Detective needed to investigate a mystery lack of ranking
-
My URL is: www.graduate-jobs.com/graduate-schemesAfter ranking on page 1 for the search term 'graduate schemes' for over 4 months, the page then disappeared completely from the SERPS for over 6. I've been assured it isn't a Penguin/ Panda problem, as this is the only page on our site that has seen this sort of drop. When checking backlink profiles of the ranking pages, our page is as strong if not stronger and it receives a good amount of traffic with decent user metrics.If anyone could take a look at the page and have a guess at why it isn't moving anywhere, it would be really appreciated.Thanks.
-
Hey Joseph,
You are absolutely right.
Our main aim is always to get registrations to the site and build our database and we try and do this by advertising good jobs that make people want to sign-up!
Thanks for all your help on the matter, if you think of anything else, don't hesitate to let me know.
Cheers.
-
..and just building a better site. you always need to try to maximize the value of a click. What do you want them to do when they land on that page? Where do you want them to go? What are they asking for when they come to that page?
Each page - has a purpose. You want them to sign up to the site? building leads to new jobs? Why not have a form where you send them new types of jobs when you have them posted.. Take a look at http://www.shoemoney.com - he thinks like this: sending out a email is like going to the bank.
build your email list.
GOOD LUCK!
-
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for the tip I will definitely check out that tool.
I see what you are saying about modifying my meta info, I think we stuff graduate a bit too much site-wide, which is something I've started working on.
I suppose I (like most people) was hoping it was a technical error with a quick fix but (like most people) I'm now realising it all comes down to good ole' fashioned link building.
Thanks.
-
but when did it happen? what day? it could also not even be you but the sites you got backlinks from.
Take a look here: http://www.linkdex.com and it will be the best way to get this fixed. When you disvow these links, add comments and group things together. i.e. #possible link network - emailed webmaster [email protected] - for removal.
#link directory - emailed [email protected]
You dont have a lot of back links - and if you do disavow the links and need help qualifying them than reach out to me with the list you come up with.. or post them here. I'm sure we can help you qualify them.
-
There is nothing you can do to prevent it and really, you're not loosing a lot either. It may have been just that one back link. Webmasters change their sites. Domains expire. You just need to build links.
This is an awesome tool: http://www.link-assistant.com/buzzbundle/ - and you can learn how to use it here: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/reviews/buzzbundle-review-how-i-drive-traffic-to-my-blog/
I would look in webmaster tools to see when it changed.. I dont know what exactly else could have caused it without really looking into it. What I would do if I were you is change the title and description a little bit. You really don't need to use graduate that much.
-
Hi Justin,
Thanks for your response and I really appreciate the detail and the honesty!
I get what you are saying about the questionable backlinks. None of them were actively obtained by us but that doesn't change that there are some suspicious sites linking to that page in particular. Would you recommend trying to get some of those links removed?
I suppose what confused me was that the Moz PA ranking is much healthier than some of the sites ranking on page 1 of the SERPS. So perhaps a Penguin/ Panda demotion is the most obvious answer (Ouch that hurts to say out loud!)
Thanks.
-
I don't think the backlink profile to that page looks particularly natural and i think thats where your problem lies
OSE shows 19 backlines ahrefs shows 30, but looking through them, you have two infographitcs (with no social shares) a couple of links from .ac.uk (which are good links), directories and a number of very questionable looking links such as www.librerio.com/search/jobs/40
You also have some exact match anchor text
All of the above suggests to me that you have been hit by Panda/Penguin and the loss of links mentioned previously most likely suggests that you had questionable links that have been removed or the sites they were coming from have been shutdown (again a good indicator of poor backlinks)
To me, it looks like you are going to have to do some work on building some good links and adding a bit of content to your site to get your rankings back
Also you are on an exact match domain "graduate-jobs.com" which may be contributing
I'm sure its not what you want to hear, but I think thats where the problem most likely lies.
I hope that helps
-
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for getting back to me. It is a bit worrying to see that amount of backlinks being lost, I wasn't aware of that!
Could you give me any more clues as to why that would be happening/ how to prevent it?
Thanks.
-
Well - you're loosing more back links a day than gaining: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks-new/prefix/www.graduate-jobs.com%252Fgraduate-schemes
link velocity is important but you prob. lost those one or two back links that pushed it to where it needed to be.
