Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.


  • Hi all, We have recently added the meta descriptions for more than 50 pages of our website. It's been more than a week and all the pages have been indexed. But still I can see most of the pages in Google results didn't show up with recently added meta description, but the content from page like how it used to be. I wonder what's wrong with this scenario. Please guide of someone aware of this. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi all, We can see many website page titles are filled with "brand name & primary keyword" at suffix. Just wondering how much this gonna help. Or can we remove "primary keyword" from other non-relevant pages and limit the same to important pages to rank well? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi, I'm an SEO Intern for a third party wine delivery company and I'm trying to fix the following issue with the site regarding duplicate content on our product pages: Just to give you a picture of what I'm dealing with, the duplicate product pages that are being flagged have URLs that have different Geo-variations and Product-Key Variations. This is what Moz's Site Crawler is seeing as Duplicate content for the URL www.example.com/wines/dry-red/: www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g123456 www.example.com/wines/dry-red/_/N-g456789 www.example.com/wines/California/_/N-0 We have loads of product pages with dozens of duplicate content and I'm coming to the conclusion that its the product keys that are confusing google. So we had the web development team put the canonical tag on the pages but still they were being flagged by google. I checked the of the pages and found that all the pages that had 2 canonical tags I understand we should only have one canonical tag in the so I wanted to know if I could just easily remove the second canonical tag and will it solve the duplicate content issue we're currently having? Any suggestions? Thanks -Drew

    | drewstorys
    0

  • Hello, moz users. Has anyone confirmed that keyword ranking dropped since last few days? I've tracked several keyword ranking by Moz and SEMrush and the ranking dropped big time on both tools today. one of the keywords dropped its ranking from 10 to out of SERP. Mozcast has shown high temperature so I assume there is or has been algo update but I would like to know someone encountered the same issue. Thanks.

    | Yuki-hero
    0

  • Hi all, I know Google shows a different page titles. Happens when over optimised or when we copied competitors page title. But we did neither. Suddenly Google changed our homepage page title in search results. Our page title suffix "brand name" has been moved to beginning. Our page title is still for years.

    | vtmoz
    1

  • Hi all, I would like to know the community's opinion on this. A website with more pages or less pages will rank better? Websites with more pages have an advantage of more landing pages for targeted keywords. Less pages will have advantage of holding up page rank with limited pages which might impact in better ranking of pages. I know this is highly dependent. I mean to get answers for an ideal website. Thanks,

    | vtmoz
    1

  • Hi Moz! I've seen a big drop in Domain Authority 31 > 22 recently. I need a plan of what to sort out first, here are the points I know we need to improve: Page Speed Quality content - guides, blogs, videos Better UX experience to improve page engagement Backlinks - quality earned links & improvement of presence on social media This is our site http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ I am the only SEO, with a small content team - who only really work on adding new products to the site. Our dev team are in France and we can be restricted by them. But I'm worried & I need a plan of what to tackle first to help improve this. We also saw keywords drop out in March - I'm assuming after Fred, some keywords aren't ones I would worry about, but then some are - for example - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/dollies-load-movers-door-skates this page ranked at position 6 for Dollies - now dropped out altogether. Any ideas are welcome - help 🙂

    | BeckyKey
    2

  • I'm seeing quick answers where the answer and image are from different websites. Does anyone have any insight into what Google is doing? Example search term: "How to tie a knot" Thanks!

    | reese5213
    1

  • Hi I wondered if anyone had a case study or more info on how Google treats content under tabs? We have an ecommerce site & I know it is common to put product content under tabs, but will Google ignore this? Becky

    | BeckyKey
    1

  • Hope I'm not resurfacing this question. I don't mean about unrelated video. I wonder how much a brand video will entice the website visitors on homepage or any other landing page? And does Google consider it as a ranking factor?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Our website cms is WordPress. We have recently changed the URL pattern of our blog pages which resulted in hundreds of crawl errors in Google search console. Even though we don't have any broken links; old pages have been reported at Google. We are trying to redirect the old URLs to new which will be handled by auto redirects or manual redirects. Will so many redirects impact on website? I don't mean about internal redirects. I mean about redirects made for the cause of reclaiming non existing pages referred from external sites

