engaged, the blog has a bounce rate of ~3.5% with average time on page of over 6 minutes. The problem can't be the quality of the content. Does Google levy penalties against specific subdirectories? Or is this a configuration problem? Bad links have been disavowed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | karasd0 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Dropped ranking - new domain same IP????
We dropped ranking late last year for our site, so decided to start over with a new domain. However we didn't change IP address. Would this cause any issues???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
Rank went up, But?
ok, I have been optimizing a sit for a while and decided to drop the flash site build an HTML site instead for obvious reasons. But, as I was building the new site, BANG! a big jump in Google rank? How can this be, I thought out loud. Must be all my anchor text kicking in...So, I am left with this question...Or did google pick up on my new site as I was building it. I build it on a new DNS, then revert back to the main DNS... Drop the HTML site and continue my link getting with the main site? Or chalk it up under something else and roll with new site. I hope that was not to confusing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0