Reason for Keyword Rankings Plummet

4 replies
  • SEO
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Since December 15th, rankings on my site www.hospitalcareers.com have steadily been in decline and I cannot pinpoint the issue for the life of me.

We saw a 40% traffic drop over night around mid December, and its been going up and down since, but mostly further down. I've checked for manual webspam actions, and there are none.

I've looked into algorithm updates and none seem to make sense that would cause this. The most recent updates with mobile-first and intrusive interstitials don't make much sense as we feature the exact same content on mobile as on desktop, and we have nothing blocking content.

However, we do have a popup that appears when you click the "Apply" button on any job if you are not logged in. Could this popup be the source of our declining rankings? Any advice would be great.

Thanks!

FYI I use SEMrush and Majestic for SEO analysis.

Thanks in advance!
#keyword #plummet #rankings #reason
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Without a lot more information, it is difficult to say what is going on.

    When you say a 40% traffic drop, are we talking hundreds of visitors, thousands, more?

    Did you see specific rankings drop? Are you tracking any rankings?

    Did specific pages lose traffic? If you had one page bringing in a large percentage of the traffic, and that page lost just a few spots in rankings, that could account for a loss like that.

    Did you recently change anything on the site? Design, layout, etc.?

    Also, to answer your question, the popup on the apply button is not the kind of thing Google was targeting. They were going after ads when you first arrive to a site from the search engine.
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    • Profile picture of the author Chris Owens
      Also, we lost several thousand keyword rankings and those that were among our highest lost several spots on average.

      This was not the result of losing 1 page that held rank 1 that was pulling in 40% of our traffic. We were pulling in ~22,000 organic a month but now around down to around ~12,000 per month.

      The only change that had been made before waking up one morning to finding the rankings drop was redirecting old domains to the current one. We recently removed those redirects again and haven't seen a reversal, so we aren't sure exactly what the cause was.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    I've noticed one of your pages has some funky stuff going on.
    • hxxps://www.hospitalcareers.com/j/north-dakota-hospital-jobs

    That page includes an HTML table, the content shows on the Google SERP description but no content shows on the Google cache (text version). The live webpage (URL above) right now shows no content on the HTML table source code. The page literally has no content.

    I didn't dig too deep to see what's going on but I did notice it takes a little while for your HTML table to populate data. Maybe an isolated case but something that should be looked into.

    Are you pulling data/content from a 3rd party API?






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