Ranking slipped to page 6 from page 1 over the weekend?
-
My site has been on page one for 2 phrases consistently from May onwards this year. The site has fewer than 100 backlinks and the link profile looks fairly even. On Friday we were on page 1, we even had a position 1, however now we are on page 6.
Do you think this is Penguin or some strange Google blip?
We have no webmaster tools messages at all.
Thanks for any help!
-
It's really hard to speak in generalities. If the site had <100 back-links, and some of those links were questionable or they were all targeted to a couple of phrases, then yes, a Penguin update could cause you trouble. The other option is that Google gave you some leeway out the gate and then re-evaluated your link profile and found it to be weak. Given that you ranked back in May, though, that seems unlikely (usually, that would happen in the first 30-60 days, in my experience).
A couple of things to check:
(1) Has anything about your indexed site change (such as duplicates of these pages)?
(2) Were there any technical or design changes to the site?
(3) Have you engaged in any recent link-building that could be questionable?
(4) Are you ranking for exact-match versions of the keywords (in quote)?
The more you can isolate the problem, the better. Penalty diagnosis is tricky.
-
I'd concur with Lesley Paone, that definitely coincides with Penguin 2.1 update. I haven't seen your link profile but you mentioned there's just 100 backlinks. It may be this was enough to rank you before, but not anymore. Just a thought.
-
Google always look for quality content, design for user not for search engine, try to rewrite
-
Hi I've sent you a private message as didn't want to reveal the URL over here thanks
-
From what I understand, no. It is basically an web spam algorithm change. Manual actions are for the sites that get around the changes, but are still spammy. So they manually have to assess a penalty. At least from my understanding.
-
The rankings were fine on Friday afternoon UK time but first thing this morning (Monday) when I have checked they have moved significantly. Considering there are hardly any backlinks I'm shocked at the extreme slip in rankings. None of my other sites have had a problem.
-
I was just going to post a new question, but this is related so I thought I'd join in here. I have seen drops in keyword ranking also which I believe is Penguin 2.1. My question is this, can I rely on the manual action section of webmaster tools to tell me if the site has been hit?
-
It very well could of been because penguin 2.1 was released this weekend. What day did it happen on? https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/386231794883780609
-
Hi there.
Can you please write your website adress and keyword that you lost ranking so there is a possibility to check it ?
Frutiko Team
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
-
Page Ranking Incorrect According to Moz
Hello, A while ago I published an article on our blog (HERE) and ensured that it meets all Moz's criteria for a good ranking. Moz scores my article at 96%, which is great. However, Google does not show my link anywhere, even that the target keyword has a difficulty score of 5% only. Any idea why this page is not doing good on Google? The article URL is: https://missionquest.org/how-to-choose-a-missionary-service-agency/ The target keyword is: Missionary Service Agency. Thank you for your help. Mission Quest
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mission-Quest0 -
Non-optimised pages ranking higher than optimised homepage
I'm a developer working with a dating site and we're having what appear to be unusual ranking behaviour for the keyword "Ukraine Brides". When searching for "Ukraine Brides" we typically have the top 3 results in Google, however the homepage is almost never ranked #1. Other non-optimised pages appear ahead of it. I believe this is having a negative affect on our conversion rate, so wish to see this resolved. For instance, if you search here in NZ, the results are typically: Login page (/account/login) Search page (/search) Home page (/) Similar situation when searching in the US, but typically the top result is the search page. Is this unusual? We've spent quite a bit of time optimising the homepage, it has more external links, more internal links, better content that targets the keyword, more traffic, etc. Even so, the login and search pages appear higher. A side note, the average CTR for "Ukraine Brides" is significantly lower than "Ukraine Brides Agency" (20% vs 80% respectively), so I don't think that it's purely a 'brand keyword'. A few thoughts were: The search page is not accessible from the homepage unless you are logged in. Maybe this is causing some sort of linking/seo/ranking issue? Re: the login page being higher, perhaps many existing users visit the login page directly from this keyword in order to login straight away so Google pushes this to the top. I think this is less likely because most existing users will be logged in automatically (via cookies "remember me") and the homepage has a login form in anycase The site supports multiple languages. Maybe this is causing some canonical issues? There was an additional suggestion that we should noindex the login and search pages in order to resolve this ranking issue, but were nervous that we'd lose a large amount of organic clicks if we did this. Google must be doing this for a reason, so we wanted to resolve that underlying reason before dropping the noindex hammer. The fear is of course that we've done something wrong with our homepage which is causing it to perform poorly and thus these other pages rank higher. The hope would be that if we fixed that, that our rank for other keywords would improve also. It would be great if we could get some more eyes on this to hopefully confirm we're not doing anything silly, and are just generally after a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrew_uba0 -
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
How to combine 2 pages (same domain) that rank for same keyword?
Hi Mozzers, A quick question. In the last few months I have noticed that for a number of keywords I am having 2 different pages on my domain show up in the SERP. Always right next to each other (for example, position #7 and #8 or #3 and #4). So in the SERP it looks something like: www.mycompetition1.com www.mycompetition2.com www.mywebsite.com/page1.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
4) www.mywebsite.com**/page2.html**
5) www.mycompetition3.com Now, I actually need both pages since the content on both pages is different - but on the same topic. Both pages have links to them, but page1.html always tends to have more. So, what is the best practice to tell Google that I only want 1 page to rank? Of course, the idea is that by combining the SEO Juice of both pages, I can push my way up to position 2 or 1. Does anybody have any experience in this? Any advice is much appreciated.0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
An affiliate website uses datafeeds and around 65.000 products are deleted in the new feeds. What are the best practises to do with the product pages? 404 ALL pages, 301 Redirect to the upper catagory?
Note: All product pages are on INDEX FOLLOW. Right now this is happening with the deleted productpages: 1. When a product is removed from the new datafeed the pages stay online and are showing simliar products for 3 months. The productpages are removed from the categorie pages but not from the sitemap! 2. Pages receiving more than 3 hits after the first 3 months keep on existing and also in the sitemaps. These pages are not shown in the categories. 3. Pages from deleted datafeeds that receive 2 hits or less, are getting a 301 redirect to the upper categorie for again 3 months 4. Afther the last 3 months all 301 redirects are getting a customized 404 page with similar products. Any suggestions of Comments about this structure? 🙂 Issues to think about:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
- The amount of 404 pages Google is warning about in GWT
- Right now all productpages are indexed
- Use as much value as possible in the right way from all pages
- Usability for the visitor Extra info about the near future: Beceause of the duplicate content issue with datafeeds we are going to put all product pages on NOINDEX, FOLLOW and focus only on category and subcategory pages.0 -
Get Duplicate Page content for same page with different extension ?
I have added a campaign like "Bannerbuzz" in SEOMOZ Pro account and before 2 or 3 days i got errors related to duplicate page content . they are showing me same page with different extension. As i mentioned below http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
&
http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor_vinyl_banner.php We checked our whole source files but we didn't define php related urls in our source code. we want to catch only our .html related urls. so, Can you please guide us to solve this issue ? Thanks <colgroup><col width="857"></colgroup>
| http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html |0