Higher rank created a quick boost but it didn't last..
-
I made a few changes to my website which bumped it up to 3rd place for the main keyword and brought it up to the first page for some of the other keywords. I saw a spike in traffic and conversions for 2 days, but now it went down significantly again. How can I research the cause of this?
-
Great question....
SEOs must become comfortable with "dealing with uncertainty".
Search engines don't reveal how they rank websites so the best thing that you can do is to study what they do reveal, study the opinions of trusted SEOs (such as the guides and articles on SEOmoz), and ask questions in a forum like this one.
Most important, you must study continuously to stay up-to-date.
Keep in mind that much of the advice that you will receive will be wrong and don't trust advice that is very old.
Most of the decisions that I make on running my site are made with a level of uncertainty. However, before I make major moves I communicate with a few people that I trust to hear their opinions.
Remember, it is not how many people agree it is who you are listening to - and even they are wrong some of the time.
-
Take stats, dont panic and move too fast, let your results steady before you move again.
-
How do I know if what I'm doing is right or wrong then?
-
SEO work takes variable amounts of time to produce results.
PR7 links are followed daily... PR1 links are followed infrequently. Your site might not be crawled often.
So, SEO work could produce results within 48 hours or it could take a month or more.
Pay attention to your work and less to your rankings.
-
Thank you - so generally how long should I wait to see accurate results from the SEO work that I did? Also, are there test environments for keyword ranking? I'm always a little nervous making a change, fearing that its going to produce the opposite effect.
-
Sit tight.
Google has thousands of servers responding to queries and new data (rankings) can take time to propagate.
Also, Google usually has several percent of their servers returning experimental data.
By this time next week you should have a better idea of what is happening.
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
-
About porn sites and ranking
Hello, I'm thinking to extend my website into porn. At the moment there is no pornography on it, although we do talk about sex related topics and products (from dating to tutorials, to toys etc.) Would it be dangerous to keep the porn section on the same domain as the rest? Would this negatively affect my non-porn content as Googlebot would "flag" my website as being pornographic (although only a few pages would be)? Or simply Googlebot would leave the current non-porn pages ranking as they are now, just fine, and plus it would rank the porn pages if they "deserve" to? I hope my question is clear. I don't want to create a subdomain.
Algorithm Updates | | fabx0 -
Need to be reindexed quickly - SERP is showing a 404
So there was a mistake made where a 404 error was placed in the canonical URL for the pages my company made. We need to have these pages quickly reindexed. I asked GWT to fetch them and have an updated sitemap but the SERPs are still the same. Any tricks anyone knows that would allow me to get reindexed faster?
Algorithm Updates | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
What's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX
Hello Mozers; I am having an issue, my client has 10K pages on their site; in WP, and they have a classified section. Question #1: I am asking, what's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX, for their Classified section. They currently have no SEO plug ins, that fix their errors, and warnings. Question #2: My question is also, do I want the Categories crawled, or INDEXED or NOINDEX? Check out their Campaign results by Moz: Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) 32 Too Many On-Page Links 9,032 Missing Meta Description Tag 6,234
Algorithm Updates | | smstv0 -
How do search engines calculate ranking?
On SEOMoz, I can see that when people type in X keyword, my website comes up at Y place. For example, if someone googles "Mobile Productivity", a page on my website comes up at #10. How is that #10 ranking calculated? I would've guessed it's based on some combination of linking root domain and page authority, but I see sites that rank below mine that have higher scores on both. For example, on the aforementioned 'Mobile Productivity' search, my site comes up #10 with a Linking Root Domain score of 2, and a Page Authority of 29. But Honeywell Products and Services comes up #13 on the same "Mobile Productivity" search (ie, BELOW my site), even though they have a Linking Root Domain score of 40 and a Page Authority of 72. Similarly, Mobileproductivity.com comes in at #1 for that search with scores of 7 and 31 respectively, but mpifix.com comes in at #2 with scores of 61 and 47 respectively. How are the search engine rankings calculated? Thanks in advance, Julian
Algorithm Updates | | MobileDay0 -
Do you Feel Street View for inside a local business is a ranking factor for the local algorithm?
I'm working in a market where the Google Trusted photographer is rolling out. The question came up if providing this data would boost your rankings in the local map pack. I've been asking a few fellow SEO peeps but I thought I would throw it out here for your opinion.
Algorithm Updates | | BCutrer0 -
Lesser visited, but highly ranked landing paged dropped in rank on Google. Time for a content update?
I noticed that my page one ranked landing pages that don't get a lot of love from me have dropped in rank big time on Google this week. This is a site that has static (meaning, I can't freshen up the content easily) landing pages for products that we sell. The pages that dropped are the ones that have the fewest inbound links, and don't get much attention on the social media side. Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one. This is a first for me. Does anyone think that this is a "lack of freshness" penalty? We are still number one on page one for our brand search terms. Would fresh content give me a shot at getting the pages back up? I'm willing to update them slowly, but before I go crazy, I'm reaching out to the pros here.
Algorithm Updates | | Ticket_King0 -
Rankings drop, but only one term
Has anyone experienced a significant drop on just one term? I have about 10 terms that I am constantly monitoring and 9 out of 10 are unchanged or even improved, but 1 term was #1 and is now #11. Curious if anyone has experienced anything similar. I originally thought it was "Panda", but why wouldn't all my terms be affected??
Algorithm Updates | | MNKid150 -
High bounce rates from content articles influencing our rankings for rest of site
We have a large content article section on our e-commerce site that receives a lot of visits but also have very high bounce rates. We are wondering if this is hurting the rest of our site's rankings. **When I say bounce rates I mean what ever metrics Google is using to determine quality content (specifically after the Panda update). ** We are trying to determine if having the content articles on our domain hurts us. We only have the content articles for link building.
Algorithm Updates | | seozachz0