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
-
Linking Websites/ Plagiarized Content Ranking Above Original Content
Hey friends! Sooo this article was originally published in December 2016: https://www.realwealthnetwork.com/learn/best-places-to-buy-rental-property-2017/ It has been consistently ranking in positions 2-3 for long tail keyword "best places to buy rental property 2017" (and related keywords) since January-ish. It's been getting about 2000-2,500 unique views per week, until last week when it completely dropped off the internet (it's now ranking 51+). We just did a site redesign and changed some URL structures, but I created a redirect, so I don't understand why that would affect our ranking so much. Plus all of our other top pages have held their rankings -- in fact, our top organic article actually moved up from position 3 to 2 for much more competitive keywords (1031 exchange). What's even weirder is when I copy the sections of my article & paste into Google with quotes, our websites doesn't show up anywhere. Other websites that have plagiarized my article (some have included links back to the article, and some haven't) are ranking, but mine is nowhere to be found. Here are some examples: https://www.dawgsinc.com/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ http://b2blabs.com/2017/08/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-places-buy-rental-property-year-2017-missy-lawwill/?trk=mp-reader-card http://news.sys-con.com/node/4136506 Is it possible that Google thinks my article is newer than the copycat articles, because of the new URL, and now I'm being flagged as spam? Does it think these are spam websites we've created to link back to our own content? Also, clearly my article is higher quality than the ranking articles. Why are they showing up? I double checked the redirect. It's good. The page is indexed... Ahhh what is going on?! Thanks for your help in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jessica7110 -
Want to Remove numbers from Old Post URL - Will it effect its Ranking?
Hi. I have a number of posts that are ranking in google for several keywords. However the URLs contain numbers, for example 2011, 2014 and 35. I want to remove these numbers to make the URLs more updated. If I use the 301 redirect for old URL to the new one, will I retain the same ranking for these blogposts Or it can effect the ranking. Does anyone have tried this in the past? I would like to get your opinion on this. Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | techmaish0 -
How to re-rank an established website with new content
I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources. To start I'll provide my situation; SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps; Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually. Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest) Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind. Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure. Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing? Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
Main Category Page Sub-category Pages Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout. Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines. Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example. Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time. What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules? Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before. It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
What are legit ways to raise up you're ranking for a new website?
I have a wallpaper website that i just made and bought a template that looks fine for the site so far for a month now, and i wanted to know what steps i cant take to better rank my site and build some traffic along the way. I use only specific directories, not sure how to get a press release done and also link back to other sites from pages that get a decent amount of traffic where i can leave a link to it, of course not leaving any type of spammy looking comments. This is the site i am working on right now, freehdwallpapers.be I have linked back from a few sites already, i look at the alexa rank if it will show a number at one point, the sites worth is still pretty low, and also i have added social networks on the site which has gained a number of followers to this day, so i got work to do still. I just don't want to go on about it the wrong way and get penalized by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 1080HDWallpapers0 -
Website rankings plummeted after a negative SEO attack - help!
Hello Mozzers A website of a new client (http://bit.ly/PuVNTp) use to rank very well. It was on the top page for any relevant search terms in its industry in Southern Ontario (Canada). Late last year, the client was the victim of a negative SEO attack. Thousands upon thousands of spammy backlinks were built (suspected to be bought using something like Fiverr). The links came from very questionable sites or just low quality sites. The backlink growth window was very small (2,000 every 24 hours or so). Since that happened that site has all but disappeared from search results. It is still indexed and the owner has disavowed most of the bad backlinks but the site can't seem to bounce back. The same happened for another site that they own (http://bit.ly/1tErxpu) except the number backlinks produced was even higher. The sites both suffer from duplicate content issues and at one point (in 2012) were de-indexed due to the very spammy work of a former SEO. They came back in early 2013 and were fine for some time. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mattylac0 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why
Hi Mozzers, I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all. Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week. Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected. Suggestions? Advice? Answers? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Using Canonical Tags to Boost Lead Form Ranking
I presently have a number of whitepapers that bring traffic to our site. If a visitor elects to download the whitepaper they are taken to a lead form with an abstract of the whitepaper. The abstract is present because the visitor may or may not have come to the lead form directly. I imagine this would be a "no no," but how do you feel about placing a canoncial tag on a whitepaper that points to the lead form w/ abstract? The obvious idea being to take the umph of a whitepaper to direction search visitors directly to the lead form.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shoffy0