#(all fixed now. if I manage to post on time without tech issues on friday I'll invade France)
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Ten Milestones: Hopes & Dreams
Hi friends! Chapter 5 is now available!
TW: drug and alcohol use
When Colin’s eyes scan over the next milestone, his face lights up in that aggravatingly adorable way it always does when things go exactly his way.
“Oooh,” he gloats. “This is a good one.”
“What?” Penelope asks, impatient. He’s sitting just close enough that she could steal the phone out of his hands if she wanted to, but she resists the urge.
“Number Four: Sharing Your Hopes and Dreams. Before you and your partner make the commitment to share a life together, you must first share what each of you wants out of that future. This conversation is important — not only will it teach you about each other as individuals, but it will also give you an understanding of how you fit together as partners. A strong partnership is made up of two people who support each other’s goals.”
Penelope doesn’t say a word. She simply smiles.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Nine Years Earlier: December 23rd, 2014
Relationship Status: Good Friends
꙳
December 24th, in Penelope’s opinion, has to be one of the worst days a person can be born on. (Third worst to be exact, narrowly being beaten out by December 25th and February 29th.) Every year, the celebration of your birth is overshadowed by the eve of someone else’s birth. Your birthday presents double as Christmas presents. Your friends are too busy with their own holiday plans to celebrate your birthday with you. Hell — most people forget your birthday exists in the first place.
December 24th is a rather shitty birthday for one to possess. But in all the years she’s known him, Colin has never been one to complain.
It helps that the other Bridgertons always make an attempt to separate his birthday celebrations from the holiday he just so happened to have been born on. That’s why these sorts of parties are always held the night before his actual birthday.
Daphne took the anti-Christmas strategy to a whole nother level this year. Invitations went out two weeks ago with a disclaimer at the bottom.
Red and green garments are strictly prohibited on the premises.
Penelope originally wanted to wear a velvet burgundy dress that she found on Dover Street tonight, but the garment has since been banished to the back of her closet. Instead, she’s wearing a dress made of a softer shade of pink.
Now, 57 minutes into the very-much-not-a-holiday-party party, Penelope stands above the Bridgerton foyer with a dark red drink in her hand. Eloise is beside her, grumbling about the many “unique” choices made for this event. (Including her required attendance.)
“I know Daphne banned holiday music, but surely she can play something better than Coldplay.”
“I like Coldplay,” Penelope mutters defensively. Eloise does not seem to hear her above all the other noise in the room.
“Have you seen the birthday boy anywhere? It’s his party and I have not seen him all night.”
“No. I haven’t.”
They’re standing on the second story landing, above the front entrance and foyer where most attendees mingle. This should be an optimal vantage point to look for Colin, but when Penelope scans the crowd, she comes up empty.
“I’m usually the one to pull a disappearing act at this sort of thing, and even I wouldn’t dare do so at my own party.”
Eloise’s words temporarily break Penelope out of her premature worry. She giggles.
“Weren’t you three hours late to your last birthday celebration? Something about needing to go downtown to visit a certain —”
“That’s different!” Eloise cuts in. “That was a surprise party — how was I supposed to know?!”
“Didn’t your family —”
“I thought I was delaying a casual birthday dinner with my mum and seven siblings. Obviously I would have been on time if I knew there were a hundred people crouched in the dark, hiding behind potted plants and couch cushions, just waiting for my return.”
Penelope’s giggles do not let up.
“Is that what you think happened while you were gone?”
“I don’t know.” Eloise literally waves off the question, gesticulating her hands so ardently that she nearly spills all the wine out of her glass. “I’m more concerned about Colin’s whereabouts at the moment.”
“Is something wrong?” Penelope asks, worry rising up in her chest again. It’s squashed just as quickly.
“No. But if I have to suffer through this party, so should he. It’s his fault we’re all here in the first place.”
Penelope scans the crowd once more. Yet again, nothing.
“Knowing Colin, he’s probably in the kitchen.”
“Oooh.” Eloise’s demeanour changes immediately. Her scowl pulls into a smile. “That also happens to be where they store the one thing that could actually make this party enjoyable.”
Penelope lifts an eyebrow, fighting off another bout of giggles.
“And what might that be? Good conversation? An old friend? The ghost of not-Christmas pres—”
“No. Liquor. Perhaps after a few drinks, your jokes will start to sound funny.”
As one final round of giggles bubbles up in Penelope’s throat, Eloise loops their arms together and leads them towards the stairs.
“And after a few more drinks, perhaps Coldplay will start to sound like actual music.”
꙳ ꙳ ꙳
Twenty-one minutes later (and half a vodka cranberry later), Penelope walks out of the kitchen by herself, realising that she has seen every Bridgerton at this party except Colin.
Violet and Daphne had both greeted her at the door. She spoke to Francesca while waiting for the loo. She walked in on a fist fight between Gregory and Hyacinth. Anthony brushed past her to break it up, barely managing to prevent Hyacinth from knocking Gregory’s front tooth out. Benedict was in the kitchen, where he and Eloise are currently having a spirited (but hushed) debate over what Christmas movie to watch tomorrow night.
Glass in hand, condensation already dripping onto her fingers, Penelope walks the Bridgerton halls.
There are people everywhere she turns. Some she knows from her lifetime in Mayfair or from her extensive experience at Bridgerton events. Some she vaguely recognizes from Colin’s social media or from her sporadic trips up to Cambridge. Some she doesn’t recognize at all.
As her footsteps trail forward, Penelope resists the urge to look and listen. To keep listening. To peer into the conversations of these strangers and acquaintances, all while she remains unnoticed.
It’s a game she knows well, but still she resists. She looks for a face far more familiar than these.
Just before her feet can step into the foyer — into the heart of the party — they stop short. Her body moves to the side, leaning rigid into the wooden doorway, hidden beneath the cover of a shadow. On the other side of the room, Colin stands with his back against a wall and his arms crossed in front of him. Clearly, no one informed him of the dress code for his own party; he’s wearing an emerald green cable knit sweater.
(He’s also wearing a light blue birthday hat atop his head — one she can only assume was hand-crafted by Violet Bridgerton.)
He isn’t alone. Daphne stands beside him, body facing him, arms at her sides. They’re talking. Penelope couldn’t even begin to guess what it is they’re talking about, but she can tell from the other side of the room that Colin isn’t happy about it.
