Ranking drop for a particular page on a particular keyword
-
Take a look at centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction.
For months we were ranking in the top 3 spots with this URL for "sex addiction los angeles", even reaching #1 for a while.
Late last year we redesigned and developed the site to clean up the code and redirects. We also cleaned up the internal linking structure. For years we had been ranking on "sex addiction los angeles" for the home page ... bumping around the top 5 spots, but we wanted organic traffic to go to /sex-addiction. In the Fall, we saw overall site traffic rise steadily. We made few changes to the site and none to this page or links flowing back to the page once we had achieved strong ranking -- we didn't want to mess with a good thing.
Then November 27th we started losing ranking on this term and a couple others. The good news is that we gained ranking on some high volume traffic terms so overall organic traffic is reasonably strong, BUT we're not ranking on the terms where we want to rank.
Centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction is now nowhere to be found on the target search term despite fairly strong page rank.
I tried redoing and resubmitting the site map, cleaning out some potentially duplicative content but to no avail.
I see no issues, errors or warnings in Webmaster Tools. We have a few medium priority fixer-uppers in SEO Moz, but we've taken care of the majority of the big stuff.
What am I not seeing?
Thank you!
-
The other big one is "sex therapy la" from centerforheatlhysex.com/sex-therapy.
Thanks!
-
Interesting... what are the other urls/keywords that have been affected? Maybe we can find a pattern.
I wonder if its a language filter causing this...
-
Thanks, Oleg. I tried out your recs, but ranking has deteriorated even further ...
Organic traffic overall is fine, but this KW (and some other geo-local long tail terms) just keep falling in rank...
-
The fact that its for 1 keyword and 1 page leads me to believe that it is penguin. The refresh came on Oct 5th but could be related. Doesn't look like it has any problems with its backlinks so that leaves on page. I ran some keyword density analysis on the site and you have very high percentages for your content.
I don't usually recommend this but you should try decreasing the number of instances of your target keyword. Not by much (3 or 4 instances) but just replace several instances of "sex addition" in your body content to some synonym/different variation e.g. "addiction to sex", "the addiction", etc.
If you decide to take my advice, PLEASE let me know if it worked. This is a really interesting case
Edit: ran copyscape and see a bunch of results. I know that you are trying to quote a respected source but maybe G is taking offense to that? Although it generally shouldn't penalize you for quoting a small portion of your pages content, G could be treating this differently for one reason or another.
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
-
How do i beat my spammy competitors? they are ranking on page 1 of google!
my competitor is ranking on page 1 of google. he has 3.4 million backlinks and 1400 refering domains. he has aquired these backlinks from various websites, but he doesnot have links from his niche . how do i beat my competition with less backlinks because if i follo his technique, it would a takea lot of time and people to build backlinks one of my strategy is to get .edu links second strategy is to have 6000 word content and rank for really low competition keywords related to my website.( my competitors website has 1500 words content!) any other strategy you can suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | calvinkj0 -
Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace. Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ0 -
Pages built on same model some rank some don’t ?
I have multiple webpages built on the same exact model and none of them have external links ? Some rank within a few days some don’t why is that ? Has anyone experienced this ? and any idea what it could be due to ? I have 2 possibilities lsi density or lsi used or topics used ? Does anyone ha e any other idea ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
My homepage ranks but not my target page.
Hello, I have an issue with one my pages. I have a page about "Bike tours in France+ exclusively that has been existing for almost 8 years. Since day 1 I changed the web address a few times but I have the necessary redirect (actually only 1). I can't find this page (pretty much since day 1) on the keyword "Bike tours France" and I am wondering why ? However, I can find my homepage rank on "Bike tours France" even though it doesn't only talk about "Bike tours in France" instead of my page which is only about "Bike tours in France". I am wondering why only my homepage shows and not the other one. For information, I have about 30 % of my external links that say Bike tours France and that go to my homepage because when I started my website I was only doing "Bike tours in France" Could google say we don't care about your page about "Bike tours in France" because you got so many links to your page with the keywords "Bike tours France" and could it be why I don't see it rank. However, it is index but doesn't show up in search results ? Or could it be the fact that made many content changes over the years on this page and that google is saying I will rank you but it will take years because of so many changes. What can I do to make my page about "Bike tours in France" appear in search results for the keyword "Bike tours in France". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How to replace an already ranked page with a better, more optimised one?
Hello peeps! I need your collective wisdom to help me deal with something. We manage a website that is doing quite well in its niche, however we have the following problem: Our section landing pages are well established and they rank for a wide range of search terms, including some with a transactional focus. It is obvious that these pages do not cater for users with transactional intent. Our competitors are targeting those transactional keywords with a completely different type of pages, and are winning across the board (annoying but understandable). We have now created a number of pages, which are very similar to the ones that our competitors are using and with an even better on-page SEO score ... WIN! ...well, not so much! Our old section pages are still ranking for the transactional search terms and our new pages are getting very little traction and are having a really slow start. 1. I suspect there is some sort of page cannibalisation going on. How would you address that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yordan.Vasilev
2. Is there a tried and tested way of telling search engines to rank your new page because it meets the search intent in a better way? Please note that we cannot just redirect the old page to the new one - there are structural and commercial reasons for keeping the old page as it is.
3. Is there anything else that I am missing? Your help is much appreciated.
Thanks
Yordan0 -
Rankings appear mixed up causing huge drop in organic
Hi, Our top page appears to have dropped out of the index. The core keyword "business ideas" is still showing us at the top but it's a different post and it's lost all the long-tail. Whats even stranger is that it's not even directly relevant to the topic of business ideas. Looks like something fishy happened here – perhaps due to the recent algo updates. We've always seen a significant increase in organic when anything Panda related updates (c.20%+ growth every time) yet this has compeltely killed us. We spent a long time building this post up, eventually outranking Entrepreneur.com. It's been #1 for Google.co.uk for months. Any help would be MASSIVELY appreciated! ikvJVrq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | entrepreneurhandbook0 -
Re-platform effects on Page Rank
We are performing a major replatform for an ecommerce client who has many top listings on page 1 in Google SERPs for very competitive terms. We are implementing a 301 redirect for all existing URLs that they have now to the appropriate new URLs, but the client is concerned with how deploying a new site with 100% new URLs and site structure will impact their Page Rank. From our experience, the 301 redirects should cover it but wanted to see if there is a way to predictively forecast page rank effects as a result of re-platforming.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bucktown0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610