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi all, If a website's traffic increase in "New visitors"; will this impact rankings? Do the website overall traffic affect rankings? How much this is related with ranking improvement for main keywords? Just because thousands of visits increased for website, will it count as a strong ranking improvement signal? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi, Moz Community. Just decided to sign up for a free trial because I'm absolutely at my wits end here. Here's my site: cheapgamesguru.com I run a small PC gaming blog monetized by affiliate marketing. I do all the writing, SEO, etc. myself. The content I write is, from what I can tell, fully complying with Google's guidelines, and in and of itself is pretty informative and high-quality. My site was started in December of 2015, and it was doing very well for a good 10 or 11 months - until late November of 2016. Then something happened. My traffic started plummeting - I went from getting nearly 300 organic users a day (Not sessions - actual unique users) to 80, then 40, and now I'm lucky to get over 15 a day. I do not do ANY black hat SEO whatsoever. I have not taken part in any shady link building schemes, nor do I try to trick Google in any way. I just write good content, do good keyword research (Targeting only low-hanging fruit and low-difficulty keywords using KWFinder), and do my best to provide a good user experience. I run no ads on my site. Glenn Gabe wrote about a potential Google update on November 29th, but the stuff he said in his article doesn't seem to affect me - my mobile site is perfectly fine, according to Google's own metrics and testing tools. Here's the article in question: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/november-30-2016-google-algorithm-update/ At first, I thought it was possible that this was a result of my competitors simply doing far better than me - but that doesn't seem to be the case, as their rankings did not actually move - mine simply pummeted. And many of their sites are far worse than mine in terms of grammar, spelling, and site speed. I understand backlinks are important, by the way, but I really don't think that's why my site was hit. Many competitors of mine have little to no backlinks and are doing great, and it would also not make much sense for Google to hit an otherwise great site just because they have few backlinks. A friend of mine has reached out to Glenn Gabe himself to see if he can get his input on my site, but he's had a busy schedule and hasn't gotten a chance to take a look yet. I recently obtained a backlink from a highly relevant DA 65 site (About a month ago, same niche as my site), and it now shows up in Search Console and Ahrefs - but it hasn't affected rankings whatsoever. Important Note: I'm not only just ranking poorly for stuff, I'm ranking in position 100-150+ for many low-competition keywords. I have no idea why that is happening - is my site THAT bad, that my content deserves to be ranking on page 15 or lower? Sorry for the long question. I'm struggling here, and just wanted to give as much information as possible. I would really appreciate any input you guys can give me - if any SEO experts want to turn my site into a case study and work with me to improve things, I'd also be open to that 😉 I kid, of course - I know you guys are all busy. Thanks! P.S. I've attached a picture of my SEMRush graph, for reference, as well. mhgSw

    | polycountz
    0

  • Let's say we create landing pages for targeted keywords in our niche. So like we have landing pages optimised for 80% of the top keywords with decent search volume. If these pages started ranking at first page or around; will this scenario improves the ranking of website? Right now, only few of our top pages are ranking good. Planning to create more of such.

