Rankings tanking fast and I cant figure out why. Any insight?
-
This site was created about a 18 months ago, and since then we did our own in house SEO. Well we did hire one recommended company on the Moz list for a few months and they did great linkbuilding but were super expensive. We always saw steady increase in organic clicks both via google and bing. We got to a maximum of around 25k organic clicks/month in July before we started to tank. We are now down to around 16k/mo and continuing to drop quickly.
Nothing has changed as far as what we are doing for SEO. The only thing that comes to mind was back in July we saw some negative SEO against us. Fortunately we keep a very close eye on our back links so we disavowed all of the toxic links pretty much as they were found. There was about ten of them from places such as:
sharklinks.info
bookmarkingforseo.com
compasslinks.infoWe don't have any manually actions in webmaster tools. Anyone want to help point me in the right direction? We have some competitors out ranking us with a horrible back link profile, beyond crappy website/content etc. I guess this is the nature of the beast and google doesnt always get it right, but I would love to hear your thoughts on why we are going backwards.
-
I would look at before and after dates in analytics and compare to see where your traffic loss is occurring.
Have you been manually tracking the rank of your keywords over time? have you noticed a drop off for a keyword that you would expect to be a high traffic driver?
It could be that you have lost a referring link that was sending over a lot of traffic, was/are you doing any PPC traffic that may have had an affect on your volumes, sometimes people forget that PPC spend also drives organic traffic, so you would see a natural decline in organic traffic if you slow down your PPC spend.
-
Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not provide a 'What's Changed' report, but you can somewhat easily make that report by exporting your Keyword information and traffic details to excel, then comparing your top terms over time.
I wouldn't suggest looking at all 1600 keywords. Instead, identify the keywords that sent 80% of your traffic and see what's changed among those. Was there a few specific keywords that sent huge amounts of traffic and no longer do so? Or can you identify a general decrease across all keywords (maybe signalling a seasonal change?).
-
I thought this might be the case, and it could be. When I run a semrush report, we went from ranking 1,400 keywords in July to 1,600 in Sept. So something is on the correct path, but obviously if the ranking is lower on aggregate for these keywords then we could be going backwards.
I am getting mixed signals I guess from the reports I am running and the actual traffic.
-
Are you referring to some sort of tool that will show you exactly "whats changed", or if I just took a look at the difference between the periods? I know that our top 20 traffic generating keywords stayed roughly the same in SERP positions, maybe an overall minimal drop when you take an average of them. We rank for some 1,600 keywords so cant manually check them all.
Is there an easier way of comparing now and then? I am importing into excel both time period and then just manipulating the data.
-
Given your scenario, there could me many areas to check and see what is has changed to effect your rankings. Have you done a 'what's changed' analysis to see exactly where your traffic dropped?
Month-to-month look at the keywords that were sending you traffic and identify which keywords have reduced their visits. Then track those keywords in Moz, see where you can improve on-page, and see what your competitors have done to outrank you.
Once you know why the change has happened, you can adjust to get that traffic back that you've lost.
-
Could it have something to do with your topic, rather than the site itself? When I look at "student debt relief" in Google trends, I see a big spike in July, and September is half that. I know on my site that traffic is related to seasonality.
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 understand our Ranking; DA, PA and On Page all better than Competiton; Ranking no where
Our rankings are up and down but our domain is clean, DA and PA good
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexSTUDIO18
and there is really in depth content which is all original. We are at a bit of a loss; The site is
http://www.fightstorepro.com I can use the phrase "Boxing Gloves" as an example
http://www.fightstorepro.com/gear/gloves/boxing-gloves.html PA 26 , DA29
Good original content; Video content, On page grade A
Not ranking in top 50 places?? The competitor in Pos4 is not matching our placing Anyone shed any light on this?0 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Brand queries as a ranking signal?
Hi folks, I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this. I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this? Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this... I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this. Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would? Best wishes, Amelia PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Why is my blog out-ranking my main site?
Please see attached ranking history chart. On June 5th the chart shows that my main site is not coming up under our main keyword "door hangers" From then on, our blog took over. Any ideas why? Thanks Andrea lpEBciu.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
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 -
Why am I not ranking in Google, but I am in Yahoo and Bing?
The website in question is: www.stbarthexclusives.com Our keywords are currently ranking for both Bing and Yahoo, but we're not appearing anywhere on Google. The website is being crawled successfully, but we still don't have any results. I hoping somebody can point me in the general right direction to fix/correct this problem. Additionally, there's a decent amount of "rel=canonical tags" on the website. If that helps your evaluation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Endora0 -
On Page Rankings dropped without any changes
What could have factored into some of my key words dropping from an A to a C on my on page rankings. I am not sure how it happened because there were not any chages made. Thanks, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0