Sudden drop in ranking for important keyword? No penalty / other issues detected

[KateWaite]

Hi

For our site we previously ranked well for the term "botswana safari holidays" on the page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx

We've suddenly seen a dramatic drop for this term, currently ranked #43 on Google UK.

There are no penalty notices in Webmaster tools and the only edits to the page recently have been to include the term "Botswana safari holidays" in the page title and the on-page h2 (previously Botswana safaris and holidays).

Any suggestions why we have seen a large decrease for this term? We expect to see some fluctuation but this one seems a bit dramatic. We've not lost any backlinks to the page that we know of.

Thanks for the help.

[RobertFisher]

Will,

That page shows 43 links to it in Majestic and only two of those are since late Sept. The only negative I see is one domain appears to be a sitewide with about 33 links from it. That may be affecting you.
Short of that, have you changed anything in the last 90 days?

Good luck,

Robert

[Travis_Bailey]

I would probably start here:

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana

http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx

Both URLs resolve. It's likely there's an issue with the rewrite rules which is creating duplicate content. Your mileage may vary, I don't usually work with ASP.net. I notice that the ABTOT page does the same thing on my crawl. The crawler also picked up /Newsletter and /newsletter.aspx, as well as an extensionless /register page.

[KateWaite]

Hi Robert and Travis

Thanks for your responses.

We've not changed anything in the last 90 days, other than fixing a few issues with a duplicate subdomain. When I looked in Majestic I'm only seeing 9 external backlinks to that page. Open Site Explorer shows 35 inbound links from 4 domains. This hasn't changed recently as far as I'm aware.

Thanks for pointing out the issue with the duplicate domains, I thought this had been fixed but we will get back onto this. It isn't a new issue though so I don't see why this term would suddenly drop so dramatically. We've (fortunately) not had the same issues on other top traffic driving keywords/pages.

We are picking up some bad links in our backlink profile that may be contributing to a gradually declining SEO visability. We are cleaning these up but I'm still not sure that it would account for a sudden drop on a key term like this.

Any further insights are most welcome!

[DougRoberts]

Hi WIll,

Is it just this keyword/page that's being affected or is it many keywords across your entire site? What does your overall organic traffic look like?

Taking a look at your domain in SEMRush, I can see that you gain a whole bunch of keyword rankings in August followed by some volatility and lost/gained (more lost than gained) keywords between November and January. (both Google UK and US)

The data's about to creep off the left hand edge of the graph, but looking in ahrefs, it looks as if a whole load of links were acquired in August. The number of linking domains has been has been steadily growing since then.

See: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.naturalworldsafaris.com

What kind of link-building/acquisition have your been undertaking. I've not taking a good look at your backlink profile but did noticed a directory or two. I'm wondering if there is anything that might have reached a tipping point.

I also notice a blog that's sending you an "infinite" number of links! Looks like there's some recursive links going on. This is just one example URL so you can see the kind of problem (eek!):

http://www.andyrouse.co.uk/index.php/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/blog/rss/blog/blog/rss/blog/blog/index.php?page_id=167

There seem to be getting a large number of links from some domains (possible site-wide links or other problems?)

I'd take a deep breath and take a deeper look at your organic traffic (What does Webmaster Tools show you under Search Traffic -> Search Queries? What's happening to your impressions/clicks etc?)

Then look at any link building/outreach you've been doing over the last 6 months. I wouldn't focus on just the one page you've mentioned as it looks like other pages/keywords being affected too.

[KateWaite]

Hi Doug

The reason for the sudden increase in August was because we consolidated several product websites under our one, main domain. The content on the old sites was transferred to the main website and all the pages were redirected. This was done working in partnership with a fairly large SEO company to ensure that everything was handled correctly.

We've not been doing any link-building/acquisition since, other than working with some selected travel journalists and photographers. However historically it does look like there has been some bad link building done on the old sites. The traffic on these old sites had been dropping overtime. With the backlink profiles of these sites pointing to the main content, could they be passing on old penalties?

Organic traffic as a whole is up month on month, but down year on year. Most of our tracked keyword terms have seen slight increases recently, it was just this one in particular which has plummeted.

Thanks for the advice! Would you recommend that the backlink profile is the primary issue to look at for now?

[RobertFisher]

Excellent research Doug!

[RobertFisher]

Nice catch Travis. Really.

[DougRoberts]

So it might just be fluctuation following the consolidation. I wonder if this is just the ripples/disturbance as Google gets to grips with the changes to your site and the various redirects you may have been put in place.

I note that the page is currently ranking #22 on Google UK. which is a big improvement on #43.

If you've not noticed the same problems happening on the other keywords your tracking and as the overall traffic seems to to be stable/growing then I suspect that there's no need to panic.

Obviously links to the now consolidated domains are no longer being created so you'll get some degradation as existing links become stale and decay (Is there an outreach opportunity here? Did you contact sites linking to the old domains?)

The other thing to watch is any fluctuations in the search result pages (not just your own ranking position). Is it just you being affected or is it something wider than that. In a different niche.

So don't panic, keep an eye on what happens to your rankings over the next few weeks and see what happens.

[KateWaite]

Thanks Doug, that's really helpful. Good to see that phrase has bounced back up as well.

We've been looking at our backlinks as we are aware there are a lot of bad, irrelevant directory sites that we are clearing up. Historically the old sites were in a pattern of steadily declining organic traffic, from the end of 2012. This has transferred to the new site (keywords slipping a few places, less long tail traffic). We think this may be due to a poor backlink profile.

We will also look into doing some outreach to the linking domains on the old site and see if we can get these moved over to the new site rather than just relying on the redirects.

Thanks again!