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi all, We usually give "brand & primary keyword" across all pages in website like "vertigo tiles". Do we need to maintain this suffix across all page titles? What if we change according to the page? Will Google downlook for not maintaining these page titles suffix like I mentioned? Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Looking at Google Search Analytics page position by device.  The desktop version has seen a dramatic drop in the last 60 days compared to the mobile site.  Could this be caused by mobile first indexing?  Has Google had any releases that might have caused this?

    | merch_zzounds
    0

  • We have a client who's law firm is the highest google reviewed, on page two or three of St. Louis personal injury lawyer, but does not show in the map listing. Any ideas why this would happen or how to ensure they are viewable in the map listing?

    | David-Kley
    0

  • Hi There, I am promoting an online events website and would like to know adding long tail keywords (4-6 words unique queries) under "People also searched for:" is a good or bad idea on event pages? My intention is not to stuff page with keywords, although I want to let search engine bot know that particular page is relevant for other mentioned queries as well. So Intent is to sent relevancy signal (via content). So the heading "People also searched for" could be changed to something like: Related searches Searches related to Related queries etc. Thanks
    James

    | jamesinhere
    0

  • Hi all, When we search for top tools or software like "top cms systems", we can see Google listing some companies in boxes. What these results are called? I know search snippets are different. Any idea on what basis Google is listing them? I couldn't able to give you screenshot as imgur failed to upload image. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Can we have rel=canonical across all pages of a wordpress CMS website? I don't know why same page has been as canonical but not for duplicate pages

    | vtmoz
    1

  • Hi all, It's a common practice giving the "brand name" or "brand name & primary keyword" as suffix on EVERY page title. Well then it's just we are giving "primary keyword" across all pages and we expect "homepage" to rank better for that "primary keyword". Still Google ranks the pages accordingly? How Google handles it? The default suffix with primary keyword across all pages will be ignored or devalued by Google for ranking certain pages? Or by the ranking of website improves for "primary keyword" just because it has been added to all page titles?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi I'm trying to review pages which have previously ranked, but in March have dropped out completely. Some of these pages I can see have dropped to having a Page Authority of 1, we haven't changed anything on these pages, so is there a reason why the authority has dropped? These pages only had around 8 - 10 Page Authority to begin with. I'm trying to identify why we have lost keywords, and if it has anything to do with the Google Updates in March Here are examples of the pages with drops: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/heavy-duty-shelving-1830x1830mm-blue-orange
    http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/metal-feet-for-heavy-duty-steel-shelving
    http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/health-and-safety-law-poster-a2 Thank you!

    | BeckyKey
    0

  • Hi I've seen a couple areas of our site drop in average rankings for some areas since the 'Fred' update. We don't have ads on our site, but I'm wondering if it's 'thin' content - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ We are an ecommerce site and we have some content on our category pages - which is a bit more generic about the section/products within that section - but how can it not be if it's a category page with products on? I am working on adding topic based content/user guides etc to be more helpful for customers, but I'd love some advice on generating traffic to category pages. Is it better to rank these other topic/user guide pages instead of the category page & then hope the customer clicks through to products? Advice welcome 🙂

    | BeckyKey
    0

  • Hi, I would like to know header tags (h5 or h6) or list items ( ) works better for footer menu links for the best linking structure. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    1

  • Does website's (homepage) ranking going to influence landing pages ranking or vice-versa? If the homepage is ranking good for a "keyword", will that improve ranking of other landing pages which are optimised for related "keywords" & Vice-versa?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Months back, we can notice "keyword" will be bold and highlighted if its in the SERP URL. Now Google no more highlights any URLs even with exact match of keyword we search. Beside UI, Does this mean Google might devalued or reduced the importance of URL as ranking factor? We can see many search results match partially or completely in URL with search keywords.

    | vtmoz
    0

  • If a website trying to rank in US and it has received many back-links from domains hosting from other countries; how it will impact website ranking? Can a website hosted in country will rank well in other country? How much the hosted location matters? Like....domain hosted in Germany but trying to rank in US?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Is there still a dofollow link back from a youtube channel to your web site? I filled in the site url in the profile, which in my understanding used to be the single dofollow link back to your web site. However, when I view the page source for the youtube channel it shows up as a nofollow link. Also, in OSE the link does not appear. Has this changed or am I just not doing this correctly?