He isn’t saying much; Daphne is doing most of the talking.
After a stranger brushes past her, Penelope raises her glass to her lips and takes the smallest of sips. Her mind briefly considers walking over to the other side of the room, but her feet remain firmly planted in her spot in the doorway. She feels a peculiar, paralyzed sensation up and down her legs as she watches their conversation unfold from afar. She can’t help but worry and wonder why Colin looks so defeated at his own party. She also can’t help but deem this conversation too dangerous to peer into uninvited.
“Oh, Pen! There you are!”
Automatically, Penelope’s head turns in the direction from which her name had been called. Eloise is excitedly walking (basically skipping) down the hall towards her.
“You’re coming over tomorrow night, right? Ben is still advocating for Elf, but with your vote I think I can swing us back to the far superior Nightmare Before Christmas.”
“Oh! Yes, I think so. By the way, I found —”
Penelope turns her head, expecting to find Colin exactly where he had been not twenty seconds prior. But he isn’t. Neither is Daphne.
“What?” Eloise asks, now standing in the doorway beside Penelope.
“Nothing.” Penelope shakes her head, then shoots back the rest of her drink. “And just for the record: Benedict is right. Elf is easily the superior Christmas movie.”
Eloise’s jaw goes slack.
“You traitor.”
꙳ ꙳ ꙳
All night, the only thing Colin wanted was to disappear from his own party. He is aware of how bad that sounds — how he sounds like an ungrateful child instead of a man on the cusp of twenty-two. But even then…
No one can plan for their birthday. He didn’t choose this to be born on December 24th. He didn’t want to have this party to begin with. He couldn’t have predicted that tonight would land in the middle of one of the most uncertain, precarious, bad-mood-inducing phases of his life. It’s not his fault that he’s currently in one of those moods — one that makes the happiness of others feel like a personal attack on you specifically.
A party was the last place Colin wanted to be tonight. Now, he finds himself in a room situated in a more private wing of the house. He’s out of view of the random, too-happy people filling the halls, but close enough to hear the remnants of faraway music. He’s sitting in front of the giant oak that used to belong to his father, arms crossed in front of him and eyes trained on the door to his left. Anthony’s on the other side of the desk, donning an expression that makes Colin wish he was back in the heart of the party.
“Must we have this conversation now? I’m fairly certain mum’s downstairs lighting candles on a cake as we speak.”
That look on Anthony’s face — equal parts annoyance and amusement — does not let up one bit.
“I’ve been trying to have this conversation with you for weeks. It’s not my fault that we had to throw a party in your honour just to keep you at home for more than fifteen minutes.”
“That’s —”
Colin doesn’t finish that sentence. He could attach a million different adjectives to the end of it that would (rightfully) attack Anthony’s character, but none of them would make his words untrue.
“I’ve been busy,” he says instead.
“Clearly.” Anthony puffs out an audible breath of air from his nose as he leans back in their father’s chair. “Seeing as you can’t even make the time for one single phone call.”
For the first time in several minutes, Colin’s arms uncross. His hands move to the arms of the chair, ten fingernails biting into its vinyl surface.
Contrary to Anthony’s claims, they’ve actually had some version of this conversation several times over the last few weeks. Over those weeks, Anthony had suggested, reminded, then demanded that Colin reach out to an old friend of their father’s — one who just so happens to be the head of English Literature at Oxford. Also during those weeks, Colin reminded his older brother that he has no intention of doing so, but such details always seem to fall on deaf ears.
Also contrary to Anthony’s claims, Colin does have plans — or at the very least, dreams for what to do after he graduates from university in the spring. His aspirations simply have nothing to do with Oxford or any other form of higher education. His dreams —
“Is this about Marina?”
Those words break Colin out of the thought spiral he hadn’t realised he had fallen into. They leave him feeling even more annoyed and misunderstood than he had just a moment ago.
“Excuse me? What exactly —”
“This. This insistence to avoid real life. To sulk around and avoid your responsibilities.”
“I am not —”
“It’s fine, if it is!” Anthony offers, sarcasm not lost in his tone. “I get it. Your first real breakup can be hard. But at a certain point, you have to —”
“That was months ago. And I don’t see how a silly little breakup has any bearing on my career aspirations.”
It isn’t until those words leave his lips that he realises how potently they taste of bullshit.
No, this is not about Marina or the ultimate demise of their relationship. Obviously, she has no bearing on any of his future plans. But to refer to their breakup as “silly” or “little” feels dishonest. (On his end, at least. The words are probably more fitting for Marina’s feelings on the matter.)
In truth, Colin had been in a perpetual bad mood since she ended things between them back in August. They only dated for six months, but that was approximately five and a half months longer than any relationship he had held previously. He thought Marina was the love of his life; after their breakup, she admitted that the only reason they ever dated was to make her ex-boyfriend jealous.
At least the relationship had been successful for one of them.
“‘Career aspirations?’” Anthony mocks, pulling Colin out of yet another thought spiral. “Is that what we’re calling them now?”
Now, Colin wishes for nothing more than to strangle his older brother. Instead, he lets go of his tightening grip around the armchair.
“Once again — can we table this conversation for another day? Daphne will kill me if I kill you and thus, ruin her party.”
Anthony rolls his eyes, but nods.
“Fine. But isn’t this your party?”
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
Anthony immediately stands from his chair, but Colin remains sitting. His gaze turns to the left again, pointlessly pointing at that big brown door — wishing against all reason and logic for someone to walk through the precipice.
Just as he always does on nights like this.
꙳ ꙳ ꙳
At approximately 11:33 PM, after cutting the cake, after dodging more of Anthony’s questions, after acting like an ungrateful, bad-mood-wielding ass at his own celebration, Colin sits alone.
He’s in the drawing room, perched precariously on the edge of a windowsill. The room is dark, lit by one dying bulb in the lamp by the door. There’s a hastily-rolled joint (a birthday gift from Benedict) between Colin’s thumb and index finger. There’s a cloud of smoke sitting on his tongue and a bitter December breeze drifting in from the open window beside him.
The party he left behind is probably wrapping up right now. People are probably looking for him. He should probably go say goodbye (or even “hello”) to them. He shouldn’t keep himself here, secluded in a well of his own misery. But just the thought of going downstairs and speaking to one of those random, too-happy people fills him with a misery that —
Shit.
