Drastic rankings drop
-
SOS SEOMozzers
hello all. I woke up this morning to find out our rankings for two main keywords:
1. internet marketing firm
2. marketing firmdropped from being #8 on google to not being invthe top 50.
last week we upgraded the site to HTML5 . We checked the on page via pro tools and everthing seemed fine.
We checked Google analytics ( traffic was beginning to fall) and we checked webmaster tools - ( there were not critical issues etc)
So now i am bewildered as to what possible happened to wipe us of the search.
Please can you help - the site is www.gunshotdigital.com
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me Keri - i really appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me i appreciate it Omarzee
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me and helping Robert. I appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
pl could you tell me who you are talking abut? Thank you.
Also it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me Journey man.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
Vijay
First and most importantly is you have a huge problem with page load times. Huge.
In YSlow you are grading out at a D. I have attached an image as the problems are too numerous to list. Your issue is because on home page you are close to timing out and on others you are not resolving at all. As I ran test, it was taking your Vimeo feed a loooonnnngggg time in the test. Don't know if that is part of problem or not.
Given the issues and the title tags, etc. I don't see how you were ranking that highly. With a page load time of at least 10 seconds, you are not going to rank.You need to add expires headers, need to move java script to the bottom of page, need a CDN, need to get rid of all the cookies, etc.
Even after the site was cached on my machine (new macpro 17 with solid state drive, 16 gigs of sdram, etc) it took over 8 seconds to load. This is the problem.
Keri had a great suggestion with checking in the main browsers for compatibility. I noticed in Chrome the video got to where it was hesitating a lot but not in firefox.
Another thought is since this in on a WP platform, did you by any chance change anything in the coding on the theme? Can't think of other reasons for page load problem and the absence of pages all together. I know that the only url I got to resolve was the home page.
Hope it helps.
-
By the way, it looks like you have an SEO consultant on staff. I just clicked on the gal who talks about SEO at your firm. How about asking her?
-
I'd have to agree with Keri on the feel of where I'm landing when going to the site. I thought it was a commercial for givenchy as well.
It's a beautiful site though. I was considering revamping my personal site to be something like this.
If there's any manual raters who got a hold of it, maybe that's why they de-ranked you if they got the same feel as Keri and I did.
When I do a source check on the meta description, I see:
name="description" content="" />
i.e., nothing. I'm a little surprised you were #8 with this and a title of:
<title></span><span>Gunshot Digital | Gunshot Digital</title>
I looked at your backlinks and it makes sense why you were ranking now. But maybe a bunch of your on page got screwed up from your new site? Take some time going through all of the on page factors and make sure they're all o.k.
I thought the recent change in the algo was about ads showing up towards the top and the stuff above the fold not matching search queries were punishing 1% of the sites. This just seems like a) not matching search intent at first glance and b) on page elements getting screwed up, but I only spent a few minutes looking.
-
Hi Vjay,
You might do a site:gunshotdigital.com in Google. There's a bunch of pages that are indexed and not resolving / timing out. If I go to the blog page, then try to go to About, I get a page not found. I'm having a hard time finding any content on your site when I go in through the main page, and the site is slow to load. Have you crawled the page as Googlebot (via Google Webmaster Tools) to make sure the site is crawlable?
The meta description that Google shows when I do the site: command includes Very Irresistible Givenchy. I don't get the sense that I've landed on a page that has anything to do with an internet marketing firm, I get the sense that I've landed on a movie trailer or something, then I figure out it's a perfume ad.
In the source code I'm seeing some text for the search engines, but I'm not seeing anything as a user. Have you checked your site in a variety of browsers to make sure it acts as expected? Have you put in redirects from the old site? Have you made sure the title tags and meta descriptions are correct? Have you reviewed your robots.txt for the platform you're using?
-
I've noticed a significant drop in some of my sites as well. I think it's because of a recent Google algo update (has happened in the last week to week and a half) and a even more recent data refresh. It's affected a lot of webmasters I know, some positive, more negative.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Migrating Magento site to Shopify Plus without dropping in SERPS
We have been looking at moving our ecommerce store www.pretavoir.co.uk from Magento to Shopify Plus. However, as we rank quite well at present we are interested in hearing experience others may have had making this change and also any advice that you may have... Also, any general comments on Shopify appreciated..
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
Log-in page ranking but not homepage
Our homepage is outranked by log-in page for "primary keyword" in Google search results; for which actually our homepage was optimised. I have gone through the other answers for the same question here. But I couldn't find them related with our website. We are not over optimised. We have link from top navigation menu of blog to our homepage. Does this causing this?
Web Design | | vtmoz1 -
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Can forwarding users from one domain to a different domain damage rank and authority of first domain?
Preliminary Explanation: We launched a new website a couple months back but haven't had much luck in Google taking notice. One of the main attractions to our site is an old flash app that was made nearly a decade ago. As the original developer has long ago moved on and we are unable to figure out how to integrate it with our new site, we've been stuck hosting the flash app on a different domain. As such, users who come to our site and want to use the app must immediately navigate away from our site to this other domain. This has caused our primary domain's bounce rate and average site time to plummet while raising it for the other domain. My question: is this damaging our search rank and page authority with Google for this primary domain/site and counter-acting any other positive SEO changes we can make? How much weight does Google give towards bounce rate/average site time spent by users in its overall calculations for search rank and page authority? Our average site time for this primary domain is resting currently at 50-60 seconds, while for the secondary domain that hosts the old flash app it is 4-5 minutes.
Web Design | | Closetstogo0 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
Does doubling up on domains increase my ranking?
I own two websites. One is older and contains the bulk of my content. The other is a web-based tool that has less written content, but is equally important to my business. For the sake of examples we'll call the older website "oldsite.com" and new website "newsite.com". Would it benefit my old site to direct traffic to the web-based tool using a domain like "newsite.oldsite.com"? What's the best way to integrate the two sites so I am not splitting my traffic?
Web Design | | Travis-W0 -
Wordpress drop down menu issue...
While I am tweaking my current site with getting rid of my footer links, my site will not allow a drop down menu for my service area parent page. It will do a drop down menu for any other tab. Could not find anything in a google search besides just link to parent for drop down... Any ideas?
Web Design | | greenjoe0