    | uwaim2012
    0

  • Hi, Can anyone help me in understanding the results which are appearing above adwords in the screenshot below. These are the knowledge graph results or something else. strip_zpsmxsufx55.png.html

    | SameerBhatia
    0

  • Generally tags will be placed starting with h1, then h2, h3 and h4.... Some of our pages starts with h3 and h1 is placed after couple of h2 and h3 tags. Is this a bad placement which hurts in SEO?

    | vtmoz
    1

  • If you search 'best games to play for youtube' you get an answer box with answers pulled independently from the article at hand. Here's an image: http://imgur.com/a/S0j9B Here are all the games from my article, in the order in which they appear. Google's chosen games for Answer Box are bolded: Battlefield 1 Bloodborne GTA V FiFA 16 TrackMania Turbo Garry’s Mod League of Legends Call of Duty: Black Ops III Tom Clancy’s The Division Overwatch Just Cause 3 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Brawlhalla Rocket League Dark Souls III Unravel Firewatch GoldenEye 007 (this was put in as a joke, but coded as an H2 nonetheless) Destiny Dead by Daylight Fallout 4 Undertale No Man’s Sky Minecraft As you can see, Google is choosing which games to display to its searchers. My Crazy Egg data shows that these were not picked by click volume (each of these H2s are hyperlinked), which means Google must be using some other popularity metric, such as its own search volume data or external sales data. I wrote this up in a post on my site, for anybody who's curious.

    | Edward_Sturm
    1

  • Hi all, Our website typically gets about 80% of our traffic from organic Google search over thousands of keywords (i.e., no single keyword (or group of) drives a large portion of our traffic). It's a nine year old website, and we have been growing steadily -- including about 30-40% year-over-year growth for the past 9-months. That is, up until Feb 2nd. On February 2nd, we switched to HTTPS. Everything was done per Google's recommendations: pages individually 301'd to HTTPS pages, no security warnings, added the new site in Webmaster Tools, etc. Google started to pick up our new site -- albeit 3 weeks into the transition, traffic was still significantly down. However, the big problem that we discovered was our ad revenues were getting destroyed. We're an ad based business and our CPMs were tanking, some of our ad partners were having problems serving ads, etc. We were losing a lot of money. So, we made the decision to reverse the HTTPS change and go back to HTTP. That was on Feb 22nd. Our traffic started to recover, and our ad rates did recover. However, 2-weeks after switching back -- March 8 -- our traffic started to fall and has continued to do so. Our traffic is now half of what it was a year ago, and only 1/3 of what it was before we made any changes. I am totally at a loss for what to do. I have spent endless hours digging through Webmaster Tools with no real insights. Here's the most I've been able to glean: Google picked up the new HTTPS site a lot faster than it has reverted back to the HTTP. Particularly for AMP pages. We had about 2,000 indexed AMP pages, which were quickly picked up when we switched to HTTPS, but since changing back to HTTP Google has been slow to re-index the HTTP. Only 935 AMP indexed pages now. According to Webmaster Tools, our overall ranking position has not been affected (the overall average). However, in a sampling of keywords I notice that a number of keywords seem to have been dropped completely from ranking, while others show the same rank position but Google seems to only be showing us in the results intermittently -- e.g., rank is unchanged, but impressions and clicks are much lower. I do not know what to do at this point, and sadly, I'm starting to get desperate for some help. I feel like all the hard work of almost a decade is slipping away and I have no idea how to change course. I've done absolutely everything I can think of from a technical standpoint. Am I being penalized for abandoning the switch to HTTPS? Should I now try and reverse course again, and switch BACK to HTTPS? Is this a temporary bobble that Google's algo will 'forget'? It's a super high quality website with long, unique, detailed articles. Not spammy and we have never had a manual action against us. I don't know what to do. Please help! Here's a link to the website. Thank you in advance.

    | tustind
    0

  • If we have duplicate content or pages cached in Google which has been indexed months back, still it hurts the original pages? Old URLs with cache can be seen now in Google when we search for the same URLs.

