Wrong page ranking and rank drop, help!
-
Dear Moz community I would like to hear your advice about our current SEO problems. Our website is www.poolsonline.nl. This is a website where people can learn the Polish language on our website. This website has been online since 2007. The website got really outdated, so we built and launched a new version on March 1st (one month ago).
We have created a salespage that we would like to rank for the keywords 'cursus Pools' (Polish course) first of all and 'pools leren' (learn Polish) secondly. The page is https://www.poolsonline.nl/cursus-pools-leren-spreken/
The old website was on rank 4-5 (roughly) for 'cursus Pools' and 'pools leren'. When we launched the new website we were on the top 5 with two of our pages. We were even on rank 1 and our salespage was also showing on the first page and often also in the top 5 (below the 'wrong' page of ours). We got quite a lot of trafic and new clients. However the problem was that the wrong page was ranking higher. We wanted our salespage to rank and not our home page (https://www.poolsonline.nl/) and not our free lesson (https://www.poolsonline.nl/lessen/groeten-en-gesprek-voeren-in-het-pools-les-1/).
So what we did:
-
Read/watched recourses about this problem: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday and https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions and others.
-
Removed the keywords (cursus pools en Pools leren) from the wrong pages (home and free lesson pages).
-
Optimized the Salespage for these keywords
-
Improved internal linking with these key words to our salespage
-
Worked on link building for our salepage. We got about 5-10 links to our salespage in the first week of March (5 seems to be significant for this competition and we are working on more). These links are not yet in Moz OSE, but Google has indexed these pages and links. For reference, here are some of these links (not all):
-
http://www.iculture.nl/apps/ik-spreek-pools-taalcursus-pools-op-iphone/
-
http://pnkv.nl/nieuwsbericht.php?bericht=rozmowy-po-polsku-juz-po-6-miesiacach
-
Shared and promoted our salespage on social media
What we expected:
- Our salespage to show up on top for these keywords
- Our ranking to improve
What happened:
- Our salespage disappeared all together from the search results for these search terms (it does show up for more specific search queries, for example 'cursus pools leren spreken')
- Our site seems to keep dropping lower and lower. We are now on the bottom of page 1 or on page 2 for 'cursus Pools' and 'Pools leren' and not with the desired page
Questions we have for you to help us:
- Why do you think our salespage is not showing up anymore for these keywords ('cursus pools' and 'pools leren')?
- Do you think we got a penalty for over optimization or bad links?
- What can we more to get our salespage to rank for these keywords? (we are working on building/earning more links)
- What can we do to restore our rankings and not drop lower anymore?
- Do we need to give our efforts more time? How long?
- Any other adivce?
Thanks so much in advance!
-
-
Thank you James. We are just keeping things as they are right now and working on backlinks.
Any more ideas from others on this topic? For what it's worth I also discover a potential bad/penalty link. I asked another question about this here.
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
-
Do links like this really help for SEO?
I was doing research with Moz's Link Explorer and one of our competitors had almost 50 links coming from sites like this. Mostly nofollow but we all know that today the nofollow can still help. My question is this: Will links like these help in any shape or matter. The reason I am asking is because Link Explorer is finding them, so I am sure Google will find them as well. Examples of sites: http://www.microlinkinc.com, http://www.cmolink.com The sites that I found via analyzing had DA 35-40 I don't want to share all urls but you get the point. Basically these sites are free keyword analyzing sites, once you put in a keyword they will bring up to 20 sites that rank for that keyword. And my research suggests that these pages stay and are crawl-able since Moz has crawled them. For example Moz says: date first seen 09/12/2018 so almost 6 months has passed but that result that was searched I am assuming has stayed. Would it make sense to search on such sites keywords that you know you are ranking for and then your site would be listed below and stay there for Google to crawl and another nofollow link in our link basket. Is my thinking correct or is it waste of time. Frankly it would take 2sec to run a search for each keyword. Any feedback and thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Davit
Link Building | | Davit19850 -
Puzzled by high ranking page (#2 in SERPs) with zero/low page or domain authority
So, I get the smoothie that is page authority and domain authority and the link metrics that Moz uses to predict how well a page will rank for a certain keyword. I can look at a specific search term where we are on say, page 2 or 3, with a page authority of 1 and domain authority of 26, I get why competitors rank above us. But then I look at a keyword that is much more competitive, where we rank #2, which is awesome, where the landing page is also showing a page authority of 1, and domain authority of 26. How can we rank higher than competitors with a page authority of 56 and domain authority of 65? Their onpage optimization for the keyword is no worse, and sometimes better that ours but we maintain this ranking. By the way the competition also have hundreds if not thousands more linking root domains than our page. Any ideas why one keyword is a rockstar and one is a dud, with the same poor PA and DA?
Link Building | | seo-lab1 -
What off page strategies will work in 2015?
What off page strategies will work in 2015? Client's always look for something innovative in off page techniques how to approach this.
Link Building | | AMTrends0 -
Url variables, page rank and canonical question
Hello.
Link Building | | adrianTNT
I am having some back-links to my site that look like: http://site.com/page.html**?source=a**
http://site.com/page.html**?source=b** I assume these two will have two different ranks, is this issue fixed if I use canonical on the landing page? Thank you.0 -
BBB.org Listings and Local Rankings
So I joined the BBB for 1 of 3 stores we have located in difference cities and states. My local rankings dropped in all cities except the one that's registered with the BBB. Coincidence? Anyone experienced something similar?
Link Building | | schmeetz0 -
PPC Landing pages and SEO landing pages query
We do a fair amount of work on PPC and because of this a lot of our PPC landing pages also do quite well in SEO. We are thinking that the landing pages do well because they get a lot of traffic from PPC and therefore, maybe google can index and take note of these pages quicker? The pages that usually shoot right up the rankings are new pages used for long tailed keywords. So I have a few questions: Does the traffic from PPC actually have any effect on SEO rankings? If we were to create a page that was to act solely as an SEO landing page, would google take note if there was no traffic? Would simply linking from our main site to the landing page be enough to give it a bit of authority, in which we can build upon? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | esendex0 -
Value of a Wikipedia page
Is there any value in creating a Wikipedia page for a company then placing a link from a Wikipedia article that is focused on a service or type of product that the company offers? I was recently searching for topics related to a companies services on Wikipedia and found some of our competitors had links within the article to their very own Wikipedia pages. Companies Wikipedia page contained a link to the companies website.
Link Building | | TRICORSystems0