The Google Algo update that happened 1-8 is KILLING my rankings
-
Does anyone know what happened?? I have a great website, we ranked very highly for a slew of industry keywords, #1 in most of our top-money kws....and our keywords have been in freefall since the update. Help?!
-
Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of opinions on what happened and not a lot of solid evidence (including my own, which is inconclusive, sadly). Google tightened up on something content-related, it seems, but we're not sure what.
It's hard to speak in generalarities, but if I had to start somewhere, I'd be looking for Panda-like signals. Do you have content that could be considered thin, and/or are you facing duplication either within your site or across competitors sites? Is your site generally too big, in terms of indexed pages, for your authority (i.e. the strength of your link profile)? It may simply be that Google turned up the volume on a few factors.
If this is content-related, the good news is that fixes should generally impact your rankings fairly quickly. This doesn't seem to be a Penguin-like situation.
-
Hi, Pete.
In our case it was one time drop over couple days and then leveled out and stays around the same spot - beginning of the second page.
What confuses me the most is this: neither us or our competitors have had any major (if any at all) changes in content (at least on main landing and ranking pages). Neither backlink profiles have changed. At the same time our rankings had experienced that drop and we are having trouble recovering. However, main competitors didn't have that drop.
P.S. All metrics in our case are better than competitors.
Any ideas on what's happening / what we should pay extra attention at?
-
Unfortunately, the industry has developed very little insight into what happened in the January "core update". Multiple tools recorded historically high rankings flux, but Google would only say that it wasn't Penguin and the patterns in our data are unclear.
There were claims that, while it might not have been a Panda refresh, sites impacted by Panda previously were also hit by this update (sorry, I know that's a little confusing). This would suggest that the target of the update was more likely on-page factors and general content quality factors than link-based factors. That said, "quality" is a very nebulous and subjective term. We're not sure what specifically Google targeted.
Have you seen specific types of keywords and/or specific pages drop, or is the drop happening across the entire site and all keywords? Step 1 is always to isolated the targets as much as possible. Have your rankings continued to drop since January 8, or was this a single-day drop that then leveled out (I'm interpreting "have been in freefall" as still dropping)?
-
Hi there.
Oh yeah, Many have the same problem. Me as well. And I can't figure out what's going on. As well as looks like there is no info from Google what was update about.
There is a suggestion floating around that it might be regarding backlinks quality, but there is no proof or reliable info about that either.
Here are my two topics I've asked, you can see what people are saying:
https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/recovery-after-recent-google-update
https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/january-2016-massive-rankings-fluctuations
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
-
Huge ranking flux that we cannot explain
Hello, SEO experts from around the world. We need your help; we have seen massive ranking flux across our website and others. We cannot explain what is causing this ranking flux. The content marketing is top quality, so we don’t know why we are moving from 25 to 50th on Google and sometimes even beyond that. Can any SEO experts explain why our agency is moving so much within Google’s rankings? We don’t know whether to make changes or possibly wait. Any help would be fantastic; thank you all.
Algorithm Updates | | sarahwalsh0 -
Traffic cut-off since Google core update
Hi all, I am the webmaster of www.chepicap.com/en (Cryptocurrency news), and since the 3rd of june (Google core algorithm update) we got the hammer from Google. Organic traffic dropped with 90%+ overnight. We are still in the dark whether we can do to improve the current situation. Does someone have suggestions regarding this issue?
Algorithm Updates | | NielsDE0 -
Increase in impressions reported by Google Analytics
Because Universal Analytics (and Google Webmaster) only stores SEO data for 3 months, I've been downloading SEO data (from the Acquisition tab of Analytics) to get a record of how impressions, clicks, CTR etc are changing in the long term (our business is seasonal, so these long-term patterns are important). Today, I downloaded data for September, and found a very large increase in the number of impressions compared to previous months. I looked back at the data for August, which I've already downloaded, and found that Analytics is now reporting much higher numbers of impressions than I have in my downloaded data. The total number of impressions has roughly doubled, and the increase for individual URLs varies, with some increasing by a factor of 10. The number of clicks has also increased, by about 15% in total. Because of the 3 month cut-off, I could only look back as far as the 11th of July, but the impressions for the end of July are also much higher than in my downloaded data. I've noticed that Analytics has changed some other details in its reporting of SEO data. For example, the impressions and clicks data is no longer rounded. Could this increase in impressions be a result of those changes? Has anyone else experienced something similar? We can go ahead and use the new data but it will throw our analysis off for past months (which have the lower numbers). If others have experienced something similar it would be good to know, so that we can adjust our historical numbers accordingly.
Algorithm Updates | | MargotLoco20 -
Ranking Well in Google But Not Bing - Why?
Hello Moz Community, I'm ranking well in Google (#2-#6 for various keywords) but on the second page of Bing. Are there certain differences that I should be aware of? Thanks, Cole
Algorithm Updates | | ColeLusby0 -
How important is Social Media for building domain authority / Google rankings? Are there any cases?
I really would like to know if someone tested the importance of Social Media for Google rankings.
Algorithm Updates | | Seeders
Are there some sites who build authority only by doing good social media?
Ofcourse, I know it is all about the mix (content, linkbuilding, social media, etc.) but how important is it?
I know many sites who rank good without any form of social media, but I do not know any sites who do only social media and rank high. I hope there are some good cases which give good insight. ps. I know it becomes more and more important...0 -
Monthly Searches in Rankings Tab
Hi everyone, I'm pretty new to SEOMoz, so my apologies if this is a very obvious question. I'm trying to find out how to do a report that shows both the ranking of my keywords as well as the monthly searches in Google or the other search engines. Is there an option for this? Thanks in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | seoppc20120 -
Why Google Cache is not showing ?
Hello Everyone, I have a question for you. Today when I checked cache:www.bollywoodshaadis.com on Google.com, it is showing following message. 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=519&q=cache%3Awww.bollywoodshaadis.com&oq=cache%3Awww.bollywoodshaadis.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=2501l16050l0l16394l30l30l0l23l0l0l353l1781l0.1.4.2l7l0 was not found on this server. I was able to see sitelinks till yesterday but they also have disappeared now. Can someone please tell me why is this happening? Is this a temporary issue? or something needs to be done.
Algorithm Updates | | SEOcandy0 -
Why would my product pages no longer be indexed in Google?
Our UK site has 72 pages in our sitemap. 30 of them are product pages which take a productid parameter. Prior to 1st Feb 2011, all pages were indexed in Google but since then all of our product pages seem to have dropped from the index? If I check in webmaster tools, I can see that we have submitted 72 pages and 42 are indexed. I realise we should have some better url structuring and I'm working on that but do you have any ideas on how we can get our product poages back into googles index http://www.ebacdirect.com
Algorithm Updates | | ebacltd0