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi We have reviews on our product pages & service reviews on Feefo, but how important is it to also drive customers to review your company on Google? I'm guessing we should be doing both, but it proves difficult when you already ask them to review your company through a third party? Any tips moz?

    | BeckyKey
    0

  • Hi Moz community, We have a page with "keyword" we are targeting in slug like website.com/keyword/. This page doesn't have much back-links or visits like homepage. So we decided to redirect homepage to /keyword page along with complete content. Will this going to hurt? Only change anybody can notice is URL. Are there any risks involved. I think this is the best way to highlight the page we been thinking about. Thanks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Let's say we have reaplced www.website.com/page1 with www.website.com/page2. Do we need to redirect page1 to page2 even page1 doesn't have any back-links? If it's not a replacement, can we ignore a "lost page"? Many websites loose hundreds of pages periodically. What's Google's stand on this. If a website has replaced or lost hundreds of links without reclaiming old links by redirection, will that hurts?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi Everyone, My company is using an iframe for an About US page because we are having coding issues with our CMS. The content is coming directly from our server. After a couple of weeks passed, I searched for the page in Google and I noticed in the search result that the meta description was using the textual content served from the iframe on the page. Does this mean the iframe we are using is SEO friendly? Thanks, Jon

    | JMSCC
    0

  • Do we have anything like header tags ratio as of now in favour to search engines? Of course no multiple H1 tags. What if h2 or h3 tags are more than each others? We have top navigation links and one more navigation links which are h2 tags across all pages of website. Does this hurt?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • Most of you have already seen the Matt Cutts video saying that domain age is insignificant after a few months. Do people agree with that? I have a friend who has a domain that is over 12 years old, but the name is not great. gaport.com for a business that sells primarily carports and garages. After watching this video, he wants to rebrand his site with a new name and scrap the old domain for something more marketable. Before he does this, I'd like to know if domain age really isn't a factor anymore? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    1

  • Hi, We have created new sub-domain with new content which we want to highlight for users. But our old content from different sub-domain is making top on google results with reputation. How can we highlight new content and suppress old sub-domain in results? Many pages have related title tags and other information in similar. We are planing to hide URLs from Google search console, so slowly new pages will attain the traffic. How does it works?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • It's a common understanding that Google treats sub-domains as different websites. Does that mean visits of sub-domain do not impact website in-terms of ranking or visibility or reputation at Google?

    | vtmoz
    0

  • I am wondering whether the intrusive interstitial penalty affects all kinds of pop-ups regardless of their nature, eg  if a third party is asking feedback through a discreet pop-up that appears from the bottom of the screen and covers max 50% of it. Is the site or the third party who is asking the feedback subject to intrusive interstitial penalty? Also is the fact that in some screens the popup covers 30% and in some others 50% plays any role?

    | deels-SEO
    0

  • Domain Authority has gone down again today (after initially dropping on the 7th February). Anyone else noticed anything? Cheers, Rhys

    | SwanseaMedicine
    0

  • Hi Moz community, Our websites has dropped almost 50 positions for main keyword and Okay with other keywords. Other pages are doing consistent for other keywords. We haven't made any changes in website. What could be reason this ideal scenario of homepage dropping for main keyword. And recent unconfirmed algo update have anything do with this? Thnaks

