Trying to pinpoint why 1 keyword moved down 100 positions in 2 weeks. Help me speculate?
-
Hi there,
One of my client's sites, a very large and successful ecommerce website with great SEO performance, has seen a significant drop in rankings in the past 2 weeks. The rankings have begun to somewhat stabilize today, except one particular keyword with a search volume of 74k has gone from 1 to 100.
Here is what has taken place in 2 weeks, sitewide:
- I revised and improved upon title tags and meta descriptions to make them more user-friendly and contain more optimized terms. Following all of Google's best practices, as always. Google still appears to be indexing these changes (has anyone seen an initial drop in rankings while this takes place?)
- The site has seen a very significant increase in 404 errors due to one feature of the site breaking. We got a message about it in Webmaster Tools, and this appears to coincide with when overall rankings dropped. The development team is working quickly to get this resolved.
- As of today, I am seeing the highest page-load time than any other day in 2015.
With regard to the particular page/keyword in question:
- The keyword is no longer "exact match" at the beginning of the title tag, but rather broken up throughout the title tag so the whole title sounds better for users. **Have you found that this type of change is sufficient for a keyword rank to move down ~100 positions?? **(Either way, I have asked the client to revise the title to start with the exact match keyword, once again.)
- Google has indexed the page 2 days ago, but is still displaying the old title tag in search results.
- I have not found any instances of internal or external links to this page being removed.
With all this information, does anyone see anything that seems like it could have reasonably caused such a huge tank in rankings? Is this a blip in time? Is there anything I am not considering? Should I just be patient?
-
Interesting - hopefully it's all fixed, but definitely let us know if it changes again.
-
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your additional thoughts.
So turns out I just checked again today and my client is back at position 6.
I guess Google was just "re-calibrating?"
Very strange...
-
Hello
Can you pinpoint a specific date the site dropped in ranking? Maybe check for a drop in Google organic traffic in analytics or a loss of impressions etc in Search Console. Or a date the ranking shifted? That's usually the best way to rule out an algo update. I think 11/19/2015 was the date of this last one.
-
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your help.
I have a hard time believing it's the result of any of these algorithm updates because this is a very high-quality site with fantastic content. The keyword I am focusing on is a head term in the medical industry with very high volume. We were #1 several weeks ago. The ranking page offers about 750 words of excellent content structured sort of like Wikipedia or Web MD, with helpful internal links and medical sources listed on the bottom.
I did have the client make one or two revisions and update the date associated to the article, as it was 2011, and now it's 2015.
I'm still concerned because today it looks like the page fell even deeper in the index.
Any thoughts?
-
Hello
I don't think any of those factors with the information provided could have had such an impact on the site. Especially not some simple title tag adjustments. It's possible that would happen over time as Google processes the new user signals, but probably not so quickly.
What type of keyword was it? What industry is the eCommerce site in?
Not sure if this came on your radar, but there was an unconfirmed Google update a few weeks ago:
- https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-no-21225.html
- http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/unconfirmed-google-algorithm-updates-2015/
If the changes you see match about November 19th, I'd check out Glenn's suggestions at the bottom of that second article. The site could have been caught in a content quality update.
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
-
Help.. there was a html and php version of my home page on my server for about a week. Now lost all rankings!
Our home page has disappeared from the Google SERPS completely. It won't even show for a search of our business name although other internal pages appear. Site appears in bing for our keywords but not for our business name. When I republished the site I got a message saying there was a php and html version of the site on the home page. I deleted this immediately but was then advised by another staff member that they had also got that message the week before but not done anything about it - so I think it was out there for about a week. Could this be the cause of the ranking drop? We have also done the following: Checked GWM for robots issue, manual action, crawl errors, blocked URLs - all good. Some crawl errors on other pages relating to broken links. All sorted and marked as fixed. Checked for duplicate content - redirected non www version of site to www Checked back links Removed video from home page that was temporarily unavailable when we did fetch and render Added canonical tag Added H1 tag that was missing Coding checked - all looks good There has been no change to the content of the page. We have fetched and rendered and resubmitted for indexing but it's still not coming back in SERPS it did for a short time the other day and then after a couple of days disappeared again Prior to all this it had ranked really well for our most important keywords for years. It's not a new site. The page is indexed as it comes up when doing a site: search. Please can anyone help? Nobody seems to have the answer and we don't know what else to do. The site is NSFW NSFW https://goo.gl/dwA8YB Main keyword sex toy party
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GemmaApril0 -
How To Optimize A Page For Multiple Keywords
Hi Guys, In this video by Brian Dean he talks about how to go about optimising for multiple keywords. He basically said the main factors for optimising a page for multiple keywords are the following: Identify other keywords with same search intent as your primary keyword. Add them to title tag strategically, don't stuff them in there. Add as many of those keywords as h2 tags into the content, again when it makes sense. Are there any other more advanced ways you can use to optimize a page for multiple keywords with same search intent that could be good? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts110 -
Moving to new platform
I am moving a site with great SEO and tons of pages to a new platform. Page names will all be different because they will not have the .html ending and names will change. It is on a system that does not support .htaccess. So, I don't have a way to do 301 redirects. How can I keep my competitive status? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Recent drop in SERP from #1 to #2\.
Our #1 priority keyword, which we've ranked #1 for years, suddenly we're #2. And, the page listed above us doesn't seem to be even compete. Moz On-Page has us at an A and them at a C. When I review the html, I don't even seem any exactly keyword match or matching text on the page. I checked are ranking last week and didn't notice any change - so I've narrowed it down to something changing in the last 4-5 days. Also of note, when I test, We're #1 on mobile, #2 on desktop. Sorry to not list the url's. omitted intentionally. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FX4nWOO0 -
I need help!
Please select best theme for me, from the below themes. I want to create printing website. I select these themes after long research. http://us-themes.com/demo/?theme=ImprezaWP http://themeforest.net/item/salbii-responsive-multipurpose-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/6265876 http://themeforest.net/item/codeus-multipurpose-responsive-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/6906054
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
SEO Ecommerce Keywords
Hi guys got a question regarding ecommerce seo do you think its a better idea to target more long tail terms and try get links directly to product pages, brand pages and categories. Rather than focus on short keywords that do bring in good traffic but are very broad, i will prob do both, but i would like a second opinion please about other users strategies thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
Emergency Help...
Hello All, I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher" i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position. Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog. He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file. He also installed the following plugins: Link Juice Keeper NoFollow Free The SEO Rich Snippets Udinra All Image Sitemap WP Robots Txt WP-PageNavi Add Meta Tags These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help. My blog link is : http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/ I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located. Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0