What Happened on the 17th?
-
Alright, what gives? Something major with Google SERPs went down on Jan. 17th. I have a site that was ranking well for 7 keywords - normal fluctuations from page 1-3, for 8 months. We never had any issues with Panda/Penguin and in fact, Nov./Dec. were excellent months.
Then BAM, on the 17th all but 2 keywords tanked...not even in the top 100! 2 remain on page 2/3 - very odd....I've seen lots of talk about something happening...anyone have a better idea or even KNOW what happened?
Thank you!
-
Oh this was/is major. I had one keyword go from # 8 to #480
-
My 2nd big key word dropped from #2 to 7-8 and now it is finally back up to two. I was so excited to reach #2...when the fall happened I just thought well time to start doing more SEO.
-
With my site - no not yet. However, Brian did shed some light on the issue and was very helpful.
-
Did you figure out what went wrong?
-
Brian, thank you for taking the time to call me and help me with this issue!
-
Yes, I know about Panda...but this stuff happened on the evening of the 17th - we dropped like a rock./
-
Barry Schwartz wrote about a new Panda update from Google, a couple of days ago...
http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-version-24-1-2-of-search-queries-impacted-146149
-
It's frustrating - not because it happened, but because I don;t know WHAT happened and if I don't know what happened I can't fix it!
-
Same problem here! All white hat in-house SEO work with nothing changing on our end, and then a big drop in early-mid Jan. Haven't seen any Google updates though that would explain this...?
-
Interesting! Traffic isn't too bad - my guess is that's because we use cpc too and maybe the keywords that tanked didn't bring in much organic traffic anyway but some of my keywords went from #11 to #370!
-
There was another post on this on the 19th or so. There was some sort of update and traffic to a few of my sites are down as well.
-
Hey there - I think we chatted in another thread Why wouldn't they mention this?? Hmmmm...
thanks for you help
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
-
What happens to crawled URLs subsequently blocked by robots.txt?
We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AspenFasteners1 -
What is happening with this page's rankings? (G Analytics screenprint attached) help me.
Hi, At the moment im confused. I have a page which shows up for the query 'bank holidays' first page solid for 2 years - this also applies to the terms 'mothers day', 'pancake day' and a few others (UK Google). And there still ranking. Here is the problem: Usually I would rank for 'bank holidays 2014' (the terms with the year in are the real traffic drivers) and would be position 3/5. Over the last 3 months this has decayed dropping position to 30+. From the screenprint you can see the term 'Bank Holidays' is holding on but the term 'bank holidays 2014' is slowly decaying. If you query 'bank holidays 2015' we don't appear in rankings at all. What is causing this? The content is ok, social sharing happens and the odd link is picked up hear and there. I need help, how do I start pushing this back in the other direction, its like the site is slowly dying. And what really kills me, is 2 pages are ranking on page1 off link farms. URL: followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays serp-decay.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk0 -
What Happens If a Hreflang Sitemap Doesn't Include Every Language for Missing Translated Pages?
As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)? We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a non penalised site
What happens if one remove the disavow file from a site that has not received a manual penalty from Google. Although the site did suffer from a drop in traffic and rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Djdealeyo0 -
What happened to my site?
This is my website: http://goo.gl/Brekn It was related to health niche. I am good with the serp for the last couple of hours. I am in top for the keywords: cure for piles, hemorrhoids treatment, natural hemorrhoid treatment. My main keyword is hemorrhoids treatment. And has recently added this page, http://goo.gl/SXNtX This page has some dupe content, as content writer was busy i have copied the content from other sources. Does this have any effect? I have not added this page onto homepage as i dont like google to index it until my copywriter writes the content. Dont know what happened, in the last few hours i lost my serp to no where. Can anyone tell me what happened to my site. Did i done anything wrong? In the last week i have added a link to my ebooks related site. Does this affected my serps? Or did the Google recent change http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html Has any effect on my site? Awaiting for your replies...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dex324344320 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10 -
My page has fallen off the face of the earth on Google. What happened?
I have checked all of the usual things. My page has not lost any links or authority. It is not black listed or any other obvious sign. What's going on? This has just happened within the past 3 days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormz0