Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why is my client's site not ranking anymore? Like big time!
-
Ok, I'm reaching out to all of you Moz'rs for some help with this one.
My client's site has dropped off the face of google in a real short period of time. It went from page 1 (avg rank 3 to page 6 (avg rank 50) and below in the matter of 2 weeks.
Here's some facts:
1. DA is a 22 and homepage PA is a 31. It outranks all other sites in its competitive set.
2. The homepage used to be the page that displays for keyword searches, now its the FAQ page, which has a lower PA of 23.
Why has the home page seemingly vaporized? And, why is the FAQ showing as the first result?
What should I start checking. I feel paralyzed, not sure where to start.
More info:
a. There are no alerts present in Webmaster Tools.
b. For some reason the homepage (domain.com) was 301'd to domain.com/home.html. Domain.com is indexed by Google, however, domain.com/home.html is not. If this is the issue, what is the best way to handle it?
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
A lot of sites saw a drop in mid November but there was no announced update. You can read a good discussion of what some site owners saw in the comments on this post:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-nov15-17689.html
My gut instinct is that this was a refresh of the Panda algorithm, but Google no longer announces these refreshes so no one can know for sure.
But, there really isn't an easy answer to your question as there isn't an obvious solution.
-
Unfortunately, my analytics doesn't go back to October 3rd. However, the sharp drop in rankings occurred between November 19th and November 26th, then again in the beginning of December.
Checkout the attached image.
I'm at a complete loss on what happened during those time periods.
Nothing in WMT for manual spam actions. And, I have been cautiously building links to the site.
-
Does your analytics data go back as October 3? If the drop happened October 4, then I would indeed be worried about Penguin.
Have you been building links to this page? More specifically, have you built keyword rich anchors to this page?
Do you see any manual spam actions in webmaster tools? (WMT --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions)
-
Many thanks for the timely responses. I didn't want to overload the detail in the first post.
*To be more specific with my issue, there's 1 particular keyword (a very important one), that the homepage has dropped out of the rankings for. There are many sites with much lower DA and PA above this site. It went from 1st page to almost non-existent in the matter of 2 weeks.
Other keyword queries are still showing the homepage on 1st page results. So I guess this probably answers a few questions. I should have specified that in my original post. Can you tell I'm freaking out?
1. The site is not new. It's been up for a few years now. I've only just begun to take over SEO/Web Marketing duties.
2. It is not blocked by robots.txt, nor does it have a canonical tag
3. The title tag hasn't been touched since I got involved with the site.
4. I'm still unsure why domain.com was 301'd to domain.com/home.html. I didn't do it and the clients were clueless when I asked the question.
5. I'm using Google Analytics, but the data only goes back to the beginning of October, because I setup Analytics when I got started. I came onboard after they saw a swift drop in rankings for that important keyword.
6. The site does have some questionable linkage from an "SEO" service they paid for that lasted about 2 years. But I'm hesitant to start disavowing links.
-
I totally agree with Marie. First and foremost, be calm. Don't freak out and start changing a whole bunch of things. Make sure your client knows what's going on. Far better for them to hear it from you than discover it on their own. Make a plan. First, document everything that has recently changed. Hopefully you've done that already. Start with that 301 redirect. You already know it's a problem, whether it's caused this or not.
Has anything else changed? Meta tags, specifically title tags? I have seen a site drop from a #1 branded search position and disappear for up to a day because the title tags were updated. Then it reappeared back in it's original spot. It's possible that your clients site is in a Google dance, but my gut says that's not it. Start with the 301...and while you're at it, check and make sure that the non.www version of the homepage is properly redirecting via 301 as well as any other potential URL versions that also produce the homepage and that may have inbound links.
Good luck and please let us know what happens. Hang in there!
-
I definitely agree that Penguin is a huge possibility. But, I think it could be dangerous advice to send a site owner on a link removal/disavow mission when we don't know for sure. There are many other possibilities. It could be a Panda issue. It could be that it was a new site and the previous high rankings were a honeymoon effect. It could be that the /home.html page is blocked by robots.txt or has a canonical tag that is confusing Google. It could be that they changed the title tag on the page so that it is no longer appropriate. It could be that the site was hit with malware and users are clicking away because of virus warnings.
(btw...the thumb down was not from me. I respect that you are trying to help but just wanted to comment to make sure that the site owner (or someone else reading this post) doesn't go off disavowing links without getting to the cause of the problem first.)
-
While it could be Penguin, I don't think we can make that call on the data given to us in the question.
-
Take a look at your organic traffic only. If you use Google analytics, go to Aquisition --> All Traffic, then choose google/organic. Can you tell what date the drop happened on or started on?
Now go to Behavior --> Site Content --> Landing pages and click on each of the top pages. Is there an obvious drop for each page or just the home page?
How old is the site?
Can I ask why you did the 301 from domain.com to domain.com/home.html? Is there any chance that the /home.html page has either a noindex tag or is blocked by robots.txt? Is there a canonical tag on the /home.html page? If so, what does it say?
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
-
What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?
We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
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 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0 -
What's the deal with significantLinks?
http://schema.org/significantLink Schema.org has a definition for "non-navigation links that are clicked on the most." Presumably this means something like the big green buttons on Moz's homepage. But does anyone know how they affect anything? In http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo#comment-142936, Jeremy Nelson says " It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test." This is a pretty obscure comment but it's one of the only results I could find on the subject. Is this BS? I can't even make out what all of it is saying. So what's the deal with significantLinks and how can we use them to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NerdsOnCall0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
I have a .com site but I am only ranking good on google for Canada and not the USA.
We are located in Canada but sell our products world wide. We are ranking ok on google.ca but are not in the top 50 on google.com. Is it due to my ip address? Is there any tips that you can give me to help up my rating for google.com. Any info you can provide me with will be amazing. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewzal0 -
Backlinks from Chinese Big sites
Hello, I wish I know your position regarding backlinks from chinese websites. I am able to get a text link(from homepage) from a very big site in chinese. It has PR8 and over 10M users monthly. My site is in english. Will it help me ? Will I be penalised (my site is 5 years old, PR4) and some decent traffic(6-7k daily) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adresanet0