Sudden Drop from #1 to #12
-
Hello Moz community,
I am really happy to be here and I start right away with a quite tricky question I'd say.We are running Star-Registration.com and in March switched platforms to Shopify. All the Redirects etc were done according to standards.
Nevertheless, Star-Registration.com dropped in May (2 months after the switch) for "name a star" and "buy a star" from #1 to the 2nd Page of Google Results after being on #1 for almost 3 consecutive years. We had a similar case with their german website but the german one is back on the top 3 rankings again for all the important keywords.
I attached a Screenshot of the Search Console stats
Any suggestions? -
This can often be because of a major Google algorithm update that's rolling out, as sometimes, it might just be what is called ranking flux that makes your business move up or down in the serps.
After this your business might return to where it once ranked, but do consult with an seo agency for advice.
We had this with a garden room company that moved on to page 2 without any changes; it moved back onto page 1, and that was because of a major core Google algorithm update.
-
Looking at your results I would hazard a guess that you were affected by the Google core update Dec 3rd.
There was a major upheaval, I felt if too. All that can be done is to analyse your sites and read through why you may have been hit.
Take a look at the MOZ blog post here: https://moz.com/blog/googles-december-2020-core-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
-
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Migrating 1 page to https
Hi there, Although we do plan to migrate our entire site to https, we currently have only one page on our site which we want to migrate to https, as it has passwords and wotnot on it. Lets say it is httpS://www.example.com/login/ I am not really sure how to go about migrating just one page though.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk
I am guessing that we need to: make sure that httpS://www.example.com/login/ is the only page that exists on httpS:// replace any link to the httpS://www.example.com/login/ version on the http:// version remove httpS://www.example.com/login/ from the http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml create a httpS://www.example.com/sitemap.xml on httpS:// which only references the one page (httpS://www.example.com/login/) 301 http://www.example.com/login/ to https://www.example.com/login/ submit both sitemaps to Google so they know whats up. fetch http://www.example.com/login/ so that google finds the redirect. Anything else?? :S Not too sure about this one. Many thanks for your help.0 -
Site dropped after recovery
Hi everybody! I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp". This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now. Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK. Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Pages are being dropped from index after a few days - AngularJS site serving "_escaped_fragment_"
My URL is: https://plentific.com/ Hi guys, About us: We are running an AngularJS SPA for property search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emre.kazan
Being an SPA and an entirely JavaScript application has proven to be an SEO nightmare, as you can imagine.
We are currently implementing the approach and serving an "escaped_fragment" version using PhantomJS.
Unfortunately, pre-rendering of the pages takes some time and even worse, on separate occasions the pre-rendering fails and the page appears to be empty. The problem: When I manually submit pages to Google, using the Fetch as Google tool, they get indexed and actually rank quite well for a few days and after that they just get dropped from the index.
Not getting lower in the rankings but totally dropped.
Even the Google cache returns a 404. The question: 1.) Could this be because of the whole serving an "escaped_fragment" version to the bots? (have in mind it is identical to the user visible one)? or 2.) Could this be because we are using an API to get our results leads to be considered "duplicate content" and that's why? And shouldn't this just result in lowering the SERP position instead of a drop? and 3.) Could this be a technical problem with us serving the content, or just Google does not trust sites served this way? Thank you very much! Pavel Velinov
SEO at Plentific.com1 -
A/B Split Testing - Rankings Drop? Need an expert opinion...
We are running an A/B split test (Started on 12/12), and a few days after we started the test, we fell from position 9/10 (about 3 weeks on page 1) to position 11/13, and we've been there ever since. We are still running the test. We disallowed the test page in robots.txt, but that's all. no canonical no noindex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC
-no Google Experiments code. Theoretically, Google could crawl the site, and find the page, but then the page is disallowed. The alternate page is not indexed. Could this explain the rankings drop?1 -
Website keeps dropping in ranking with no visible penalty.
