Ranking drop
-
Hello there,
Based on Moz's rank tracker our keywords ranking have been dropping in ranking.
Does anyone know what might be the cause?
We have been building quality "white hat" links which are very relevant to our niche
Thanks,
Robert
-
Keep it easy man. If it is a one position drop, monitor your CTR and whether there are new competitors in your SERPs that have maybe just pushed you down.
-
Hi Robert,
I recommend this all the time, but one thing that may shed some light is the Full SERP Report in the Keyword Difficulty Tool in Moz Pro. It can give you a sense of what your competitors on the SERPs are doing that's helping them pull ahead.
Cyrus Shepard made a quick video on it here.
-
Hi Robert,
It sounds to me like you might just be getting out-competed. Gradual declines in rankings in the absence of content changes or penalties are typically the result of competition. If it had something to do with your link profile, you would expect to see large-scale drops - ditto for Panda-related issues.
I can't see any problem with your anchors, so my guess is that you just have to get back on the link-building grind and perhaps add some new content to freshen up the site itself.
Sucks, but that's the game!
Best of luck moving forward,
Rob
-
If unable to see a sharp drop - unfortunately it is back to basics. SImply have to work through the below. Make differential diagnosis's along the way. Do not discount anything until you are 100% certain.
1. https://mza.seotoolninja.com/google-algorithm-change
2. https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit
3. https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
4. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit
5. https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial
Hope that assists. Though it is the long way home.
-
Robert
Panda 4.2 rolled out on the weekend of 19 July. It is going to be very difficult to track Panda 4.2 the way google is rolling it out.
Can you go to your WMT's and in search analytics and run a comparison on all 4, but the result I am after is page position from 20 july to date and pre 19 july as far back as you can go. ie run a comparison on page position. The green line.
Is there a difference in page position?
If that is not clear ask and can clarify.
-
It has happened in the last few months. Nothing major but most keywords appear to drop one position down regularly.
-
Hi Robert
When did you start to see the ranking drop and was it for all your terms?
Thanks
-
Yes I have run the site through OSE. Our spam score is 0 out of 17.
Anchor text for our root domain is as follow:
|
wallpapered
|
61
|
258
|
52
|
137
[no anchor text]
|
10
|
92
world map wallpaper
|
9
|
13
|
8
|
15
here
|
8
|
25
|
7
|
38
http://www.wallpapered.com/custom-map-wallpaper
|
6
|
19
wall murals
|
5
|
388
wallpapered
|
4
|
25
[no anchor text]
|
4
|
5
custom map wallpaper
|
4
|
10
www.wallpapered.com/custom-map-wallpaper
|
3
|
4
executive world map
|
3
|
3
source
|
2
|
2
2
|
2
|
8
standard world map
|
2
|
2
i sell on wallpapered
|
2
|
4
old map wallpaper
|
2
|
2
bryant park wallpaper
|
2
|
2
1
|
2
|
8
custom area map wallpaper
|
2
|
3
921653 wallpapered com
|
2
|
4
black white world map
|
2
|
2
classic spring wallpaper
|
2
|
2
vintage map wallpapers
|
2
|
5
|
2
|
5
design blog
|
2
|
6
|
2
|
3
wallpaper maps
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
5
elizabetholwen rootsandpods
|
1
|
5
find out more at the wallpapered com website
|
1
|
1
|
-
Hi Robert,
It is hard to help you with this without having more details on your site itself. There are many things that could cause a ranking drop. Have you run your links through Opensite explorer to gauge their spam score? What sort of anchor text do these links have? What changes did you make around the time of noticing the ranking drop? How long has it been going on?
Sorry to answer your question with more questions but there are so many factors that can cause a ranking drop, so establishing more detail will help the community help you further.
Best
Matt
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
-
Keyword rank drop, any advice?
Screen Shot 2021-08-26 at 19.02.18.png My search visibility dropped from around 13% a few weeks ago to 8.29%. I know that Google launched a bunch of updates in this past few weeks to ignore spam links, and I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the drop - some of the links to my site date back over 10 years and those links were garbage. Confusingly, at the same time, my Domain Authority went up by 1 to 32, then back down a week later. How can I restore my previous rank in the short term? We're designing a new site at the moment with vastly improved page speed, but I'm not sure what effect that will have yet (thespacecollective.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
What should I do if same content ranked twice or more on Google?
I have a Bangla SEO related blog where I have written article like "Domain Selection" "SEO Tools" "MOZ" etc. All the article has been written in Bengali language. I have used wp tag for every post. I have submit xml site map generated by Yoast SEO. However I kept "no index" for category. I know well duplicate content is a major problem for SEO. After publishing my content Google ranked them on 1st page. But my fear is that most of the content twice or more. The keywords are ranked by post, wp post tag and Archive. Now I have a fear of penalty. Please check the screenshot and please suggest me what to do. uRCHf yq7m2 rSLKFLG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AccessTechBD0 -
A single page from site not ranking
Hello, We have a new site launched in March, that is ranking well in search for all of the pages, except one and we don't know why. This page it is optimised exactly the same way like the others, but still doesn't rank in Google. We have verified robots.txt for noffollow, noindex tags, we have verified if it was penalized by Google, but still didn't find nothing. Initially we had another site and was on the topic of this page, but we have redirected it to the new one. In case this old site was anytime in the past penalized by Google, could it be possible that the new page be influenced by this? Also, we have another site that ranks on the first position, that targets the same keywords like the page that does not rank. It was the first site we launched, so it is pretty much old, but we do not have duplicate content on them. Maybe Google doesn't like the fact that both target the same keywords and chooses to display only the old site? Please help us if you have any ideas or have been through such thing. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniela.pirlogea0 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
How to improve my rankings?
Hi guys, I'm targeting a specific country NZ to start off with as my site is only new 3months old - whilst I'm trying to rank for various keywords such as - psychic readings, online psychic readings, love psychics, clairvoyant, astrology, tarot card readings etc I can see I'm slowly ranking around 18, 20,30,40 through my blog page, but nothing from the site. I know the site is content thin and were currently working on improving this, is there anything else you can suggest that perhaps I might need to be aware of? Or any tools I could use to go about getting information that could help put me ahead lol Thanks all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Dropped ranking - new domain same IP????
We dropped ranking late last year for our site, so decided to start over with a new domain. However we didn't change IP address. Would this cause any issues???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
What is the impact of excessive code on rankings
I am working on optimizing a page that utilizes a template that generates an excessive amount of code - 4 to 5 times what I am seeing with competitor pages. The entire site seems to have this problem and we have, according to webmaster tools a a medium to slow load time. In general, given the content and teh strength of the domain, I think this page should be performing better. I think the entire site should be performing better. Would it be worth it to replace the template I am using and replace it with a more lightweight page design? I would obviously keep the content and the url the same. Typically I want to try everything I can to improve rankings, but this change would take some time, so I don;t want to rush into it. Looking for some answers based on experience, not general best practices. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0