Why did my rankings drop?
-
Hi all,
In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links.
Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen:
1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see.
- Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites.
3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too.
-
A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3.
-
I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse.
Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net.
Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from?
Any help would be appreciated.
-
I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content
That is clearly a large change which should have been mentioned up front.
When you drop a page from your site, you will of course lose any traffic that page generated. Even if those pages were low traffic pages, they did generate some traffic.
When you say the old content was replaced by fresh content, exactly how was this change done? If you have a page named "homes currently for sale" and you update that page with new information, the URL remains the same, the backlinks remain and the overall effects should be positive. Even a normal change such as this one could have a negative impact on traffic though in a corner case such as you listed a popular address or area before, the house sold and was replaced by less popular listings.
There is a lot of analytical data to analyze. How much traffic were the old pages generating vs the new pages which replaced them. How many back links did the old pages have pointing to them? Were all these pages properly redirected?
With respect to links, if your client has money to spend use it on other methods of traffic generation. Pay for high quality content to be created. Pay for advertising. Pay to be entered into the couple of directories that actually make a difference. Pay for A/B testing of the site's pages. Don't pay for junk directory submissions.
-
A closer look at the Analytics: Yahoo traffic seems to be down by 60%, especially on long tail terms. The shift happened on the 4th August. In the 10 days prior I had added about 10 paid submissions but I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content and replace it with fresh listings supplied by the client. I wonder!
Overall there is a slight reductions in most keywords but as you say this could be because competitors are building links too.
-
I started building links from these directories
The overwhelming majority of directories are a complete waste of time. They offer absolutely no value at all for SEO, and real visitors will never see and follow the links
I started buying submissions to directories
Buying links is a violation of search engine rules, If and when you are caught, you will suffer a penalty. In the meantime, understand that the search engines know which directories sell links and most likely offer those links no weight at all. If they see your site has acquired links from multiple paid directories they could take that as a sign you are attempting to manipulate rankings.
Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen
There are so many factors involved to even begin to properly respond to this statement. If you had 1000 links previously and build 20 links, then you have increased your links by 2% which may not have any effect on traffic at all. You need to research what is driving visitors to your site. Is it organic search results? An advertising campaign? Social networks? etc.
Once you break down the traffic drivers, you need to further investigate the overall traffic. For example perhaps the keyword "vitamins" is the top driver of traffic to your site. You can check to see how much overall traffic the search term provided this month compared to last month.
What are your competitors doing? If you built 20 links and your main competitor built 30 links, or received 1 high quality link, then you may drop in rankings. Your search results are always a competition with your competitors.
In summary, any time you spent with directories is not likely to add value to your site. If you want to use directories the main ones I would suggest are Yahoo, BOTW, DMOZ and Business.com. If your industry has any high quality niche directory that can be considered as well. Otherwise your focus should be on creating very high quality content which is useful and touches upon important industry topics, then obtaining links to that content.
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
-
Upgarded woocommerce 2 to 3 and saw a large drop in rank
Hi guys, I recently upgraded from woocommerce 2 to v3 and rankings have been plummeting. I have double checked all of the schema, markup, technical, speed, etc and it all seems to be the same. The on thing that I did find is that while there used to be about 400 images (products) there are now over 1500 images in the index as all of the thumbnails are not in the sitemap. Would / could this cause the issue? Can i remove all the thumbs from the sitemap? if so any suggestions on how (google returns very little to nothing regarding this). Should i alt text every thumbnail..... Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plahpoy0 -
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 -
Ranking drop for "Mobile" devices category in Google webmaster tools
Hi, Our rank dropped and we noticed it's a major drop in "Mobile" devices category, which is contributing to the overall drop. What exactly drops mobile rankings? We do not have any messages in search console. We have made few redirects and removed footer links. How these affect? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
Satish0 -
Drop in Mobile & Tablet Rankings
We have pretty strong rankings and have done since we launched our business in 2004. Over the past two months, we have seen a strong growth in rankings after a bit of a drip last year, however over the past week we have seen a significant drop off in organic traffic. Further analysis has shown that this is coming from mobile/tablet traffic, as the desktop traffic has been fairly consistent. There does appear to be a drop (across all main keywords) on mobile/tablet, but again there is no noticeable drop in desktop rankings. I am obviously aware Google treats these differently, but we can find no obvious reasons why this might have occurred. It is almost as if some sort of penalty has been applied on mobile/tablet only. There are no warnings or obvious problems in webmaster tools and our mobile/tablet site is mobile optimised. At a bit of a loss and would appreciate a bit of guidance in where you think we should start to understand what is causing this and how we should go about correcting it. Thanks in advance for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
My page ranking dropped after I made it responsive
Recently, I made one of my site page responsive. It was ranking on 13th Position and after I made the page responsive, it dropped to 24 desktop and 35 on mobile rankings. I ran mobile friendly test and it said "awesome, your page is mobile friendly". Not sure, what went wrong here. Page in question is: https://www.itcontractorsuk.com/ Can someone please advice? Please Note: My site is partially responsive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkWebUK0 -
Ranking on google search
Hello Mozzers Moz On page grader shows A grade for the particular URL,but my page was not ranking on top 100 Google search. Any help is appreciated ,Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sobanadevi0 -
Significant drop in web rankings
We have two websites and last week we had a significant drop in search engine rankings. Some of these search rankings we have been top 3 for the past 5 years and now we are not in the top 20. Last weekend we changed our hosting provider and IP addresses for the first time in over 7 years. Now is there a way we could work out if we have been hit by the latest Penguin update or if the change in hosting / IP has caused these drop in rankings? I would appreciate any thought or ideas at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
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!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshuakrafchin0