Keyword rankings sudden drop
-
Hello,
I own an online headshop, and as of last week my keyword rankings dropped significantly on some competitive keywords I was ranking for. I noticed the same thing happened to me last month, and then a few weeks later these keywords were ranking again. In fact, they were ranking even higher than before. I also noticed that 2 of my biggest competitors who receive 500k+ clicks a month had a significant drop in their keyword rankings as well. Does anybody know why this happens and how to correct the issue?
Thanks
-
Sorry to say that without an in-depth look, there isn't going to be a way to tell. Unless you changed something, it is most likely testing or an update from Google. I've seen rankings go up and down over the years on multiple sites for a variety of reasons and sometimes what seems like no reason.
It can be the negation of the value of backlinks, or an entrant to the market, or Google trying other sites out to see if they perform better in the eyes of the searcher.
In this industry, there is only so much you can control. Focus on creating top quality content, focus on the searcher, and you'll come out on top.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Broad keyword use
It seems that the broad keyword use is not very accurate. I have 3 very similar keywords: Dive Florida, scuba diving in Florida, Florida scuba diving. Why does the program not recognise them as broad usage when assessing the page title? And if the program cannot understand broad usage terms, how confident can we be that the program can properly measure for keyword stuffing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Zambezikid0 -
I lost traffic from my website and the rankings also gone down... What should I do?
I've started working on a project recently (for 20 days) and it got average 1800 visitors per day and the ranking were seemed good. When I started that project, I saw that there were too many plugins installed. I removed unnecessary plugins and keep the importance ones. And I started modify some pages considering SEO perspective. Few days ago I created a backlink in reddit; from where I got way too much traffic in the site at the time and the server gone down. So I have to change the server. Now I see the drastic drop down in both ranking and the traffic. I am wondering if the ranking affected when I changed the server? Or Is there any other way to check why my ranking and traffic gone down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Homepage not ranking for branded searches after Google penalty removal
Hi all, A site I work on was hit with a manual action penalty some time ago for spammy links built by a former SEO agency. It was a partial match penalty so only affected some pages - most likely the homepage. We carried out a lot of work cleaning up links and disavowed suspicious links which we couldn't get removed. Again, most of these were to the homepage. The disavow file was uploaded to Google last Friday and our penalty was lifted this Tuesday. Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. I've carried out the obvious checks - robots.txt, making sure we're not accidentally noindexing the page or doing anything funky with canonicals etc and it's all good. Have any of you guys had a similar experience? I'm thinking Google simply needs time to catch up due to all the links we've disavowed and sitting tight is the best option but could do with some reassurance! Any past experiences or advice on what I might be missing would be great. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brendan-Jackson1 -
Want to know Best Method to fix keyword cannibalization issue?
I have a website that has been experiencing keyword cannibalization issue since last 2-3 months. We have one main key search term to bring our website TOP ranking, but we have been seeing our website’s 2 different pages ranking strangely sometime for 1st page& sometime for 2nd page that one main key search term. As e.g.:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aman_123
our main key search term 1st page rank sometime instead 2nd page
our main key search term 2nd page rank sometime instead page I am looking for best solution here to get this fixed..0 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Should you include keywords in your domain name to rank well on Google Places?
Is it okay to include keywords in your domain name (as well as business name) to rank well on Google Places? In my opinion, this is very spammy and the sites using this technique will be slapped by Google sooner or later.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thegoatman1 -
How cloudflare might affect "rank juice" on numerous domains due to limited IP range?
We have implemented quite a few large websites onto cloudflare and have been very happy with our results. Since this has been successful so far, we have been considering putting some other companies on CL as well, but have some concerns due to the structure of their business and related websites. The companies run multiple networks of technology, review, news, and informational websites. All have good content (Almost all unique to each website) and rankings currently, but if implemented to cloudflare, would be sharing DNS and most likely IP's with eachother. Raising a concern of google reducing their link juice because it would be detected as if it was coming from the same server, such as people used to do for their blog farms. For example, they might be tasked to write an article on XYZ company's new product. A unique article would be generated for 5-10 websites, all with unique, informative, valid and relevant content to each domain; Including links, be it direct or contextual, to the XYZ product or website URL. To clarify, so there is no confusion...each article is relevant to its website... technology website- artciel about the engineering of xyz product
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MNoisy
business website - How xyz product is affecting the market or stock price
howto website - How the xyz product is properly used Currently all sites are on different IP's and servers due to their size, but if routed through cloudflare, will Google simply detect this as duplicate linking efforts or some type of "black hat" effort since its coming from cloudflare? If yes, is there a way to prevent this while still using CL?
If no, why and how is this different than someone doing this to trick google? Thank you in advance! I look forward to some informative answers.0 -
Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smckenzie750