The door to the drawing room starts to creak open. Before it can open all the way — before he can even turn his head to identify the perpetrator behind that noise — Colin flicks the joint out the window. When he finally does look over to the entrance across the room, his panic starts to settle.
“Sorry. I thought you were someone else,” he says, just as Penelope says, “Sorry! I didn’t mean to intrude.”
Even in the dim lighting — even from across the room — Colin can see her cheeks flush pink as she laughs nervously and steps across the precipice. Thankfully, she shuts the door closed behind her.
“Sorry,” she says again. “Hope I don’t disappoint.”
“Not at all.” He shuts the window before standing from his spot. He meets Penelope halfway on the light blue couch in the middle of the room. “Quite the opposite.”
As she walks closer, her cheeks grow just a little more pink. The nervous smile drops though, her face settling into a look Colin has become quite familiar with over the years. He knows there’s a question behind it — something gnawing at her insides, begging to be asked aloud. Given his admittedly odd behaviour and the fact that this is the first time they’ve spoken all night, he feels rather confident about what question he’s about to be asked.
But he’s wrong.
“What happened to your birthday hat?”
“Fucking hell,” he unconsciously mutters. The words slip from his lips as his hands raise to the crown of his head. “Forgotten by a tray of eclairs. I think.”
That gnawing expression on Penelope’s face drops. She giggles.
“Shall we go look for it before your mum catches on?”
“No.” It isn’t until that word shoots off his lips that he realises how deeply he despises the idea of being anywhere except this spot on the couch. “Mum will forgive my carelessness.”
Penelope nods, a soft hum of agreement on her lips.
“Is there a reason you’re hiding up here instead of by that tray of eclairs?”
Colin’s first instinct is to deflect. He opens his mouth to do so — but before he can say anything, he’s suddenly hit by a wave of clarity that doing so would be wrong. That Penelope already knows something is up with him and lying to her would do neither of them any good. The epiphany is almost certainly a consequence of the weed he inhaled approximately 60 seconds ago, but still…
“Just in a bit of a shit mood. Which — I should really apologise for. To you and the hundred other people held hostage by said shit mood all night.”
Penelope’s face flashes with an expression different from inquiry, but just as familiar to him after all these years: worry.
“Don’t apologise.”
Maybe it’s the joint currently burning a hole in his mother’s lawn. Maybe it’s the deflection finally breaking through. Maybe it’s his inherent need to pull the worry off Penelope’s face, but Colin cannot help but smirk.
“Sorry. I’ll try to remember to stop doing that.”
“Why are you in a shit mood?” she asks, seemingly unphased by his facetiousness.
Colin shrugs.
“Not in the Christmas spirit this year, I suppose.”
“I don’t see how that’s of any relevance, considering the fact that this is not a Christmas party. In fact, I believe any mention of said ‘Christmas spirit’ has been banned entirely.”
“Bloody hell.”
Colin runs a hand across his face, literally wiping away that smirk.
“I told Daphne to relax on the ‘rules’ for this thing. Actually — I told her to skip this party altogether. To just tack on a birthday cake to the usual Christmas Eve celebrations tomorrow. Unfortunately, I don’t believe my input is of much relevance on the subject.”
Penelope remains quiet for a second longer than Colin feels is necessary or comfortable. In those few seconds of waiting, she sports a new expression on her face. This one is harder to read than the ones that came before.
“Is that why you two were arguing before?” she finally asks. And when Colin simply gives her a look of confusion, she clarifies, “I saw you two talking in the foyer earlier tonight. You looked a bit… I don’t know. Cross?”
Once again, Colin feels himself hit with a desire to drop his faux-nonchalance and charming deflection. To speak plainly. If there ever were a person to be candid with, surely it’s Penelope. Throughout the entirety of their friendship, she has only ever regarded him with an open mind. All his life, she has been so constant and loyal. If there is anyone he should be discussing matters such as this with, surely it’s her.
Surely.
“No, that wasn’t what we were talking about. As silly and unnecessary it may have been… You know how excited Daphne gets about these parties. I didn’t want to complain. Not that directly, at least. We were, uh —” He clears his throat. “We were actually discussing my post-uni plans.”
In the relative darkness surrounding them, Penelope’s eyes light up with eager curiosity.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Anthony has been on my ass for weeks regarding the future — which is completely out of character from him, I know. But I… I don’t know. Anthony isn’t exactly the easiest person to talk to about that sort of thing and I… I thought it would be easier to talk to Daphne about it, but…”
The longer he speaks, the more apparent it becomes that his usual capabilities for completing sentences have seemingly slipped away from him. It’s probably the weed, but…
“What are your plans?” Penelope asks, filling the interim silence. “It’s fine if you don’t know yet, of course. Not everyone has to know exactly what they want to do after uni, but —”
“No, I do have plans,” Colin is quick to clarify. “They’re just a bit… mad. According to Anthony, at least.”
“Oh.” Penelope shifts in her spot, sitting up a bit straighter. A wicked smile creeps up her lips. “Well, that’s much better than no plan at all.”
“Yeah,” he chuckles. “I guess so.”
“So what are these mad plans, exactly?”
“Well,” Colin can feel his body sink just a little bit deeper into the couch cushion as he continues, “you know how I’ve always wanted to travel?”
“Of course,” she says, a softer smile suddenly appearing on her lips.
“I always thought of that as some far away dream. Like, once I become an actual adult and have my life figured out, then I can take time off from my ‘real life’ to go see the world for myself. The only problem was…”
His voice trails off again, still unsure of what words he could use to best describe what lies in his heart. Thankfully, Penelope describes it for him.
“You never had any dreams for your so-called ‘real life?’”
“Exactly.”
Though the window has since been shut tight, the air in the room remains quite cold. And yet, Colin feels a sudden warm sensation in the center of his chest; he does his best to ignore it as Penelope opens her mouth again.
“So you want to make a career out of travelling the world?”
“Something like that,” he mutters, his shoulders unconsciously shrugging upwards. “Though, when you put it like that… maybe I can understand Anthony’s reservations on the subject.”
“Don’t say that,” Penelope insists, a gentle breath of nervous laughter on her lips. “Lots of people’s jobs revolve around travel. There’s nothing wrong with that.” With another tiny laugh, she adds, “And I’m sure a business degree from Cambridge will be useful in securing those future plans.”
“I don’t know how true that is,” he admits, the words tasting sour on his tongue.
In truth, Colin had no idea what he wanted to study or work towards when he first started at Cambridge at eighteen. He had chosen to study business simply because it seemed like the rational choice to make at the time. Unlike his older brothers, both of whom knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives before they hit secondary school, Colin was late to such a realisation. It wasn’t until very recently that his hopes and dreams for the future started to solidify.
“What do you mean?” Penelope asks.
“Well, obviously any degree from Cambridge will be useful for my future. I just meant…” He sucks in a cold breath of air. “If I were to go back in time and do it all over again, I wouldn’t have chosen business. I think I would have, uh, chosen something more in line with English Literature.”
Once again, Penelope’s face lights up in the darkness.
“You want to write?”
“Yeah.” He chuckles again. “I think so.”
“Colin, that’s —” Penelope’s hand, which had previously been sitting limply in her lap, moves as if she’s about to reach out and touch his shoulder. It doesn’t in the end. It now rests on top of the couch in the space between them. “That’s a great idea. Truly.”
That warm feeling makes a sudden reappearance in Colin’s chest. Again…
“Really? You’re not worried about what will happen if you’re no longer the only writer in this friendship?”
“No,” she insists, almost sounding defensive. “The world needs more good writers.”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s fair to say —”
“You’re a good writer, Colin.”
At her words (and the adorably serious manner in which she spoke them), Colin cannot help but laugh.
“And you know this based on what? A few emails?”
To claim Penelope has only received a “few” emails from him feels disingenuous. But still, he struggles to see her point.
He sent the first email in January, shortly after returning to Cambridge from winter holiday and approximately six weeks after Penelope’s father passed. The email wasn’t about her dad or uni or anything in particular. If anything, it was a compilation of random thoughts (and several puns) he had collected in his brain in the five days that passed since they last spoke.
He sent that first email on a Friday. She responded on the following Monday. He sent another on Friday. She responded again —
Suffice to say, a pattern emerged. Both of them missed a few Mondays and Fridays over the last eleven months (especially around the end of the spring term and the termination of his relationship with Marina), but even then…
Penelope has read more of Colin’s writing than anyone else. More than even his professors at Cambridge.
“Yes, based on a few emails, Colin,” Penelope insists, rolling her eyes lightly. “Really, you are such a terrific writer. It doesn’t matter if it’s in an email to a friend — or in a term paper or a book or whatever it is that you want to do. I can tell that you like to write, and that’s really the fundamental requirement for becoming a writer.”
That warm feeling in Colin’s chest is back and it feels like it’s about to leave a rash on his skin.
Crossing his arms in front of his chest, Colin sighs and leans a few inches away from Penelope.
“Well… Thank you. But I believe Anthony would protest that last point.”
“What do you mean?” Penelope asks, similarly drawing a few inches backwards. Her left hand falls back into her lap from the couch cushion.
“Anthony is of the mindset that liking something isn’t enough of a reason to upend your life for that thing. He thinks the idea of me running off to another country after graduation and writing about my experiences is ‘silly.’ That if I want to be a writer, I should stay put, apply for a graduate program, and actually learn how to become one. Which…”
His voice trails off, because saying it all out loud makes his own plans sound a lot more “silly” than he had originally thought.
“Well…” Penelope starts. “In fairness to Anthony’s perspective, you can’t wake up one day, decide to be a lawyer, then go litigate a murder case at the courthouse down the street. But becoming a writer… It’s different than becoming a lawyer. Maybe Anthony isn’t the best person to talk to on the subject.”
Colin nods, a vague hum of agreement on his lips as he thinks over her words.
Maybe not so silly, after all.
“And Daphne? What did she say?”
“Oh.”
He had almost forgotten why they’re having this conversation in the first place.
“She was more supportive than Anthony. I think I was just a bit frustrated because she didn’t seem to fully understand what it is that I want to do. She thinks I just want to fuck off for a year, then come home and figure out what to do with my ‘real life.’ Attend postgrad, get a job in an office, do… Do whatever it is that real adults do.”
Penelope doesn’t say anything right away. She’s looking at him in that way that makes it clear that she has a lot to say and is still figuring out how to say it. Before she can, he opens his mouth again.
“I shouldn’t be cross with her. Or Anthony, even. I just think — for my own sake — I need to commit to the idea. To go out and try to make something of myself without having a backup plan to revert to if I don’t succeed within a year’s time.”
“Then you should go for it.” Her words come out quickly, in one determined breath — like she needs to get the words out before he continues rambling. “Anthony will come around. He probably just needs some time. And perhaps some perspective.”
“Yeah, may—”
“What is it that you want to write, by the way?” Penelope asks, interrupting whatever further deflection he was surely about to throw her way. “A book about your travels?”
Colin considers the question.
“No, I was thinking more in terms of a blog. Or,” he laughs, “a magazine, if they’d hire me. But I do like the idea of writing a book one day. Not any time soon, but once I’m older and wiser and have lived a little more, I think I’d like to have some written recollection of my experiences to look back on. That’s sort of the magic of writing, you know?”
Penelope doesn’t confirm that last bit. She stays quiet as she gives him a look that says, “keep going.”
“Like… When I was at Aubrey Hall last summer, I got bored one day and went snooping through my grandfather’s old study. When I did, I found this cardboard box in the back of his closet. It held all these little mementos from when he was on tour back in the forties. He kept so many journals from that time — all filled with these little details about what his life was like. Leaving England for the first time. Seeing the Eiffel Tower. Eating strudel in Vienna. Skinny dipping in the Danube. Wa—”
When Penelope lets out a surprised giggle, Colin can’t help but laugh, too. The bad mood that had been plaguing him all night has long since been forgotten.
“Anyway… I read through approximately five years worth of those stories in one afternoon, and I just — I couldn’t help but think about how lasting the written word is. My grandfather died before I was born, and yet I learned so much about him just because I happened upon those old journals. Just because he sat down one afternoon seventy years ago and decided to write about the time he and a bunch of his army buddies stripped naked and jumped into a river.”
Penelope laughs again. So does Colin.
“I just — I like that idea. That —” He inches forward to grab a little white napkin from the coffee table. “I could grab a pen, write about all the delectable food we ate here tonight, hide this in an archaic book on the shelf over there, then seventy years from now, my grandson could find it and understand just how ardently his grandfather loved eclairs.”
Penelope laughs again. This time, the laugh is strong enough to make her lose a little bit of her resolve; when she tips forward, her forehead lightly brushes against his shoulder.
“But like I said…” He says, only once Penelope has returned to an upright position on the next cushion over. “I think I need to live a little more before I even think about writing something as definitive as a book.”
“Well… Whatever you end up writing, I’ll read it.”
Colin laughs again. He can’t help it.
“You know — you’re quite the loyal reader, Pen. First you put up with my weekly long-winded, rambling emails, now you’re —”
“I don’t ‘put up’ with anything, Colin. You’re a terrific writer. I always enjoy reading your emails. Even if they almost always include one too many puns.”
“That’s debatable,” he mutters defensively, only able to cling onto those last few words.
“Even with the jarring amount of puns in your work —”
“Hey!”
“— your writing is good. You obviously have a passion for it, and that matters a hell of a lot more than a lit degree.”
Penelope takes a breath. Speaking a bit more softly now…
“Possessing a passion is important. It will fill your hours with a sense of purpose. When others doubt you or success seems illusive, that passion will drive you to keep going. To achieve something definitive — something you can look back on decades from now and be proud of.”
When Penelope stops speaking, Colin is reminded of that inability he possessed just a few minutes ago — the one that made it impossible to finish his sentences without trailing off into oblivion. It definitely wasn’t the joint. (The more he thinks about it, the more apparent it becomes that Benedict’s “present” was nothing more than a few grams of oregano rolled into a little white paper.)
No. A few minutes ago, Colin was unable to properly put his hopes and dreams into words without trailing off or sounding like an arsehole — just as he has been unable to do for several months now. But now…
Now he can. Now it all makes sense.
After thanking Penelope for her kind, insightful words, Colin decides it is time for this discussion to alter course.
“And what of your dreams, Pen?”
Penelope doesn’t answer right away. Though the room around them is still rather dark, Colin’s eyes have adjusted enough to see the blush that quickly forms on her cheeks.
“You know I’m studying to become a journalist,” she says, which is more of a protest of his question than an actual answer.
Of course he knows that. Unlike Colin, Penelope knew what she wanted to do with her life long before she began attending university. But despite their increased correspondence over the last few months, Penelope never really talks about why she made that choice.
“Obviously. But what is it that you’re so passionate about? What fills your hours with purpose?”
She considers his questions.
“I don’t know. I always loved reading, and that just naturally bled into a love of writing.”
“Okay,” he says belatedly, not initially realising that was her entire response. “But why journalism? Why not fiction or poetry or —” Colin chuckles. “Travel writing?”
“I don’t know,” she says again. “I just — I’ve always been interested in people’s stories. Real people’s stories. One day, I might wake up and suddenly want to write a romance novel or a children’s story, but right now… Journalism feels like the right fit for me.”
After another prolonged silence, Colin asks, “What interests you about real people’s stories?”
“I don’t know,” she says for a third time. “People are just so… complicated. Everyone has a million stories inside of them. That’s the fun part of interviewing people — finding ways to get those interesting, hidden details into the light.”
In the back of his mind, Colin wonders if Penelope has been practising that particular skill on him during this conversation. He waives the thought away before it can fully develop.
“Is there an area of journalism you’re specifically interested in?”
Before answering his question, Penelope scrunches her nose, then lets out a forced breath of laughter.
“Colin, I don’t know why you’re getting so caught up in the small details of it. What my dream is now could be different than what it is ten years from now — or even two years from now. However I choose to spend my hours, I just hope that I have a purpose to drive me. Something satisfying and fulfilling. Something that will challenge me to be brave and witty. Something to propel me forward and set me free.”
It takes Colin a moment to realise that he has been stunned into silence. Thankfully, he’s able to pull himself out of the daze with a little effort.
“What could possibly measure up to all of that?”
She shrugs. “I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.”
They sit in a shared silence for a moment. Colin wishes he could hear what is going on in Penelope’s head; his is filled with her voice.
Something to propel me forward and set me free.
“I think it’s amazing that —”
“Oh, stop,” she says, another forced laugh on her lips. Though she remains rooted in her spot on the couch, Penelope’s face turns away from Colin and towards the nearest door. For the first time in several minutes, he remembers that there’s still a party going on downstairs. His party.
“It’s late,” she says. “Don’t pay too much mind my silly little words.”
“I think your dreams are bigger than you let on, Pen.”
She turns back towards him, eyes meeting his again through the darkness.
“Weren’t we discussing your dreams?”
Yes, but he much prefers this subject.
“I —”
“What’s holding you back? Is it just your siblings’ reactions?”
“No,” he admits. “There are certainly bigger obstacles than Anthony’s lack of enthusiasm.”
“Such as?”
Colin doesn’t respond right away. While his concerns may be easier to conceptualise than his hopes or his dreams, they’re harder to speak aloud.
“Well… Working as a travel writer would also mean spending the majority of my time away from home.”
For the first time tonight, a strikingly sad expression flashes on Penelope’s face, as if it is only now that she realises the consequences of Colin’s dreams coming true. It’s only a flash, though. Her smile makes a quick reappearance, even if it isn’t quite as bright as it was before.
“You already spend the majority of your time away from home.”
“Yeah, but Cambridge is only two hours away. Plus, Eloise is there to annoy me if I’m ever feeling homesick. If I’m off in a different timezone the majority of the year…”
His voice trails off again. This time, Penelope doesn’t jump in to fill the lull.
“Is it awful to say I’m worried that life will move on without me here if I’m away?”
“No, it’s not awful.” Penelope’s smile looks even sadder than it did before, but it doesn’t drop. “I think a lot of people worry about that, regardless of their career paths. I think that’s just part of growing up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…”
Her voice trails off as she looks away from him and towards the ceiling, seemingly racking her brain for the right words to use. It only takes her a few seconds to find them.
“When you’re growing up, your world is pretty small. You have your siblings and your neighbours and your friends at school, and for the most part, that world is stable. Some people move away and you lose touch with others, but most people remain a constant. But then as you get older and leave for uni or work or wherever it is that life takes you, the world is suddenly really, really big.
“Those people who made up your entire world when you were younger are still there, but their lives aren’t intertwined with yours like they used to be. It’s more like they’re running parallel. Like… you know all those emails we send back and forth?”
It takes Colin a rather long moment to respond, and all he can muster in the end is a single nod.
“We’re still in each other’s lives, but the stories we share with each other are… separate.”
It takes him even longer to respond to that last part.
“Pen… Was that meant to be reassuring? That was the most depressing thing I’ve heard in my entire life.”
“Oh stop.” Penelope laughs half-heartedly. “It’s not depressing — it’s just life. Actually, it’s a bloody miracle. We should be thankful that our friendship has lasted so long, despite how much our worlds have changed over the years.”
After another extremely long beat of silence, Colin musters what little energy he has left to draw the faintest hint of a smirk to his lips.
“So, what you’re saying is… You will not miss me if I disappear to a different country every week?”
Penelope’s forced smile finally drops. She rolls her eyes.
“Obviously, I’ll miss you. But that’s no reason for you to stay home and prevent yourself from reaching your full potential.”
And just like that, Colin is eighteen again, not seconds away from turning twenty-two. He and Penelope are on Fife’s rooftop, not on the couch in his family’s drawing room. He’s hopeful for the future, not scared that their friendship won’t survive this next phase of life.
“I —” Penelope starts, back on the couch in his family’s drawing room. Colin has no idea what it is that she is about to say, because he leans in and hugs her, incidentally muffling her words with his cable knit sweater.
With his lips practically in her hair, he whispers, “Thank you. For being so supportive.”
Penelope doesn’t respond until approximately 25 seconds later, after she breaks the embrace apart and looks him in the eye.
“You don’t have to thank me for my silly little words.”
Before Colin can find an adequate response to such a ridiculous statement, Penelope removes herself from his touch completely. She stands from her spot on the couch and looks down at him as she continues speaking.
“It’s getting late, I should get…”
Her voice trails off when her eyes land on her phone. She smiles.
“Look,” she instructs, holding up the screen for him to see.
12:01 AM.
“Happy Birthday, Colin.”
Now standing beside her, Colin takes the phone from her hands, smirks, then throws it gently onto the couch. The cushions are still indented in the spots they sat together.
“Merry Christmas Eve, Pen.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------
“No debating that one, I suppose. What’s next?”
#I have to stop posting at 3 am#it took me 2 days to realize there was no link in this post#(and another day to realize I added the wrong link!)#(all fixed now. if I manage to post on time without tech issues on friday I'll invade France)#polin#fanfiction#bridgerton#weepingfromacedartree#fanfic#ao3#ten milestones#penelope featherington#colin bridgerton#penelope x colin
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Holy Shit Buckle Up Y'all
(TW: mentions of transphobia, racism, and self-harm)
A little backstory:
In November we hired three new people to help with our workload around the holidays, and we've kept them on. Two of them are very hard workers, have great personalities, and nice work ethics. The third, who I will be referring to as J.....does not.
She constantly asks to switch shifts instead of putting in for time off or changing her availability (said that its "inconvenient" for her to change it), if you're even a minute late to covering register for her when she's supposed to get off, she'll just abandon the register and clock out and then shop for thirty minutes, and she is constantly walking away from her post bc she's "bored" and "doesn't feel like working" when there are literally people in line.
So about two weeks ago, she scheduled for five days off. Sweet, shes learning. She then proceeds to call off the day before her five days and the day after. So now she has a week off. Dick move, but I can't say no one has done it before.
Her scheduled day back is a Wednesday. She texts one of my coworkers, P, and asks her to take her shifts for Wednesday AND Thursday. P agrees because she wants more hours, but all of us, including the managers, are irritated now. This is now nine days off she's gotten.
On Wednesday, I got a text from her asking if I could take her shift Friday. Now as of this point, I've been sick all week - hacking my lungs out, not able to breathe, but working bc we're short staffed (bc of her) and bc I need the money. I had Friday and Saturday off for the first time in MONTHS so no way in hell was I gonna take it. I just said no, firmly.
She continues to pester me, asking why, since I don't work Friday I should be able to, etc, and I kind of snapped:
Which, okay, maybe I shouldn't have snapped like that. But I was exhausted and frustrated and so sick of her getting to do this that I just couldn't take it anymore. I expected her to call me a bitch and then ignore me but hoooooo boy nope. (Names are blacked out) (and if this many photos aren't allowed feel free to delete this submission)
First of all, the racism comment:
She was buying cigarettes and even though shes a coworker, I have to ID her bc she's 19 and I can get fired for that shit. She told me she had lost her ID and asked to just put her birthday in. My manager said it was fine, so I did, and I made the offhanded comment about how she should get a new one so she didn't get pulled over by a racist dick while driving. We live in an area where the cops just looovvve to profile people (if you know Ohio, you know where) and I'd had that conversation with so many of my friends that I didn't even think about it, I was just concerned about her getting home safely to her kid. She didn't react negatively at the time, just said "oh I didn't think about that, thanks" and we moved on. If she had really had an issue with it she would have spoken to our managers, so clearly she's only bringing it up now to scare me. I just.....I mean obviously if I am being racist I want someone to tell me so I can fix my actions, but I didn't even think that came off that way in the moment. Maybe I was out of line, but the same thing has happened recently to my 16 year old cousin (he's fine dw) and so its been on my mind.
Second, no, I am not a manager. But aside from four other employees, two of which only work part time, I am one of the oldest members of staff (time wise, not age wise, I'm 23). So the managers put me in charge of a lot of shit, which means that I end up being in charge of people. Which apparently she did not like.
And third no, I do not have a kid. I'm not married, I don't have a partner, and I barely have the income to make half of rent with my roommate sometimes. I would not bring a child into this world if I could help it, and it pissed me off that she would imply that if I had a child, I'd be more mature. I wanted to scream at her and tell her that if having a kid makes you more mature, it clearly didn't work for her. I feel so bad for her kid; he's like two, and she's already constantly using him as an excuse for not doing things and not going to work. She lives with her mom and her boyfriend, so she has a support system (her mom is retired, and a very sweet lady). Like again, I don't have a kid, but all my coworkers who do don't pull this shit ever.
Anyway
I was physically shaking by the end of these texts, crying, because I HATE when people yell at me, especially when they know me IRL. And especially cause she was accusing me of some nasty shit. I sent them all to my manager in the least professional set of texts I'd ever written and then two hours later had to go to work.
My depression was up, my anxiety was through the roof, and as soon as our floater manager asked me if I was okay I burst into tears again. I showed her and the closing manager the texts and they were both appalled but then
They fucking started trying to "comfort" me by making racist comments!!! "Oh, thats just what her people are like" "you know she grew up in the ghetto part of town" "that girl is straight up hood" like!!!!
I was furious. I was so mad it wasn't funny, but they're my MANAGERS and i need this job and they're both old, so they don't think what they're saying is wrong. I tried desperately to derail it by saying things like "where she grew up had nothing to do with it" but they just kept going and I just....that made it so much worse tbh I just walked out of the office to do my fucking job.
A couple hours later, right as I've started to calm down, one of my coworkers started making really transphobic comments about one of our old coworkers who I'm still friends with, deadnaming her, saying that she's allowed to deadname her bc its part of her religion, etc etc.
Y'all I just....walked behind the photo counter and had a fucking meltdown on the floor. I dragged myself to the pharmacy to get their trash so I had SOMETHING to focus on and as soon as I got there the tech took one look at me and held out her arms and I just lost it again.
I go to my manager and basically just ask to do trash and go home. I was supposed to close, and I have left early only once in my life, when we were too dead to need me, but I had just mentally had it. I knew that if I didn't leave in that moment I wasn't going to make it to the end of the night without hurting myself.
She agreed, I finished trash, and got one of my friends to come pick me up.
My GM texts me the next morning (Thursday) and says she's giving me PTO for the hours I didn't work Wednesday night and for my day off on Friday. I almost cried again bc I was so stressed about the money.
Fast forward to a week later, today, and J still has a job, but she has now also called off 16 days in a row. Claiming she's still stuck in Texas with her kid (which was why she was asking to trade shifts last week).
I don't know how much longer my GM can hold out before firing her. I really don't.
Tldr; coworker asks me to take a shift for the hundredth time after calling out for a week, I say no (albeit a bit rudely), they start screaming at me via text, and I have a mental breakdown.
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Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome the wonderful Kameron Jenkins to show us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
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How To Focus Your SEO Strategy: A Quick Guide for Businesses New to Online Optimization
New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/how-to-focus-your-seo-strategy-a-quick-guide-for-businesses-new-to-online-optimization/
How To Focus Your SEO Strategy: A Quick Guide for Businesses New to Online Optimization
With businesses making the move to serve their customers primarily online and the footfall of customers in physical stores dropping dramatically, the value of SEO has been rediscovered. Businesses are now paying closer attention to their online experience and how they can compete on the internet.
This post will offer a guide to businesses looking to enhance their organic reach and traffic, by providing some SEO solutions to issues they might be experiencing. This includes information suitable for businesses that haven’t engaged with SEO as a channel before, as well as those who have had more experience with it. The goal is to gain more traffic and increase conversions.
Scenario 1: You don’t know what keywords you should be ranking for
Targeting the right keywords is central to getting a return from SEO. Targeting the most valuable and relevant keywords to your product/service is crucial.
How to know what keywords to target:
They should be relevant to your product/service offering
They should have a search volume large enough to target an audience that is worthwhile. This can vary depending on the country, how specific your product/service is, and seasonality. Using your judgment is crucial here; your own knowledge about your specific industry and market will help you target the right keywords with the search demand relevant to your business.
Tools to conduct your keyword research:
Moz Keyword Explorer → a keyword research tool that offers access to millions of keywords that can help form your list. You can see keyword suggestions, current ranking websites, and all the metrics on the keyword itself.
Cost: Create a free account to get you started.
Ahrefs ‘Keyword Explorer’ or ‘Keyword Generator’ → these tools are amazing for finding new keywords to target, variations, seeing their search volume, generating keyword ideas, and more. Cost: They offer a 7 day trial for $7.
Google Trends → is a platform that lets you look at the search trend for a select group of keywords. You can compare the keywords to each other, and look into the monthly search trends around the topic. Looking at these trends can also help you avoid targeting the wrong keywords. Sometimes, some keywords have a higher average monthly search volume when compared to another, however, the other keyword might suddenly receive a high search interest due to an emerging trend.
Cost: It’s free!
Answer The Public → will let you view questions that are commonly searched for around your keyword. This can help with generating content ideas, as well as provide insight into the types of things people are searching for around your important keywords.
Cost: It’s free!
Google Search Console → this tool helps you track the performance of your website in the organic search results, and is an excellent resource when it comes to SEO. It can be used to discover what keywords your website is currently ranking for, and what keywords are performing better/worse over a period of time. (If you haven’t already set this up for your site, please do so now!)
Cost: It’s free!
After all this, you combine your keywords, de-dupe and filter them out accordingly, to keep relevant keywords that you want to target in a list.
What do I do once I have my list of keywords?
Optimize your website to include them! This can involve:
1. Updating your on-page metadata.
Page titles = should be unique to the page, clear and relevant, and under 60 characters (so it doesn’t get cut off in the search results).
Meta Descriptions = include important keywords, without “keyword stuffing” (which is when you cram a lot of keywords in together and it doesn’t read well). This should be up to 150-160 characters to avoid it being cut off.
H1s = these are the on-page headings, typically displayed at the top of the page, These should be relevant to the page, as they provide structure to the article and context to Google and the user.
2. Create content around the keywords. Tools like Answer The Public will provide you with some ideas of questions/topics asked around important keywords. Make a blog post out of those! Make sure you have a title for it that includes those keywords, and is easily understandable. Internal linking is also an important factor in pages ranking well. Link important pages (these are usually the pages that are most linked to on your site, such as those included in your main navigation), to those that you want to rank well. Passing link equity between these pages signals to Google that these pages are worth showing to the user.
For more information on keyword research and implementation, be sure to read through The Keyword Research Master Guide from Moz.
Scenario 2: Your rankings have dropped
You’ve noticed that your website has dropped from the search results for a few key terms, however, you’re unsure of the reason. To be honest, this is a bit of a black hole as there could be numerous reasons. If you’d like to read further into this issue, a few articles I recommend are Tom Capper’s article “Organic traffic down YoY? It’s not what you think…”, as well as “Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday”. However, to keep things simple, I’ll detail a few options that can be checked and are fundamental to rankings.
How to identify this issue:
Spot check → the keywords that you know your website ranks well for suddenly aren’t ranking your site in the same position.
“Average position” in Google Search Console → this metric shows the average position ranking of your website as a whole, as well as having a table that displays various keyword ranks.
Rank trackers → A tool called STAT lets you enter in a list of keywords, which you then “run” to track over a few days. Once it’s finished tracking, you get access to up to date information on how keywords are ranking, for what pages and access to multiple reports surrounding the performance. This is a great tool to see what keywords are dropping in ranks, or increasing.
Ways to fix it:
Check robots.txt and sitemaps → to make sure Google is able to access them, and all pages that are included should be. (This is also included in a tech audit).
Technical SEO audit → will show you any technical issues that might be occurring on the site that have affected rankings. This can be done by running a crawl of your website (could use Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl, for example). Things that can arise are a group of 404 pages, noindex,nofollow directives, incorrect canonical tags, lack of internal linking, etc.
Errors and warnings → Google Search Console displays all the errors and warnings that are occurring on the site. These should be looked into, as they could affect the performance of pages.
Recent changes to your site → Changes such as redirects or rebranding can affect how your site performs in the search results. Depending on the scale of the change, organic performance can be expected to change, but if the pages are optimized and free of technical errors, no long term effect should occur.
Algorithm updates → As ranking algorithms determine how pages are ranked in the search engine result pages (SERPs), algorithm updates change the way your site adheres to their ranking guidelines and, as a result, how your pages rank. Keeping up to date with any algorithm announcements or glitches can help you keep track of your organic performance. Twitter is a good channel to get up-to-date industry news, and you can follow notable figures in the industry like Marie Haynes or Barry Shwartz (to name just a couple) for their commentary. In addition, tools like MozCast (free!) will show you the current level of volatility in the SERPs.
Make sure your key pages are being crawled and indexed → use the “Coverage” report in Google Search Console to check what pages are being indexed and what pages have warnings. You can also do a manual check on Google, by typing into the URL bar: site:yourwebsite.com/web-page-slug operator. No results will show up if your page isn’t indexed.
Scenario 3: Your user experience is poor
User experience has become more important than ever. Regardless of whether your website is ranking first for all important keywords (we’re talking in an ideal world), it won’t make a difference if users don’t know how to interact with your site once they’ve landed on it. They’ll drop off and go to your competitor. Ensuring you have a well developed user journey and usability on your website is critical to successful SEO.
How to identify this as an issue:
This is something that involves your judgement, as unfortunately there isn’t a tool that will tell you if your site is delivering a poor user experience. Generally, if you get frustrated when using your own site or there are some things that annoy you when you’re navigating other websites, that’s what we call a poor user experience. Some practices that can help highlight if this is an issue are:
Run a survey to ask users about their experience on the site. For example, a common question to include would be, “Did you find what you were looking for?” This short but direct approach can facilitate a relevant and direct response from customers, which can be easily acted on. Some tools you can use for this include Google Forms, SurveyMonkey and WuFoo.
Compare site speed with competitors. This can be done using a tool such as Crux, which can give you an indication of how fast/slow your site is in comparison.
HotJar can show you how people navigate a page. This can highlight what areas they spend more time on, where they’re attracted to click, and what they’re missing.
Google Tag Manager can record click tracking. This is helpful to see if people are acting on your calls to action, such as filling out a form or pressing a certain button.
Ways to fix it:
Optimize your on-page content. This involves updating any content on your website to ensure it’s relevant to your audience and up-to-date. Content should be easily read by someone who has no context to the product/services offered on the website. You can also:
Optimise your content layout. For example, include a numbered list to show your content in a different form, which can help target featured snippets.
Update any old blog posts with new, relevant information and optimize the meta data to include keywords.
Make sure all metadata is relevant to the page and optimized.
Include CTAs. A clear call-to-action should be present on all pages. These could be included in the main navigation, so it appears on all pages, or placed near the top of each page. CTAs give direction and a point of action to the customer, ensuring that if they want to engage further, it’s easy to do so. For example, common CTAs include “Contact us”, “Sign up here”, or “Book Now”.
Is it easy to convert? When you land on the homepage, is the CTA clear? Are there any barriers that might stop a customer to complete that action (such as requiring a customer to login or register before a purchase)? Making the journey easy and clear from entering the site to converting is crucial, as obstacles can easily deter a potential customer.
Summary:
This guide discussed 3 common scenarios that digital marketers experience. Not knowing what keywords to target, or how to go about it can be difficult to navigate. By using the suggested tools and collecting relevant keywords to target your pages will help improve your rankings. The guide by Cyrus Shephard elaborates further on this. Similarly, being able to identify when your rankings have dropped is important to ensure you stay up to date with any issues that could be causing this fluctuation. If you’d like to read more about this, I recommend “SEO Rankings Drop: A Step-By-Step Guide to Recovery”. Lastly, serving a good user experience has become an important element in digital marketing. If you want to expand your knowledge on this, Rand Fishkin has more to share on this area. Hope this article was helpful and can provide some direction of areas that you can check when you’re faced with an issue and don’t know where to start!
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Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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Text
Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking
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Text
Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
0 notes
Text
Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday
Posted by KameronJenkins
Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?
This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.
Was it a major ranking drop?: No
The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.
We're going to take this path first. It was minor.
Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?
That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.
So if no, I would actually say wait.
Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.
If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.
Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes
The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:
Was there a rank tracking issue?
Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.
I. The wrong domain or URL.
That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.
II. Glitches.
So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.
III. Manually check rankings.
One way I would do that is...
Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.
So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.
Problems in Google Search Console?
So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...
I. Manual actions.
If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...
Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.
But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.
II. Indexation issues.
Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.
Algorithm updates
Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.
For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"
If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.
Site updates
What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.
Other factors that can impact rankings
A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."
Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...
I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.
There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.
II. Content cutting.
Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."
When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.
III. Valuable backlinks lost.
Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.
IV. Accidental no index.
Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.
SERP landscape
So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.
What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:
What are these pages doing?
How many backlinks do they have?
How much content do they have?
Do they load fast?
What's the experience?
Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.
I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.
Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
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