Erratic Rankings Earlier This Month - UK
-
Can anybody tell me what happened here?
http://5lx.co.uk/images/searchconsole2015-12-22 13.37.16.png
That is the ranking pattern of my UK site on Google UK for my main keyword.
It reached number 1 on 7 December but three or four days later, dropped like a stone.
It has been very erratic ever since, slumping as low as the mid-30s.
I checked the search console but there were no manual penalties. There is an update signalled on the chart but I can't find any info about it and anyway it seems to have happened after the drop began.
I barely touched the site between its top ranking and the slump and certainly didn't do anything to deserve that roller coaster (as far as I know).
Does anybody have any ideas?
Thanks
-
I've been watching some large sites, and I've seen some pretty crazy things around the 14-17th, with most sites seeing the biggest impact in ranking drops on the 16th. It was clearly an update, but I can't find reliable info on what exactly it was - probably because it affected a small niche of sites. Does your site receive a lot of traffic for local terms by chance? My working theory is another update to local search results. (Trying to show more companies that work in that area, possibly with more local packs.)
The reason I'm thinking local is because it was the biggest shift in rankings I've seen in a long long time, and tools like Mozcast didn't pick up a big change. There are so many possible combinations of local terms that it's nearly impossible to track even a small set of keyword + city terms.
Anyway, I've seen about the same as you - a big drop for some key local terms, followed by a slow and steady recovery. The results looked pretty bad when the update was first made, so maybe Google realized it wasn't a good update and has rolled some of it back.
Of course this is all just speculation. I'd love to hear what other types of terms people have seen ranking decreases on.
-
Thanks Moosa
There's no information about that update and it certainly hasn't shown up as Penguin or Panda in the monitoring services.
Technically, my site is fine. It's very fast. The front page loads in about 2 seconds, a lot faster than the competition and both Moz and SEMrush suggest the ranking page for that keyword is fine.
I did wait a few days and as you can see from the chart it keeps going up and down. There doesn't seem to be a 'normal' for it.
I am particularly confused about that initial drop. I still can't find a good reason for it.
Thanks
Neil
-
Obviously I cannot say exactly but If I would be at your place, I would dig into what kin d of update it was. If its penguin or Panda update then try to look in to your content and links and see if they are fine. Also work on building some good quality links as well.
Recently, my rankings tanked like anything (I have some site speed issues) so I thought this drop was because of that but today I looked in to rankings again and saw that the rankings are back to normal.
I am not sure but maybe you should wait for a day or two to see if it comes back to normal.
Just a thought!
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
-
SPA (angularJS) Ranking Problem
Hello dear experts; I working on SPA website with More than 20,000 indexed pages by Google there is a problem that I involved with: 1- Some pages had a good ranking on google.com but from a week ago, ranks one by one, dropped and homepage Replaced. for example, URL: https://cafegardesh.com/tours-dubai removes and https://cafegardesh.com replaced. Google still see the page when I use Fetch as Google tool. I can't understand what happens Is there anyone can find my site problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Ranking Above sub-domains
So I work for a company that has a very successful affiliate that operates under a third level domain name such as "region.company.com". Their SEO practices are very good and they rank highly in keyword searches. However "company.com" does not even though it is not a subdomain. Even after optimizing the company.com's pages etc, the regional sub domain ranks much higher for keywords and the main company fails to rank at all. Is Google discounting the main company's page? Is it a matter of trust or time? or is it something else? How can I get Google to prioritize the main company website rather than a lower level domain affiliate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resolute0 -
Ranking problems with international website
Hey there, we have some ranking issues with our international website. It would be great if any of you could share their thoughts on that. The website uses subfolders for country and language (i.e. .com/uk/en) for the website of the UK branch in English. As the company has branches all over the world and also offers their content in many languages the url structure is quite complex. A recent problem we have seen is that in certain markets the website is not ranking with the correct country. Especially in the UK and the US, Google prefers the country subfolder for Ghana (.com/gh/en) over the .com/us/en and .com/uk/en versions. We have hreflang setup and should also have some local backlinks pointing to the correct subfolders as we switched from many ccTLDs to one gTLD. What confuses me is that when I check for incoming links (Links to your site) with GWT, the subfolder (.com/gh/en) is listed quite high in the column (Your most linked content). However the listed linking domains are not linking at all to this folder as far as I am aware. If I check them with a redirect checker they all link to different subfolders. So I have now idea why Google gives such high authority to this subfolder over the specific country subfolders. The content is pretty much identical at this stage. Has any of you experienced similar behaviour and could point me in a promising direction? Thanks a lot. Regards, Jochen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy0 -
Is my website is having enough content on it to rank?
I have less content on my website, is this okay or I need to add more content on my pages? Website is - brandstenmedia.com.au Any other suggestions for the website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Green.landon0 -
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 -
100% links within the website - could it rank?
Hi, If I create blog posts inside my website and link it back to my website, Would it still rank? I understand that its better to get links from the established domain. But I just wonder what kind of impact would my site have if the blog posts within my site link back to itself for ranking. Please let me know. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zsyed0 -
Is my other domain making me not rank?
Hi there, We have a .co.uk website which was ranking well for a number of highly competitive keywords, however in February 2012 those rankings for those keywords suddenly dropped off Google all together and have never came back. A few possibilties to why this has happened: We launched a .ie website which has exactly the same content, could this be the reason for the drop? I have put in all the necessary steps in making sure Google ranks these geographically correct by using hreflang and making sure everything is setup properly in webmaster tools. Why I think it could be this: If I copy and paste the first few paragraphs of text from the pages in the .co.uk website that were ranked highly in Google.co.uk it's the .ie version that appears not the .co.uk version. Here is the webpages in question: http://www.avogel.co.uk/health/menopause/ http://www.avogel.ie/health/menopause/ Forgot to mention, the reason we have these two websites is due to different currency and legalities. Hope someone can help me out with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780