    | vtmoz
    0

  • I have been searching through these forums and haven't come across someone that faces the same issue I am. The folks on the Google forums are certain this is an algorithm issue, but I just can't see the logic in that because this appears to be an issue fairly unique to me. I'll take you through what I've gone through. Sorry for it being long. Website URL: https://fenixbazaar.com 1. In early February, I made the switch to https with some small hiccups. Overall however the move was smooth, had redirects all in place, sitemap, indexing was all fine. 2. One night, my organic traffic dropped by almost 100%. All of my top-ranking articles completely disappeared from rank. Top keyword searches were no longer yielding my best performing articles on the front page of results, nor on the last page of results. My pages were still being indexed, but keyword searches weren't delivering my pages in results. I went from 70-100 active users to 0. 3. The next morning, everything was fine. Traffic back up. Top keywords yielding results for my site on the front page. All was back to normal. Traffic shot up. Only problem was the same issue happened that night, and again for the next three nights. Up and down. 4. I had a developer and SEO guy look into my backend to make sure everything was okay. He said there were some redirection issues but nothing that would cause such a significant drop. No errors in Search Console. No warnings. 5. Eventually, the issue stopped and my traffic improved back to where it was. Then everything went great: the site was accepted into Google News, I installed AMP pages perfectly and my traffic boomed for almost 2 weeks. 6. At this point numerous issues with my host provider, price increases, and incredibly outdated cpanel forced me to change hosts. I did without any issues, although I lost a number of articles albeit low-traffic ones in the move. These now deliver 404s and are no longer indexed in the sitemap. 7. After the move there were a number of AMP errors, which I resolved and now I sit at 0 errors. Perfect...or so it seems. 8. Last week I applied for hsts preload and am awaiting submission. My site was in working order and appeared set to get submitted. I applied after I changed hosts. 9. The past 5 days or so has seen good traffic, fantastic traffic to my AMP pages, great Google News tracking, linking from high-authority sites. Good performance all round. 10. I wake up this morning to find 0 active people on my site. I do a Google search and notice my site isn't even the first result whenever I do an actual search for my name. The site doesn't even rank for its own name! My site is still indexed but search results do not yield results for my actual sites. Check Search Console and realised the sitemap had been "processed" yesterday with most pages indexed, which is weird because it was submitted and processed about a week earlier. I resubmitted the sitemap and it appears to have been processed and approved immediately. No changes to search results. 11. All top-ranking content that previously placed in carousal or "Top Stories" in Google News have gone. Top-ranking keywords no longer bring back results with my site: I went through the top 10 ranking keywords for my site, my pages don't appear anywhere in the results, going as far back as page 20 (last page). The pages are still indexed when I check, but simply don't appear in search results. It's happening all over again! Is this an issue any of you have heard of before? Where a site is still being indexed, but has been completely removed from search results, only to return within a few hours? Up and down? I suspect it may be a technical issue, first with the move to https, and now with changing hosts. The fact the sitemap says processed yesterday, suggests maybe it updated and removed the 404s (there were maybe 10), and now Google is attempting to reindexed? Could this be viable? The reason I am skeptical of it being an algorithm issue is because within a matter of hours my articles are ranking again for certain keywords. And this issue has only happened after a change to the site has been applied. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated 🙂

    | fenixbazaar
    0

  • I read on SEOLand that there may have been an algorithm update on Feb. 1st. I got our rankings report back today and was shocked to see 103 of our 530 tracked keyword phrases went down over the last week, especially on pages that we recently updated (like a month ago max). The pages we updated went up in ranking the last two weeks in a row, but went down this week, considerably (like #14 to #34). We also submitted a sitemap update last Friday to Search Console. Checked on Search Console and noticed we also had a dip in CTR around the same time period. I know the rumored changes were targeting PBN, but could other changes be in play as well? I know we have (against my advice) a few syndicating blogging partnerships who we share content with from time to time, but nothing like a PBN. Wondering if anyone else saw a considerable dip in their rankings?

    | Rydch41
    0

  • A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time. Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?

    | FPK
    0

  • Hi guys, I am new to SEO and I have a question for you guys. We created a sitemap for our website. I was thinking of creating a sitemap link on our homepage. Do you think it's a good idea? Would this help us in terms of ranking improvements? Or would help with anything at all? Thanks

    | ahmetkul
    0

  • Hi all, We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option: to combine them all in one FAQ section? or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place? Thank you!

    | lgrozeva
    0

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.