Why have my positions dropped after implementing recommended changes?
-
Hello! I have taken a Moz free trial and am really enjoying using this service. But, after implementing the recommended changes by Moz my rankings have really dropped. Is this normal? I was averaging around 17 but now averaging 40. Here is my website if anyone has any ideas of what I might be doing wrong, I would greatly appreciate any help.
Thank you
Nicole -
Could be because of a Google algorithm update?
There have been massive Google algorithm updates lately -
@NicoleChambers said in Why have my positions dropped after implementing recommended changes?:
Hello! I have taken a Moz free trial and am really enjoying using this service. But, after implementing the recommended changes by Moz my rankings have really dropped. Is this normal? I was averaging around 17 but now averaging 40. Here is my website if anyone has any ideas of what I might be doing wrong, I would greatly appreciate any help.
Thank you
NicoleHi Nicole!
I completely understand your frustration; I’ve been in a similar situation before, and it can feel quite discouraging when your rankings drop after making changes based on recommendations.
When I started using Moz for my website’s SEO, I also made changes suggested by their tools, expecting to see improvements. However, much like you, I saw a drop in rankings initially. After doing some research and consulting with experts, I learned that this can sometimes be part of the process. Search engines may take some time to re-evaluate and adjust to the changes, especially if you're optimizing for factors like content structure, keywords, or internal linking.
In my experience, I found that the key is to give it some time. SEO improvements, especially with structural changes, can take weeks or even months to show up in rankings. Additionally, I made sure to carefully monitor my traffic through analytics and ensured my content was still user-focused and high-quality. Eventually, my rankings started improving, and I saw the benefits of the changes Moz recommended.
One thing to keep in mind is that SEO can be very competitive, and external factors can affect your rankings too. Other sites may have made similar changes or improved their own SEO during the same period, so it's important to stay patient and stay on top of your adjustments.
If you’d like to take a closer look at your site and what might be causing these fluctuations, I’d suggest checking your site’s speed, mobile optimization, and ensuring that your content is unique and adds value. And if you want to dive deeper, feel free to explore my website to see what changes worked for me in the long run!
Best of luck, and I hope things improve for you soon!
-
If your positions dropped after implementing changes, it could be due to:
Algorithm Fluctuations: Search engines may take time to re-index your site.
Change Impact: Adjustments might have affected content relevance, structure, or user experience.
Redirect Issues: Improper handling of URL changes can disrupt backlinks.
Increased Competition: Competitors might have optimized.
Algorithm Updates: Rankings can shift due to external updates.
Incomplete Implementation: Changes might not align with SEO best practices -
Hi Nicole, I can totally understand how frustrating it must feel to see a drop after putting in all that effort. Based on my experience, rankings can sometimes fluctuate right after implementing changes—it’s almost like the search engines are recalibrating. Have you checked if your changes impacted user experience, site speed, or navigation? These can play a big role too.
When I was helping a friend analyze their website, we noticed similar fluctuations after making SEO tweaks. But over time, things stabilized and rankings actually improved as the changes started aligning better with search intent. It’s important to keep an eye on your analytics and maybe give it a bit more time before tweaking further. I hope this helps—hang in there!
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
-
What crawler do you recommend for finding orphaned pages on a website?
Is there a crawler that you guys recommend for finding all pages, including orphaned pages on a website? A data export is not feasible. I saw a question from back in 2013 and was wondering if anything has changed since then in regards to crawling orphaned pages. Do most enterprise systems already have this built into their crawler? Or is it best to get a crawler like Xenu or Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl?
Technical SEO | | DigitalMarketingSEO0 -
Changing IP adress of Website will impact on ranking or not?
Hello, We have TLDs as below:
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
bannerbuzz.combannerbuzz.co.uk
bannerbuzz.com.au
bannerbuzz.ca Within few days, We are moving in Magento Technology for 2 domains,
Bannerbuzz.com.au and Bannerbuzz.co.uk We have purchased new plan, So IP address of those 2 domains will be changed. So my question is, It will impact on my current Ranking or not?0 -
Sudden 50% drop in SERP rankings
Hi, Our website is well established and has been growing every month until around Jan. 6th 2013. All of sudden our search rankings on Google dropped dramatically (nearly 50%). We getting tens of thousands fewer visitors through search results than normal. At the same time as the drop (almost to the day) we changed our forum software from Vbulletin3 to Vbulletin4. The forums are on a different subdomain, and our forum developer said there is no way the change would affect the main site. Is that true? So far, we have not been able to figure out what caused the sudden change. Maybe a Google update?
Technical SEO | | AVman0 -
Sudden drop in website ranking
Since past 2 week my website www.micromaxtablet.in is experiencing sudden drops in the site ranking. I can understand this regression in the site ranking is not because of Goggle Panda update, and their is some other reason. Kindly let me know what could be the other possibilities, and plz also suggest how to get it fixed. Keyword for which the site had the best rankings (in top 3) was "micromax tablet". Now it shows on the second page in the google search and to make it worse, it's losing its position almost every second day.
Technical SEO | | nishant9110 -
What can i do to stop my site from dropping in the rankings
Hi, we were number one in google for the keyword lifestyle magazine but now our magazine website www.in2town.co.uk is doing very bad in the rankings. One week ago we were around 8 then we went to 12 and now we are on the third page and i am not sure what is happening. We wanted and needed our home page to rank for the keywords of lifestyle magazine, lifestyle news but none of these keywords are doing very well with google can anyone please point me in the right direction so i can stop my site falling any further I am not sure if the home page is properly optimized but i have never had trouble with it before many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Why has my website dropped 20 places
Hi, a bit shocked this morning as my website http://www.in2town.co.uk/ has dropped around 20 places in google. Does anyone know why this has happened. The site is updated all day long so not sure what is going on here any help and advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Changed cms - google indexes old and new pages
Hello again, after posting below problem I have received this answer and changed sitemap name Still I receive many duplicate titles and metas as google still compares old urls to new ones and sees duplicate title and description.... we have redirectged all pages properly we have change sitemap name and new sitemap is listed in webmastertools - old sitemap includes ONLY new sitemap files.... When you deleted the old sitemap and created a new one, did you use the same sitemap xml filename? They will still try to crawl old URLs that were in your previous sitemap (even if they aren't listed in the new one) until they receive a 404 response from the original sitemap. If anone can give me an idea why after 3 month google still lists the old urls I'd be more than happy thanks a lot Hello, We have changed cms for our multiple language website and redirected all odl URl's properly to new cms which is working just fine.
Technical SEO | | Tit
Right after the first crawl almost 4 weeks ago we saw in google webmaster tool and SEO MOZ that google indexes for almost every singlepage the old URL as well and the new one and sends us for this duplicate metatags.
We deleted the old sitemap and uploaded the new and thought that google then will not index the old URL's anymore. But we still see a huge amount of duplicate metatags. Does anyone know what else we can do, so google doe snot index the old url's anymore but only the new ones? Thanks so much Michelle0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0