What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
-
Hi,
9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places.
For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite.
I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop.
Any suggestions would be most welcome.
-
I appreciate that, thank you.
-
Anytime, if things don't settle down, private message me and I would be happy to help you further if I can.
-
Hi Monica,
That all seems very sensible. Thank you very much for your help.
-
Have you ever heard of the Google Dance?
I started working with a company in August and have been trying to fix some major SEO issues. What I noticed is that at the times I made several changes, 301s, on page changes, revising content, I would see a huge decrease in rankings one week and then they would start to level out over the next 2-3 weeks. This isn't atypical, it shouldn't concern you too much right now.
Here are a few suggestions. Google your keyword + the number of your company. There should be an arrow in the SERP next to your URL, click that and select "Cached". This will tell you if the engine has seen your changes yet or not. If it has been cached, just wait a week and see if it levels out a little better, or at least bounces back to where it was.
The second thing you should do is check your search impressions in webmaster tools. With the two big updates happening in the past 30 days a huge change in your search impressions could cause some of your keywords to move around until things even out. You want to look for search impressions that dip below your lowest average day before 10/17/14. This will tell you if Panda or Penguin are having an affect on your rankings. If they are, this could just be temporary as the rest of the penguin update unfolds.
I say give it a couple of weeks just to be safe. I wouldn't make any other changes just yet. You don't want to fall victim to over optimizing either.
Good Luck!
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
-
Ranking Page #1 for Keyword without Hypen, Not at all for Keyword with Hyphen
Hi There! So I work in an industry where there are different conventions for referring to, searching on and spelling the industry name. For example, let's pretend there were a variety of different conventions for referring to the SEO industry. So someone could search for S-EO, SEO, sEO, etc. and those would all be accepted and understood means of referring to the industry. If we use the SEO example as a comparison for our industry, the two most common conventions would be S-EO and SEO. Using this example, we rank on the first page for the term "SEO" but do not rank AT ALL for the term "S-EO". We have a high-value piece of content that is targeted in the following way: "S-EO (SEO): The Basics Guide" so it is more targeted at the hyphenated word but does not rank at all for the hyphenated version, whereas it is page one for the non-hyphenated term. As additional pieces of context: -In general, our site is more targeted at the hyphenated term and there are places where we rank in the top spot for both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions. For example, we rank in a top 2 position for both S-EO & SEO software but do not rank at all for the broader "S-EO" term. -There are times when we do appear on page one for the term "S-EO" but it's typically only for a matter or hours or days and then we disappear entirely from the SERPs for that term. We consistently appear for "SEO." -I currently do not believe we are dealing with a penalty of any sort - our link profile is clean and our spam score per Moz is 2 / 17. Any thoughts or ideas as to what is going on here and how we can potentially rank for the term "S-EO?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dpayne10 -
Replacing keywords by synonyms. Will it increase risk of google keyword stuffing penalization?
I have a page which is ranking already pretty well for a relative competitive keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Google also ranks us on first page for synonym of keyword we optimize the page for (even though synonym does not appear on our page). I am now considering to replace some occurences of the keyword in the page by different synonyms, in the hope that our ranking may further improve for these synonyms.
However I am concerned that google may penalize me for keyword stuffing if I am using a wide range of synonyms of one keyword on our page. My plan is only to replace some occurences of keyword with synonyms. I am a bit nerveous here since page is already ranking quite well in a competitive niche. Any thoughts?0 -
We used to speak of too many links from same C block as bad, have CDN's like CloudFlare made that concept irrelevant?
Over lunch with our head of development, we were discussing the way CloudFlare and other CDN's help prevent DDOS attacks, etc. and I began to wonder about the IP address vs. the reverse proxy IP address. Before we would look to see commonalities in the IP as a way that search engines would modify the value to given links and most link software showed this. For ahrefs, I know they still show common IPs using the C block as the reference point. I began to get curious about what was the real IP when our head of dev said, that is the IP from CloudFlare... So, I ran a site in ahrefs and we got an older site we had developed years ago that showed up as follows: Actos-lawsuit.org 104.28.13.57 and again as 104.28.12.57 (duplicate C block is first three sets of numbers are the same and obviously, this has a .12 and a .13 so not duplicate.) Then we looked at our host to see what was the IP shown there: 104.239.226.120. So, this really begs a question of is C Block data or even IP address data still relevant with regard to links? What do the search engines see when they look for IP address now? Yes, I have an opinion, but would love to hear yours first!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher0 -
Is a Rel Canonical Sufficient or Should I 'NoIndex'
Hey everyone, I know there is literature about this, but I'm always frustrated by technical questions and prefer a direct answer or opinion. Right now, we've got recanonicals set up to deal with parameters caused by filters on our ticketing site. An example is that this: http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets?location=il&time=day relcanonicals to... http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets My question is if this is good enough to deal with the duplicate content, or if it should be de-indexed. Assuming so, is the best way to do this by using the Robots.txt? Or do you have to individually 'noindex' these pages? This site has 650k indexed pages and I'm thinking that the majority of these are caused by url parameters, and while they're all canonicaled to the proper place, I am thinking that it would be best to have these de-indexed to clean things up a bit. Thanks for any input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
What's better ...more or less linking C-blocks?
I'm a little confused about c-blocks, I've been reading about them but I still don't get it. Are these similar to sitewide links? do they have to come from websites that I own and hosted in the same ip? and finally, what's better ...more or less linking c-blocks? Cheers 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mbulox0 -
Ecommerce SEO - Indexed product pages are returning 404's due to product database removal. HELP!
Hi all, I recently took over an e-commerce start-up project from one of my co-workers (who left the job last week). This previous project manager had uploaded ~2000 products without setting up a robot.txt file, and as a result, all of the product pages were indexed by Google (verified via Google Webmaster Tool). The problem came about when he deleted the entire product database from our hosting service, godaddy and performed a fresh install of Prestashop on our hosting plan. All of the created product pages are now gone, and I'm left with ~2000 broken URL's returning 404's. Currently, the site does not have any products uploaded. From my knowledge, I have to either: canonicalize the broken URL's to the new corresponding product pages, or request Google to remove the broken URL's (I believe this is only a temporary solution, for Google honors URL removal request for 90 days) What is the best way to approach this situation? If I setup a canonicalization, would I have to recreate the deleted pages (to match the URL address) and have those pages redirect to the new product pages (canonicalization)? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | byoung860 -
How is Google's algorithm evolving in terms of DA vs PA value?
how is Google evolving in terms of value for DA vs PA? Is having a link from a DA 75 + PA 25 better than having a link from a DA 50 + PA 50, assuming such 2 websites are otherwise identical? I have a couple of .EDU backlinks where DA is around 80, though PA 1. Would be DA 40 with a PA 40 be more valuable? I hear Google is placing increasing value on the domain and less on the page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
Any insight appreciated thank you0