Sudden loss of half my Moz rankings
-
My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this?
About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think.
My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com
-
No responses so I'm guessing no-one really knows what the answer is? FYI my rankings have started to recover since early December, with about half back to where they were and traffic at about 40% of pre-drop figures. Still no real understanding of why it happened or what I did (if anything) to start the recovery process.
-
I notice my Moz Rankings report from yesterday shows I've regained about one third of my rankings but my search traffic has not increase yet. I'm hoping it was just a glitch and it will recover in full, but I don't know. I was about to ditch my new theme (which makes the site 10-15% faster and much better mobile experience) and return to my old theme when I saw the Moz report.
Would still like to get some input from experts as I see a lot of people now complaining about this on the GWT support forum (including myself).
-
It seems my "rookie mistake" is not the real issue. I rectified this problem three days ago, my URLs are listed in Google but I still have less than 10% of the traffic I had a week or so ago.
The decline started on 24 November, so it's hard to connect it to the Phantom 2 update on 19(?) November? Would Google collapse my traffic that fast and take this long to send me traffic again after just 4-5 days of index blocking? I wouldn't have thought so. And I think the drop occurred just before I migrated to the new site template, but not sure. Nothing in console to suggest anything is wrong except index numbers were lower than I'd expected.
Anyone else able to see anything (e.g. in code) that could be causing this? It's a real disappointment as I'd just started to get some real solid SERP traction on this site following the domain name change a year ago.
-
Stupid rookie mistake! I made all the changes in my development environment and copied the files and database to production with "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" still checked! Hopefully the damage is not long-lasting as I had been doubling my Google search traffic month on month for the past three months.
-
Hey there! I just had a look in your campaign and from spot checking it does seem that the drop in ranking is being reported accurately by using Rank Tracker and also doing some manual searches as well.
As far as to what impact of changing the theme and and removing indexing, I can't say for certain what impact this would have so I'll let an SEO expert answer those questions
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
-
Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website?
Hi, Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Ranking strangeness
Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client. Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve. Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on. Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages). The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1! Bang -straight to top spot. However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition. Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one. We still need to fix thin and duplicated content! I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre. Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Subpage ranking for homepage keyword
Hi all, May seem like a simple scenario and I might be missing something, but my subpage seems to be ranking for my main homepage keyword. The subpage PR is 28 and my domain authority is 17, how can I get my main home page to rank instead of the sub page (product page)? I want to stay away from exact match anchor text links, any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Rank drop in June
Since fixing a major duplicate content issue in Dec 2012, our traffic saw steady and dramatic growth through the summer. It has started to settle down now and rankings have started to decline. I have a bad feeling that something is wrong but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. Our Moz rank is pretty high but some of our biggest keywords have gone from #2 to #9 in a fairly short time period which makes me very nervous. I am not even sure where to look at this point. Any suggestions are welcomed as I am kind of at a loss now but worry I am missing something basic. www.threeguysgolf.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astaelin0 -
Moving low ranking domain
I have a website, that I rewrote great content for, but I recently found that there are many, many links going to the subdomain that may be pulling it down. Has anyone had experience taking down a site and then moving the content to a new site? Will it be considered duplicate content if you completely take the old site down and use rel="canonical" on new site pages? I don't want to lose the good content, but I cannot have it on the current URL with all the bad backlinking (it's a complicated situation, as I need to keep those backlinks which are affiliates). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
SEO Moz Keyword Ranking Tool
The SEO Moz keyword ranking tool is useful and fairly accurate but it would be more useful to know why the ranking changed. Can the tool provide any insight in this regard?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Sudden drop in ranking for major search terms
Site bumpbabyandbeyond com au. Help! We have been operating for six years and had steadily built up our ranking for major terms like maternity clothes, maternity clothing, maternity wear, reaching highs of 6, 8 and 10 respectively for AU sites AU wide about six months ago that we have steadily maintained. All of a sudden we have dropped away. A week ago I noticed we had dropped from 6 to 12 for maternity clothes. This morning we are 21! I can't see any obvious reason for this, but believe the eCommerce module of our inventory/pos software has had a recent update - I'm awaiting answers on this. We haven't actively had anyone link building or working on SEO after being badly bitten and shelling out a small fortune for an AU company to do very little over six months - rankings improved rapidly when I sacked them and did some on page minor work myself. But I don't have the time or knowledge to look after the seo, and am on the hunt for reputable white hat assistance. Is there anything obviously wrong that I need to fix ASAP? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catfree0 -
Ranking Ranking Factors!
When you look at the keyword analysis, you see the following ranking criteria: - | Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority | Root Domain Linking Root Domains | How do you rank the importance of each of these factors from 1-4? For example, PA, PLRD, RDLRD, DA Please explain. How many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0