Hi everyone! I would really appreciate your help on this! The website URL is: www.gipsydharma.com It has now been over a year, but we're finding it very difficult to start ranking for any useful keywords. Some keywords like: leather boots / boots for women / handmade clothing at some point went up to page 20, but have now dropped again below page 50. Now, most of our traffic comes from social media so the business is going OK. But the question still remains, what does Google have against the above URL? Its not a super amazing website, but it provides unique and engaging content and has zero spam. I also don't think its over optimized, but I may be wrong on this. Recently, I've also noticed that the Domain Authority has also been going down, it was 46 at some point and now its 40. There's no visible penalty and all the pre-Penguin links (of which there weren't that many, I think) were cleaned up months ago, without Google suggesting that. There are very few keyword rich backlinks and a lot of them come naturally anyways. So again, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GipsyDharma0 -
My site is always in the top 4 on google, and sometimes goes to #2\. But the site at #1 is always at #1 .. how can i beat them?
So i'm sure this is a very generic question.. of course everyone wants to be #1. We are an ecommerce web site. We have all sorts of products, user ratings, and are loved by our customers. We sell over 3 million a year. So let me give you some data.. First of all one of the sites that keeps taking the #2 or #3 spot is amazons category for what we sell.. (i'm not sure if I should say who we are here.. as I don't want the #1 spot to realize we are trying to take them over!) Amazon of course has a domain authority of 100. But they never take the #1 spot. The other site that takes the #2 and #3 spot is not even selling anything. Happens to be a technical term's with the same name wikipedia page! (i wish google would figure out people aren't looking for that!) Anyways.. every day we bouce back and forth between #4 and #2.. but #1 never changes.. Here are the stats of us verse #1 from moz: #1: Page Authority: 56.8, Root Domains Linking to page: 158, Domain Authority: 54.6: root domains linking to the root domain 1.42k my site: Page Authority: 60.6, Root domains linking to the page: 562, Domain Authority: 52.8: root domains linking to the root domain: 1.03k So they beat us in domain authority SLIGHTLY and in root domains linking to the root domain. So SEO masters.. what do I do to fix this? Get better backlinks? But how.... I can't just email GQ and ask them to write about us can I? I'm open to all things.. Maybe i'm not using moz data correctly.. We should at least be #2. We get #2 every other day.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 88mph0 -
Massive 40-50 page drop for primary keyphrase, no apparent reason, + map listing weirdness
Hi. I manage the site http://physiowinnipeg.com, which has had some interesting yo-yo effects lately, culminating in a 40-50 page drop as of last Friday. The phrase in question: physiotherapy winnipeg Background: The site has ranked on the first page for this keyphrase since about May There was the occasional blip where the homepage would disappear from rankings altogether for a day or two, and then return back to its regular listing This would coincide with a sudden increase in organic places listings (our site would hit the top of the local map listings, but the homepage would vanish) Other pages would still appear for the target phrase, just not the homepage About a month ago, the organic places listing settled, and the homepage permanently vanished Other pages still ranked high, and we commanded many of the listings on the first 10 pages of Google, first page included The homepage would still appear for some other searches We had been affected by the Google Places --> Google+ Local transition, so I was of the opinion that we needed to wait it out a bit to see if it, like the other issues related to the transition, would work itself out This time around, it worked itself out again, just today -- but we are now ranked slightly lower on the first page and our Google local listing has disappeared (again) Our other pages are still (currently) absent from the first few pages, for this keyphrase The main differences I noticed here, aside from the much longer timeframe of our drop, was that other pages disappeared as well, and that the homepage was actually found, between page 38 and 50, depending on the day According to SEO Moz and other tools, the site is doing pretty much everything right. I should note, however, that there is a service we use for educational content called Patientsites that loads in the subdomain http://education.physiowinnipeg.com -- and this site has pulled many warnings in SEO Moz (around 10,000, actually, mostly long URL related), as well as a few errors. I'm not sure if this is a part of the problem, but I am considering having the content of the subdomain blocked via robots.txt and Webmaster Tools. Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or have any insight? This weirdness has gone on too long. Thanks! Bobby
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinnacleWpg0