Citations and Organic Rankings

[obcted]

Hi All,

I have a client that I've been moving up Organic Search Results page from 60+ to first page. Natural organic link building with Good Content. NONE of the search results we're focusing on bring up local results. About 2 weeks back we slipped back down to the second page and I was a little confused - I know organic is volatile but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Low and Behold - I realize the NAP in the footer has changed. I emailed client and got the "Oh yeah - we moved", response. I know I have to update the 300+ Citations we earned for them - but could this change play a role our small but real drop in ORGANIC results?

Just figuring out where I should prioritize my time with this client. Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you!

Ted

 

[Phil Rozek]

Ted,

Changing the NAP in the footer is unlikely to cause much of a drop-off - not that going from low P1 to high P2 is huge. My guess is your client changed something else on the site (e.g. title tags), or simply got buffeted by the stormy seas.

If he or you didn't change anything else on the site, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Probably nobody messed up. Just keep earning good links, writing content for human eyes, and in general doing what the lazy competitors refuse to do.

 

[heckler]

Might need to check some of those links you built as well (make sure they're not broken). If one of the domains those links live on became toxic (in Google's eyes) that could also ding you.

 

[obcted]

Hi Phil - thanks for the response. Yeah wasn't convinced it was the citations. We've been getting a ton of .edu links and I thought they would push us up a lot faster than they have. Just saw a little backslide around the time I learned they changed the Footer address. Just wanted to make sure I didn't have to go into Emergency mode and try to change every directory by hand.

Thanks

 

[armstead]

Ted,

Changing the NAP in the footer is unlikely to cause much of a drop-off - not that going from low P1 to high P2 is huge.

It may not be the reason, but I would look to get those fixed.

What all changed with the NAP?

 

[obcted]

Thanks for the reply.

Not sure what happened but over the weekend the site bumped back up to where it was. Sadly another site that I was watching like a hawk dipped back down. Win some lose some.

It looks like a small algo change to be honest but for whatever reason google went back to what it had before - as we're back in the EXACT same spot #5 and for 2 weeks we went down to #13. While the exact opposite thing happened to another site.

Kinda strange - but not really.

The change in the NAP was about the company moving. They switched home office addresses and didn't tell me. I just noticed when I went to the site and realize the company's HQ moved across the country. So it goes. Thanks for the email though.

 

[Laustin1878]

To keep the lines of communication open between you and the client, perhaps you can create a shared Google Doc (spreadsheet usually is best) in which you can both report back and forth on what was done to the website. I've done this with one of my clients who is rather hands on and it's worked out better then expected. It's especially helpful when I see ranking fluctuations.

If they aren't making changes and you are solely responsible, it may not be important for you. It never fails to amaze me what clients do and fail to advise the people in charge of their marketing efforts.

I know everyone is different but I've dialed back to looking at rankings at a minimum of 3-4 week intervals as I was driving my self crazy trying to diagnose ranking changes. I find this period allows for algorithm tweaks to iron out before I dive in see what's going on. YMMV

 

[Nathan Thomas]

Conflicting NAP data isn't exactly a huge deal when it comes to organic rankings. Different rules there!

You said you were getting a lot of .edu links. How are you earning those links? Are you outsourcing, doing it yourself, etc? What I find to happen is when building .edu links that may be questionable or at the very least not truly relevant, is occasionally it seems that Google will "discredit" certain links.

Perhaps it isn't so much of being discredited as it is diluted, reducing the power of the links you acquired.

Just a thought.

 

[obcted]

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yeah - It may not affect it all that much but I'll have to change 700+ directories now - ugh. I use white spark - and keep a data base with all Usernames and PW for each directory but you know how these things all scrape each other and feed into other directories. It's a pain in the neck to fix.

I have a .sql injection script that puts a link on high authority .edu pages... Just kidding Yeah some of these links could be discredited but the as far as I know there is no real way to tell.

We can have metrics for Page and Domain Authority (I like Ahref's Better) and we have metrics for general Trustworthiness of a page/domain (Majestic) but we don't have a good relevancy metric to asses the how relevant a link is to a page.

If I had the time I would test this out more fully - but I speculate that it's some small score that google assigns to the strength of the link (among other factors) based on the simple the similarity of the content that google shows in the "Content Keywords" in WMT. Meaning if the linkor and the linkee share x% of similar terms in the "content keywords" then more link juice will pass through.

Some of the best links I used to earn on high authority sites are no longer as effective as they used to be. I would suspect that google now keeps a "content Keywords" on a page by page basis - so my formerly great links are now on a deep page with a much different content then than homepage - thus lower relevancy score and less value being pushed through to the linked page. Sorry - random tangent. Back to work for me!!

Thank you!