Cannot find reason for drop in ranking
-
One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is.
On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie.
So, trying to find the problem:
- I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A.
- Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page.
- Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary.
- The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought?
- I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine!
Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking.
Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear.
I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance!
Michel
-
Hi there, has this question been answered? Please let us know yes or no, thanks! ~ Christy
-
Hi there, thanks for your question! Has it been resolved?
-
Feel free to PM me any examples if you want. But after some thought I still feel that any page with that many links on it will be weighted negatively by the engines. Google dislikes link-farms and your link/content ratio may be too high for their liking. To that end, you may accidentally be swept up in a downranking effort based on that ratio.
I do think this should raise the question in your mind as to why you are focused on rankings. Since they are no longer the same from person to person, outside of GWT they aren't very effective in making good strategic decisions. What I would be asking is has the web traffic changed? Conversion rates? Any on-page activity see any shift? There is alot that can be determined from that sort of data. Rankings, in my opinion, are phasing out as a useful metric in determining business impact.
Dig into GA or whatever analytics tool you like and see if the drop in ranking is correlative with any shift in page/site performance and that can offer you a better view of the situation.
-
Hey Sean,
Thanks for your response! The pages are all category landing pages, and with a mega dropdown for navigation, faceted navigation on the left and a footer, the total number of links adds up quickly. They're all internal links though, and it was my understanding that a high number of internal links does not directly harm the value of a page?
I used the SEO Workers website to count the links by the way. According to them, the lingerie page has 342 links (they call it URLs but I guess they mean links), the swimwear page has 199 links and the nightwear page has 190 links. So, the number of links for the swimwear and nightwear pages are roughly the same, yet the swimwear page does not currently rank for swimwear, and the nightwear page is ranked #5 for nightwear.
What's strange though, is when I copy the source of each of the three pages into Notepad++ and count hrefs, I find 203 occurances in total for each of the pages. That's strange in the sense that SEO Workers apparently does something different, but not strange since the page templates are exactly alike, but the content is different so the number of subcategories, filter options etc will be a little different.
I'll PM you the links, just in case you're curious and want to see for yourself
-
Thanks for that info. Obviously, any advice offered here is weak without looking over the actual data, but something stood out to me. Why are there 342 URLs (do you mean links on that page)? If one page has that many links, it could be perceived as a link farm...alot depends on the content amount, how the links are listed out, and more. It does sound like far too many for one page (do you paginate?). Do the other pages that haven't seen any negative impact have a similar amount of links?
Can you also list some differences in your data research between the affected and unaffected pages? How are they different?
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
-
How to rank if you are an aggregator or a directory of resource?
Most of the SEO suggestions (great quality content, long form content, engagement rate/time on the page, authority inbound links ) apply to content oriented site. But what should you do if you are an aggregator or a resource directory? You aim is to send the user faster to other site they are looking for or provide ranking about the resources. In fact at a very basic level you are competing for search engine traffic because they are doing same things. You may have done a hand crafted, human created resource that is better than what algorithms are showing. And your site likely to have lot more outgoing links than content. You know you are better (or getting better) since repeat visitors keep coming back. So in these days of Search engines, what a resource directory or aggregator site do to rank? Because even directories need first time visitors till they start coming back again.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maayboli0 -
Sudden Drop in rank of Keyword "Sobha Aspirational Homes"
Hi, For domain http://www.homeadda-sobhaaspirationalhomes.in/ keyword Sobha Aspirational Homes, We had google india ranking 5 continuously for past 2 months. There is sudden drop in rank and we have been pushed to rank 114. I do not understand why this happened. Regards, Mithun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mithungowda0 -
New site - when will it rank?
We changed our domain 6 weeks ago as we had a penalty we couldn't shake off... My question is: How long will it take to rank for our keywords. I appreciate this is a difficult questions as there are a lot of factors that will effect our ranking. Do Google wait a period of time before allowing a new site to rank well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
What is the impact of excessive code on rankings
I am working on optimizing a page that utilizes a template that generates an excessive amount of code - 4 to 5 times what I am seeing with competitor pages. The entire site seems to have this problem and we have, according to webmaster tools a a medium to slow load time. In general, given the content and teh strength of the domain, I think this page should be performing better. I think the entire site should be performing better. Would it be worth it to replace the template I am using and replace it with a more lightweight page design? I would obviously keep the content and the url the same. Typically I want to try everything I can to improve rankings, but this change would take some time, so I don;t want to rush into it. Looking for some answers based on experience, not general best practices. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
Home Page Rankings Drop
Hi all we have being working with a small local client in the last few weeks getting good rankings using onsite op, and business listings we have been getting good ranking ie top 15 then today we drop right out the top 50, after completing manual checks i see the keywords as all related | glasgow catering | Not in Top 50 | down > 42 | |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig
| catering glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 41 | |
| glasgow caterers | Not in Top 50 | down > 39 | |
| caterers in glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 37 | |
| caterers glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 32 | Also when completing manual checks on the above keywords, the home page is not ranking what so ever, infact its missing i went 300 results deep and cant find it, other inner pages rank but not the home. The only other recent change is that we now have a listing under the Google maps section of the homepage on page 1 any advice www.georgieporgies.co.uk0 -
Aggressive Loss in Rankings
I recently launched a website and used local directories, web directories and guest blogging as a means of getting links to the site. Within 60 days the site was ranking on the first page for a highly competitive keyword. It was hovering on the first page for about two weeks before it plummeted in ranking to near 200. I am not finding any crawl errors or duplicate content issues on the site. Could my links have caused this massive decrease in rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0 -
Ranking problems
Hi All My site is live for a year now. I;m getting tons of traffic (alexa 54k) and business are good. The only problem is that I have 0 page rank....I have checked again and again the site;s structure to see if there is anything wrong with the site but everything seems to be ok. Google just added search links to the site (megamoneygames) which looks very nice. For example, none of my competitors have search links but they all have page rank of 4 while I have 0. In addition, for some reason the site's age (days) shows 0 although it is live for a year now... Do you have any idea of what is going on? do I have errors in the site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pariplay0