My pages are absolutely plummeting. HELP!

[SwanseaMedicine]

Hi all,

Several of my pages have absolutely tanked in the past fortnight, and I've no idea why. One of them, according to Moz, has a Page Optimisation Score of 96, and it's dropped from 10th to 20th. Our DA is lower than our competitors, but still, that's a substantial drop. Sadly, this has been replicated across the site.

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Rhys

[Stevie-G]

Complete stab in the dark not knowing what your url is, but there was an update around that time, see if it applies to you: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

[SwanseaMedicine]

Hi Stevie,

Thanks for the link; I don't think it's that because we don't have any pop-ups or ads. Individual pages have just plummeted, one dropped 81% in a week. Any other ideas? There's not much left for me to optimise, so I don't see how I can regain my first-page positions.

Cheers,

Rhys

[Stevie-G]

Hi Rhys,

Without your url it's impossible to take an educated guess I'm afraid.  Google are constantly tweaking things so if it's only Google not any other SE's it could well be an algorithm adjustment, assuming you've not changed anything yourself.  You can check that in your Moz account if you're tracking any other SE's (I always keep a non Google one in there myself for that exact reason).

If your site doesn't have SSL and the sites that rose above you generally do, perhaps it was that, or if not mobile friendly, they could have put more emphasis on it?  My blind guess is they're the two likely culprits at the moment.  But it could be something as simple as you dropped a high authority link, if there weren't many to start with, or one of soooooo many other factors.

[SwanseaMedicine]

Hi Stevie,

This is the course page in question, but this is only one of a number of pages that have dropped.

It's not great in mobile, but speed isn't an issue, but more to do with how it reacts to mobile.

http://www.swansea.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/medicine/bscbiochemistry/

But this is the page which has an optimisation score of 96. Not really sure what else I can do.

Our domain did drop by 2 in the latest update a fortnight ago, but then again, so did many of our competitors.

Cheers,

Rhys

[Stevie-G]

Hi Rhys,

I'll be honest with you, I usually deal with relatively small businesses, so am probably not the best person for this one.  It's mobile friendly (responsive), so that's not the issue.  It doesn't have SSL, so that could be a factor, I'm sure I remember Google saying they'd be giving a boost to secure sites early this year.

Yours is an authority site in itself, so I doubt a few links either way would make a diffference either. Theres also plenty of text which I assume is unique. I appreciate that you may not have control over the whole site, so could it be that the general site navigation changed somewhere further up and inadvertantly pushed you deeper into the site as a whole (i.e. more clicks from the homepage)?

[Stevie-G]

Oh, and I just spotted that you have the same text in 2 x H1's and the title,  It just might make a difference if you either change the second H1 to a variant if possible, and make it an H2 OR probably better, just lose the h1 tag on the logo completely.  You never know

I'd also be inclined to make the title longer, you've plenty of space for a few related keywords or a call to action

[SwanseaMedicine]

Thanks, Stevie. Apparently, there's been a 'phantom' update which I suspect is the culprit...