Has there been an algorithm change in the last week?
-
Hi guys,
Rankings for almost half of our targeted keywords have gone down this week vs. last week.
I have checked a couple of rank trackers and all are reporting some serious movement in Google's algorithms during this period.
Does anyone have any further information on this that can help me restore our rankings? I haven't read anything in regards to any 'major' pending updates.
Many thanks in advance,
Jack
-
Thanks, Donna.
My plan is to not have a knee-jerk reaction to this, and as you say, just see how things play out over the next week or so.
Many thanks for your response - I really appreciate it.
-
Hi Jack,
I saw your question a few days ago and didn't respond thinking I'd wait and see if there was talk of an update in the SEO forums. There hasn't been any.
As you probably know, Google updates its ranking algorithm 500-600 times a year. Only the larger, more disruptive ones get talked about in the forums. You may be witnessing one of the smaller ones. I know I have seen some fluctuations this week.
As to what to do about it, if you're playing by the rules I'd sit tight and see if things normalize over the coming few weeks. It's not unusual for there to be significant changes that eventually reverse. If things don't normalize, then you're going to have to do some comparative analysis to figure out what you need to do to catch up again.
Not a specific answer - sorry, there isn't one. I could be so many different things.
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
-
Changing Permalink/ Structure to introduce woo commerce
Advise needed please We have rankings coming along nicely with a website that uses page content but we now need to start online shopping with woo commerce The url structure has always been a bit of a mess, but its quite in depth We are looking to move small paragraphs about each product cat (formerly put on Pages) information into the Product Category and then the Product information into the product page and redirect the old urls to the new urls. It would mean updating the permalinks also - My concern if there is less leverage with product categories - do these rank just as well as pages, are we going to see our rankings change dramatically in doing so? Added to that - is it best doing this change gradually or all at once (like staging site to get the set up ready) and then pushing live
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KellyDSD860 -
Site Not Indexing After 2 Weeks - PA at 1
Hi Moz Community! I'm working as a digital marketing consultant for an organization that uses us for their online registration - we do not manage their web page. The issue that I am hoping you might have some ideas on is that their SERPS still aren’t making much of a recovery since they revamped their site in mid August. I ran a MOZ campaign for them and despite that they (eventually) got all their 301s in place, they submitted an updated sitemap to Google, aren’t hitting any crawl errors, and have a working robots.txt over two-thirds of their site pages don’t seem to be indexing. MOZ is giving most of them a Page Authority of 1, and when I login to their GWT, it’s showing me that only 3 pages have been indexed of the 315 URLs submitted. I know Google doesn’t make any guarantees in index update timelines, but 2+ weeks seems like a long time 😞 Their website is https://www.northshoreymca.org/. The site has a DA of 43 but most of the pages on the main nav are still at 1. They gave me permission to share in this forum because we're really trying to figure out a recovery strategy. Any thoughts or ideas as to what might be causing this? Is there anything else that you think I should check or that might be causing an issue? Is it possible that Google is just taking this long to index their page? Note: this page is built with Drupal. THANK YOU!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | camarin_w0 -
Changing URL structure of date-structured blog with 301 redirects
Howdy Moz, We've recently bought a new domain and we're looking to change over to it. We're also wanting to change our permalink structure. Right now, it's a WordPress site that uses the post date in the URL. As an example: http://blog.mydomain.com/2015/01/09/my-blog-post/ We'd like to use mod_rewrite to change this using regular expressions, to: http://newdomain.com/blog/my-blog-post/ Would this be an appropriate solution? RedirectMatch 301 /./././(.) /blog/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanOBrien0 -
Algorithmic penalty perhaps but what is it?
I've discovered that when google crawled my home page my ranking for all keywords dropped. I've submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I wasn't breaking the rules. The response was that no manual penalty had been applied to my site. Therefore it must be an on site algorithim penalty? I thought it could be duplicate content as I have many posts that are in multiple categories so maybe that was it. Since then I've made efforts to ensure the posts in the categories are varied. I also thought it might be too many on page links so I removed categories that weren't needed as I have categories in my navigation and sidebar. So far though no improvement. I wonder if anyone here can take a look at the site and offer any suggestions as to what might be causing this algorithmic penalty? The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content!) I'm really struggling to figure this out so any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Losing Rank As A Result Of Domain Change
I have a client who is wishing to switch from an established, but unattractive domain, to a domain he just purchased that is more attractive. For example purposes, his existing site is "His-Company-Website.com" and the site he just purchased and wants to transfer to is "HisCompanyWebsite.com." The only difference is the old site has hyphens in between the words and the new one does not. He is not making this choice from an SEO perspective, but more of a "I don't want to keep saying all those hyphens when telling people about my website." But he said he doesn't want to lose his search engine rankings as a result. So he knows this won't necessarily increase his ranks, but doesn't want them to drop as a result. When speaking with him, I thought we could simply toss in a 301 redirect at the root level and pipe them over to the other site, but he wanted some actual proof. I went back to look at what I thought would be a similar case that I did earlier in the year (transferring from a .net to a .com) and noticed that we did see some rather substantial drops in at least traffic, so I am not so sure about this plan any longer. So my questions for my far more insightful colleagues... What would be your suggestion on this problem? Transition to the more user friendly domain or stick with the unfriendly domain? If he does elect to transition to the new domain, what all can I do to preserve his search engine rankings? Should a rankings and/or traffic drop be predicting when completing this? Thank you all in advance. Any other tidbits anyone has to offer would be great. Looking forward to your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
Redesign Launch with change from ASP to PHP
My client is launching a new corporate website redesign. But the trick is, their old site was built in ASP and they want the new site to be a Wordpress site, built in PHP. Their current website has A PR4/10 and MANY backlinks to its pages. I don't want to risk any SEO authority and make sure the transition is smooth. The current site only has less than 75 pages. Can anyone give me a checklist of things I need to make sure get done? And how to do each? For example: 1. How to forward the old domain to new URLs... (301s? DNS? HT Access?..not savvy) 2. Keep all the same URLs? 3. Don't change any content?...etc. 4. Submit new sitemap? or robots.txt file? Also, I wanted to add a Wordpress Blog to the new site for SEO purposes, but since it's being built in Wordpress, do you recommend I have a subdomain on this site as www.blog.website.com? Or is this now not necessary since the entire thing is built in wordpress? I would REALLY appreciate your time helping me on this. Thanks! Derek
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DerekM880 -
URL formating is it worth changing?
One of my clients sites has almost OK URL's, set up something like the following: keyword2_keyword3_keyword1 Ideally the URL's would be more like this: keyword1-keyword2-keyword3 My question is is there any point in changing them and 301 redirecting them over just to get the target keywords in a better order and change the _ to a - ? Has anyone tried this and its worked or not worked, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids0 -
Most efficient way to change site structure?
I would like to change my sites structure to be more efficient for SEO. I have a fear that the changes will have a potential impact on my current rankings, but know this would be a good long term decision. My site is wordpress, so the changes are relatively easy to make. What are some ways to change the site structure without damaging your rank? I would have to have to clean up a bunch of errors, so is the best way to simply do 301 redirects on the old pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dignan990