Why has my keyword dropped and risen so much in only 7 days?
-
Sorry if this question is really obvious (or unanswerable) but my client asked me for an explanation and as a relative SEO 'noob' I couldn't really answer them.
The client's site http://www.solentlep.org.uk/ dropped 29 places for the keyword LEP last week (all the other keywords had small rises and falls) and then this week has jumped back up the same 29 places. I made no changes to the site in the 7 period (as I hadn't worked out what to change) and although everything is fine now I'd still like to let the client know what caused the blip, or is it one of those things that 'nobody knows'.
-
Thanks Mark.
-
Thanks Mark
-
Make sure you check out Dr. Pete's post on the blog here - it's not just you experiencing it
-
As the other people already responded, there is a lot of fluctuation in the SERPs on a regular basis.
A few things come to mind
- Google could be trying out different landing pages for the term - it may be your homepage was blocked and so they showed an inner page, but much further down.
- This fluctuation seems to be happening every few months, where the site gets downgraded temporarily and then recovers - see the attached image
- Have you been having site connectivity issues - any messages in webmaster tools?
Hope this helps,
Mark
-
I also have notices sporadic jumps in search traffic, not just daily but hourly. One keyword keeps going back and forth 3-5 search position.
-
im getting a lot of daily movement on a couple of my sites. up and down all the time, not seen the rankings change so frequently before.
-
I can't answer this, but exactly the same thing has happened to me, last week... over 100 keywords improved significantly, now... roughly 100 keywords have plummeted and are no longer in the 'Top 50' - nothing has changed, we've never used spammy link practices, we just rely on insightful news and good PR.
I have to say, I'm worried.
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
-
Can't get my site recognised for keyword
My site prettycool.co.uk and primary we sell fascinators, the problem is I can't get the word fascinators to be listed by Google. We are on the 1st page for most colours ie. pink fascinators, blue fascinators etc. but for the term fascinators even if we fetch we are listed for a couple of hours and then disappear. I've checked for keyword stuffing but our site sell fascinators and we need to have this word in our site and other sites have a lot more references to the term and are listed on the 1st or 2nd pages. We used to be listed on page 1 for many years but the last 2 or 3 years dropped back to page 4 but now nothing. Any help or suggestions would be fantastic!
Technical SEO | | Rutts0 -
Pages Fighting Over Keywords
Hi Guys, Just after some general advice. Since manipulation of keywords through links is no longer a feasible way of ranking these days, I was wondering how people got round the issue of pages bouncing for the same keyword or Google deciding that a blog post is a better signal rather than your service page. For instance if you are doing local and national search, how do you stop the local keywords ranking for national pages, without diluting the local signals. I have some ideas:- stronger internal linking to the page review content But obviously redirects or canonical won't be a good solution as I still want these pages to exist in their own right. Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Redirect 'keyword-url' to improve ranking?
I was wondering if a good url, with a keyword in it, can help you improve the position of that certain keyword by redirecting that url to your website. To make it clear: We run the website www.terello.nl, and have the possibility to let the url www.iphonereparatie.nl (translation: iphonerepair) redirect to our website. Would this help us to rank for the keyword 'iPhone reparatie'? I hope that I made myself clear this way:) Otherwise i'm more than happy to clearify myself!
Technical SEO | | Jan-Peter0 -
Hamburger nav causing drop in organic traffic?
This may sound crazy but is it possible a hamburger nav used on a desktop responsive site could lead to a drop in organic traffic? Our hamburger nav requires between 3-4 clicks to arrive on a subpage. Here's an example of necessary clicks for a given page: click hamburger menu2) resorts (expands resorts nav) city (expands various cities where our resorts are located) actual resort (this opens up resort menu) resort overview (first clickable link) Is there any way we're getting penalized for excessive number of clicks? All our old pages were 301 redirected and content is relatively the same on the new redesigned website. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Accidentally blocked Googlebot for 14 days
Today after I noticed a huge drop in organic traffic to inner pages of my sites, I looked into the code and realized a bug in last commit cause the server to showing captcha pages to all Googlebot requests from Apr 24. My site has more than 4,000,000 in the index. Before last code change, Googlebot are exempt from being shown the captcha requests so each inner pages are crawled and indexed perfectly with no problem. The bug broke the whitelisting mechanism and treat requests from Google's ip addresses the same as regular users. It leads to the captcha page being crawled when Googlebot visits thousands of my site's inner pages. This makes Google thinks all my inner pages are identical to each other. Google remove all the inner pages from SERP starting from May 5th before when many of those inner pages have good rankings. I formerly thought this was a manual or algorithm penalty but 1. I did not receive a warning message in GWT
Technical SEO | | Bull135
2. The ranking for main url is good. I tried with "Fetch as Google" in GWT and realize all Googlebot saw in the past 14 days are the same captcha page for all my inner pages. Now, I have fixed the bug and updated the production site. I just wanted to ask: 1. How long will it take for Google to remove the "duplicated content" flag on my inner pages and show them in SERP again? From my experience, Googlebot revisits urls quite often. But once a url is flagged as "contains similar content", it could be difficult to recover, is it correct? 2. Besides waiting for Google to update its index, what else can I do right now? Thanks in advance for your answers.0 -
Rankings drop in UK and AU but not US
After the last Panda update on Jan. 22 my rankings dropped significantly in the AU and UK but not in the US. We operate in UK and AU and not the US so if anything the rankings should be the opposite (which also obviously would be preferred) Any ideas for why this would occur?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Page Rank 7 - Domain Authority of 6 (How does this happen)
Iv never seen this before, but what do you guys make of this? http://www.becitywise.com/ According to Google, its a PR7 website. SEOMOZ are reporting a DA of 6 (1 link to the domain) http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php Any thoughts as to how or why Google have assigned such a high PR? According to Whois, the domain was registered on 16/07/12 so its brand new... The funny thing is, many people purchase links based on the Page Rank, so this guy must be making a fortune. (the Friends links I assume are all paid links) Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO? My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this? An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0