My rankings are up and down like a Yo-Yo. Any ideas why?
-
One of the companies that I work for sells the latest smartphones.
It ranks fairly well for key terms in an extremely competitive field. Recently the rankings of one particular handset have been extremely erratic and do not follow the pattern of other products, I am wondering if anyone can offer some insight as to why this is happening?
When the handset was first announced, it ranked fairly well (20th). This is good when you bare in mind that it is an ecommerce site competing with top tech sites. Prior to release, the ranking gradually declined to 33rd. I believe this may be due to reviews being publsihed (as a result of review handsets being sent out prior to release) as Google has started to favour reviews and news updates.
I have seen a similar pattern with other handsets, reviews and news are favoured by Google prior to release, but once the product is available, my rankings rise and remain on the first page provided that links are still coming in.
However, the rankings of this handset dropped from 27th to below 50th upon launch. The next week the ranking rose from >50th to 7th, dropped to below 50th again the following week, rose back to 9th the week after and has now dropped again to below 50th. These are by far the biggest changes in rankings I have seen on a week to week basis.
The page has a strong link profile in order to achieve such a high ranking in the first place. With this being the case I have no idea why ranking can drop off so much in the space of a week?
Update: I forgot to mention initially that I have the variant listed twice, one for each colour variant. All content is the same apart from the colour being altered in the appropriate places. This has not been a problem in the past, but perhaps it is due to recent changes to Google algorithm?
-
No I don't have more than one variant...
-
That sounds similar to my experience. I have just realised that what is in fact happening is that it is picking up a different variant each week.
So one week it picks up the black handset in the top 10 results, the next week the black handset has dropped to below 50, but it is picking the white up on the 4th page.
Have you got more than one variant of your product listed at all?
-
I have had exactly the same experience- my ranking report on SEO moz report said I dropped >45 places; from 6th to somewhere outside the top 50 for a search term that I had been doing well on- I made no changes to that page, when I look in google now though I am back to 6th where I had been last week. So the question is; was SEOmoz report wrong or for the date in question 23rd of March or did Google drop my ranking down 45+ places and bring it back in less than 4 days?
Any help grately appreciated.
thanks,
Sinead
-
Thanks for your response Vinod.
I have been adding back links over time so I'm not sure why it is so erratic.
-
In general, when there are frequent ups and down then backlinks made over time helps getting stable ranks.
Not sure if backlinks will help you, still you can try it. No harm.
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
-
Angular website and ranking
Hi guys Unfortunately I have to optimize the angular website, but I don't know how google see my website. Seo quacke (seo extension) doesn't get data from this website: https://cafegardesh.com and sitemap generation tools just crawl 1 page of this website. why? How find that google really crawl and index angular website?
Reporting & Analytics | | denakalami0 -
Image ranking plummet help
Hi Moz Community, I need help understanding why my site is dropping rankings and traffic significantly. We were hit the hardest with doing a image query filter ~6/2-6/3 (image attached). We also had a site migration on this exact date, but didn't change URL structure or domain names, just switched hosting sites. I'm assuming this plummet is from the migration, but can't figure out why. I may also not be understanding this filter clearly so let me know. Shoot any questions my way that could help your understanding of the problem be more clear. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | IceIcebaby
-Reed yVzQRTK0 -
Sudden dramatic drop in "some but not all" keyphrase rankings for client, 3 weeks ago
I noticed recently that 4 of my keyphrases which ranked on page one, and were climbing 3 weeks ago, have suddenly dropped to > 50. What could have happened? I did find an issue with my sitemap (yoast generated), but why would that suddenly change? And even more importantly, how do I fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | chill9860 -
Moz Rank & Trust | Page vs Sub vs Root
Hey guys, Just need some help deciphering my OSE link metrics for my site theskimonster.com . Page MozRank: 5.51 (highest among my competitors) Page MozTrust: 5.74 (#2 among my competitors) Subdomain MozRank: 4.19 (#4 among my competitors) Subdomain MozTrust: 4.63 (#2 among my competitors) Root Domain MozRank: 3.89 (#5 or last place among competitors) Root Domain MozRank: 4.1 (#5 or last place among competitors) What does this mean? What am I doing right, what do I need to do?
Reporting & Analytics | | Theskimonster1 -
Previously performing page no longer ranking
The best performing page on my website www.danielalexandra.com/personal-training/ has suddenly completely fallen off the google radar and all of my ranking results for keywords have dropped significantly as a result. My domain is only 4/5 months old but was already becoming relatively competitive and generating some interest until this? Any ideas as to why this may have happened?
Reporting & Analytics | | DAlondon0 -
Weekly Yahoo #1 rankings seem faulty
For the past 3 weeks I have been getting several #1 rankings on Yahoo or Bing but then when I check it on the same day I get the reports from SEOmoz...I am not even ranked in the top 50 on most. After the 1st week I thought it was just a quick drop in rankings but 3 weeks in a row...something is not right. Is there a problem with SEOmoz yahoo rankings? Boo
Reporting & Analytics | | Boodreaux0 -
Why do we temporarily rank for highly competitive words after writing a related blog post?
I write for a blog that Google probably "likes" at this point because we update so frequently and get a decent amount of traffic. Sometimes this happens and it has always been puzzling to me: Let's use an example. Say I write a blog called "How to eat spaghetti." For the next few days, we will get a ton of traffic for people who type "spaghetti." But when I check us on rank trackers we are nowhere to be found for that term. What is happening here? Sometimes the traffic will all be international and located in some random city in Africa or something. Any thoughts? Super confused by this. We have gotten lots of traffic for extremely competitive words because of this, but it only lasts a couple days.
Reporting & Analytics | | LilyRay0 -
Tool to check pervious rankings for a keyword ?
I am looking a tool/site to check ranking history of specifc keyword . Is this possible ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bfletc40