On 28th of oct I was sunk: google anaytics says: hardly any impressions, no clicks - nothing. I was still indexed though. Now, apparently some of my keywords are back on the first page of google - according to the info in webmaster tools: 'avg.position', but still I have ridiculously low impressions - and I only get 1 or 2 visitors a day. When I check manually, some of the keywords that are supposedly on page one are not there at all. But even for those that are on page one I do not get any visitors. Is someone here who can help me make sense of this?
What you were saying is that - you are supposed to have visitors because you're on page 1? Where do you rank? #1 or #10? Worst case, no one is really searching for that keyword right now. Also, don't forget to use proxy to localize the SERP.
How many local monthly searches do your ranked keywords get? What is the actual rank of those keywords? First page doesn't mean big traffic in all cases. Don't trust Webmaster Tools to give you your current position. Do a manual search to check for yourself. If your keyword only gets 1000 local searches per month and you are #10, you aren't going to get much traffic.
Hi guys thanks for the reply. The position now is 4.9 now and before it was 3.5 or something. Before I got roughly 20 to 30 visitors through organic google search. It does not sound a lot but it transformed into a steady flow of paying clients - I was quite happy with it. Now, I have no visitors and obviously no new clients. I don't think that people have not stopped searching for this particular keyword - it's something that does not go out or in of fashion. I think the info google gives about the avg position must be wrong. I just would like to know if you find this, too. By the way, I think I have an idea why I was sunk. I am writing a column for a very big website and my articles get very high page ranks, get copied by other websites and they all give me high page rank, high quality back links. My website should do better and better and not get sunk... Anyway, my fault was that I was publishing my own articles on my own website AFTER I had them placed on the big website. Obviously, google must be thinking that I scrape these articles from this big website and have had no new unique content for almost a year. SIIIIILLLY ME!!!!! Anyway, I learnt my lesson: from now on I first put the article on my website, then, a week later, once google has crawled my site and noticed the article, I will submit it to the big website with a backlink to the original article - as google advices in webmaster guidelines. Feel free to comment. But please don't tell me how stupid I am because I am telling this myself already (
Philvault - what is a proxy? I just checked the position of all my keywords in the rank checker tool in firefox. Many ranked quite okay before (and still do on yahoo and bing) but on google they are completely sunk - they are not even mentioned, which means their position is on page 200 and worse. therefore, the 'avg position' on google analytics must be completely wrong. Is that you experience also?
Remember, "average" means average, not the current. So lets say you were at number 3 for weeks. Then just last week you got dropped to 20th. The average would still show like 4 or 5, even though you are dropping past the first pages. It's going to keep going lower as time goes on, eventually catching up to where it stabilizes. You don't want to look at average if you want to check the position of your site for keywords right now at this moment. If you want the most up-to-date status, do the freakin search yourself for your keywords! Why are you relying on tools that are delayed? Go directly to the source, just like your customers will do. See where your site comes up. What happened was Google has lost interest in your site and your traffic has suffered because you lost rankings. Yahoo and Bing might still rank well but the traffic generated by them is small compared to Google.
the problem with doing the search yourself is that your own browser shows you different and usually much better results than other people's browser. In google analytics you can specify the time frame, which I did. I did get the avg position for the last week and it was definitely wrong. Any more insights on this, everyone?
You have multiple browsers. I use Chrome as a primary browser. Since I am logged in I do not do test searches from it. I use IE instead since I never use it and dont have to log in. After browsing I clear cache and history and all settings like that. This is why Philvault suggested using a proxy. Its the same concept. It makes it where you would be just like a visitor instead of personalized results. And your average position last week is much different than present rankings. If you have been dropped from Google, your traffic will go down.
thanks twilight - I forgot about the othe browsers. I will try that. If I have been penalised for 'copying' so many articles any ideas how long it will take until googles notices that I have deleted them and get me back to the position |I was before? It happened a year to me fefore, when I was penalised for having too many error pages - once I had fixed them it took roughly 2 weeks. Is that your experience also?
Depends. If you continue to provide unique articles on your site before you add them to others your rankings will go back up eventually. Especially if your articles are featured on a high rank site and linked back to your site.