over night drop from page 1 to page 8...

[Poppylong]

how does this happen!!!!

Any idea?

Many thanks
Katie

 

[neils3]

How did you get on page 1 in the first place? How long have you been on page 8? Potentially one of the tactics has been slammed by Google.

 

[Alan]

Easy. A strong supporting link disappeared a couple of weeks ago.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Any messages in Webmasters tools? that is the first place to look. look for the obvious manual penalty, then look for server outages, unreachable pages etc that could cause technical ranking drops.

Have a look at pagination, make sure that google hasn't suddenly indexed duplicate pages and split your site through canonicalisation etc.

There could be lots of things that can cause this, but my guess is some technical glitch someplace. (or a manual spam penalty)

Importantly, you are talking about a single solitary key phrase, how is traffic? has it died overnight? ACROSS THE BOARD?

 

[Andriusgr]

How did you get on page 1 in the first place? How long have you been on page 8? Potentially one of the tactics has been slammed by Google.

lol I'd Love to hear that too!

Are you talking about google.co.uk or global? As pigeon has been recently released and if your seo tactics were cheap and spammy you lost the game

 

[Ian J]

I have a similar problem although not quite the same. I have a secondary keyword that is fairly well optimized but Google only ranks it at best on page 10 yet it will drop down to page 20 over night then back up again in the next day or two. It's been zooming up and down like this for weeks

 

[Tom @ Click Miners]

I have a similar problem although not quite the same. I have a secondary keyword that is fairly well optimized but Google only ranks it at best on page 10 yet it will drop down to page 20 over night then back up again in the next day or two. It's been zooming up and down like this for weeks

How old is that page?

 

[Ian J]

The whole website was redone in about March 2014 but there will be a redirect from a previous page in the old site that would have been live for 10 years

 

[Tin]

I have a similar problem although not quite the same. I have a secondary keyword that is fairly well optimized but Google only ranks it at best on page 10 yet it will drop down to page 20 over night then back up again in the next day or two. It's been zooming up and down like this for weeks

Ian, pull a report from Serpfox and it might flag up a problem on that keyword. I'm wondering whether there's two urls involved in rankings for that same keyword and that's what's creating the ranking changes you're seeing. If you see two different urls ranking for the same keyword in the Serpfox report that will give rise to exactly what you're seeing. I'm not saying that's the problem as there can be other reasons but, that one is a common one.

Hope it helps.

Ray

 

[Poppylong]

you were right - my h1 tags had disappeared. thank s all

 

[OldWelshGuy]

@Ian J I think Ray might have the right of it. it could be a simple internal linking thing that is resulting in pagerank flow causing google to 'pick' different urls as 'the one' that it decides to show. This will often result in the bouncing you see.

It could also be canonicalisation (duplicate content via urls)

 

[Ian J]

@Ian J I think Ray might have the right of it. it could be a simple internal linking thing that is resulting in pagerank flow causing google to 'pick' different urls as 'the one' that it decides to show. This will often result in the bouncing you see.

I've just done what Ray suggested and he was right as Google seems to be bouncing around between the page specifically written for the term "invoice discounting" plus a secondary page that has an invoice discounting case study on it.

I should have known that rather than spending days scratching my head over it I should have asked here

 

[OldWelshGuy]

A bit of de-optimising of the lower ranking page and a bit of smart internal linking adjustment should ensure this stops then

 

[UKSBD]

This was one of my theories from a blog post I made in 2011 (post Panda)

All a bit simplified and using made up values.

Pre Panda
You have a page with a value of C for a keyword.
You add 3 or 4 feeder pages to the site related to the same keyword with links pointing to the original page and you improve the value to B whilst the feeder pages just stay at E.

Post Panda
You have a page with a value of C for a keyword.
You add 3 or 4 feeder pages to the site related to the same keyword with links pointing to the original page and you decrease the value to D and at the same time one of the feeder pages is also valued at D.

In effect you have spread the jam to thin, the page which was just intended to be a feeder page is now competing with the main page, rather than helping it and Google sometimes chooses the wrong page.

Solution
If you are going to create feeder pages (blog posts, articles, etc.) be careful that they are not too emphasised on a keyword another page is targeting and not too well optimised for the keyword.

 

[Poppylong]

this is worse than I thought..... please help! Okay, so sales are down, but my ranking is higher. But my visitor stats have been dropping by about 60%!!!

I have been making changes to the website - mainly to the pictures. Our products are really found on images searches. I'm using underscores i.e. (diamante_peeptoe_shoes.jpg). Has something changed?

Okay, so SEO is a mind field for me, and I will put in the work, but there's no point in my doing the wrong things. Would anyone be interested in looking at a few pages please? Happy to pay for this analysis. Please pm me, thank you.

 

[Andriusgr]

spend more time on local seo. Do some research

 

[OldWelshGuy]

You should not be using underscores, you should be using hyphens. for a start. Also be careful what you are doing because the very first thing in any SEO campaing is complete analysis of what you have right now. I.e. what is bringing the traffic in which pages keywords images etc. Then you can look at 'tweaking' those and really going for the elements of the site that are not.

Firstly forget rankings, that is the wrong metric, if sales are down and traffic is up, you are chasing the wrong keywords. The main part of keyword research is NOT the number, it is the search expectancy, i.e. what the searcher intends to do when they get their results and click through.

 

[123Simples]

Everyone keeps chasing "SEO" but it is more about your content, and what you are offering clients that matters. In reality does it matter if you have 5000 hits a month but no conversion to actual work??? OWG above makes good points too!

 

[searchangel]

Easy. A strong supporting link disappeared a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, if the link was from the BBC homepage.