Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
-
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice.
My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links).
Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1.
Here are some more details:
- I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected.
- The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time.
- site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages
- Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. - I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. - Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+
- No malware on website
- I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones).
- I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty.
It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!?
I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com.
What do you think about it and what shall I do?
Thank you so much for any help!
-
Sorry Johannes I think I confused matters... I didn't mean there is spammy content now, I mean the spammy content that you removed. I'll be cursed for saying it but it's quite possible some of that spammy stuff was working if there were exact matches in there then which aren't now. Google isn't perfect yet so unfortunately some spam does still work (for now) though it will likely hold risks too. My suggestion with that was to look at the spam that was removed and figure out how to incorporate some of it back into the site in a non-spammy way.
With regards to the link numbers, yes if it was me I think I'd remove at least some of those footer links too.
My mistake with the rel canonical, I didn't spot it but just noticed it was a bit lower down.
The duplication could well be the issue, but if that's the case and the dupe is no longer there then it should sort itself out pretty quickly.
-
Thank you for your response Kathy!
You got a good point with the tourist destination vs. ac company. Even though I was aware of it I decided to do such a mix because I did not know how to target 9 locations with the same keywords and at least some unique content. Actually the bounce rate on the city pages was around page average. But I will work more on the content. Thx!
@references: Good Advise! But which references did you mean on the Sarasota page? Siesta Key Beach is in Sarasota (if you meant that one).
But I still think the city pages might not the reason for the sudden drop yesterday night.
Do you think brightsidewg.com was maybe the issue? If so shall I submit the website for reconsideration and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace (brightsidewg.com)?
-
I appreciate your honest response Steve!
@many links: I will get rid of some links for instance the repeated link to the city pages - correct or? Do you think I should also remove some links in the footer?
@spammy content: Did you think that all content was spammy or certain content (e.g. city pages, homepage, recent posts etc.)? Believe me, it was much much worse before. I am trying to improve...
@rel="canonical": Currently a WordPress plugin already adds the rel="canoncial" tags to the header (). Or do you mean I should have a common canonical tag for all the city pages? But then they would not rank any longer separately.
The weird part is that I didn't really change these things in the last few days, google had these pages in its index and they were ranking pretty okay.
So you don't think that the slightly older copy of the website on brightsidewg.com was the main issue? Because brightsidewg.com started to show up roughly (- ~10 ranks) were kobiecomplete.com was showing up.
Thank you so much!
-
Not much value on your city pages. Really, makes you wonder if you are selling a tourist destination or an ac company. The two just don't mesh to me.
I would really work at the content on the city pages.
http://kobiecomplete.com/air-conditioning-service-area/ac-repair-sarasota/
Also you might consider using references from the city you are targeting on the city page. Keep it super targeted. This one has a reference from different city.
-
Did you always have as many links going out of each page? There's quite a few... plus that spammy content, whilst I hate to say it, might have provided the longtail exact matches you were ranking for. Maybe get those keywords back in to their pages in a non-spammy way?
There's no rel="canonical" tags which would help if it is down to dupe issues.
Also, you're cannibalising a lot with the keywords... not just content and links but for a quick demo look at your page titles, the same keywords cropping up in a few of them.
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
-
Google Bot is seeing the desktop version in cache for Mobile website too.
Hi, I have an e-commerce website that is dynamic(not responsive) in nature. when i check the cached version of mobile website it shows the desktop version in cache. Will it create any problem . How can i tell google bot to see my mobile cached version instead of desktop one.
Technical SEO | | dhananjay.kumar10 -
Moz/Google does not recognize text on Wix website
My client's website was built on Wix and despite having substantial content on web pages, Moz is claiming that there is very little-to-no content: Sufficient Characters/Words in Content. Does anyone know how to fix this issue? I've run a word count tool and it gives the same results. Website: pesclinical.com
Technical SEO | | Perfect-Pixel1 -
Will Google Also Penalize Desktop Rankings If Your Site is Not Mobile Friendly?
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I was unable to find it. For desktop organic rankings: Will Google take into consideration mobile-readiness as a ranking factor? Thanks in advance for any reply, Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
Eric Darby1 -
Google index graph duration in Google Webmaster Tools
Hello guys, I wonder, my sites are currently being indexed every 7 days, exactly. At Index Status page in GWT. However, this new site gets updated almost everyday, how can I ask google to index faster and more frequently/almost daily? Is it about SItemap.xml frequency ? I changed it today to Daily. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mdmoz0 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
Ranking Drop and Google Disavow Requests
My website, www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk has fallen dramatically for the top industry search terms (nile cruise, nile cruises) over the last 12 months from previous page one rankings to page three which has very badly affected us financially. I found, using Linkdetox, that we had thousands of back-links for non-related anchor-text, mainly porn terms, viagra, etc. I have submitted a Disavow file and request about a week ago and wondered firstly if the enormous amount of these links would have helped cause the drop to page three and secondly if the Disavow request will eventually help the website return to better rankings? Thanks,Colin
Technical SEO | | GratefulFred0 -
Why did I drop ranking after setting up perm redirect, sitemap, and Google places??
I have a site that was ranking in the top two for my search terms. We had a funky url (it contained hyphens) and was advised to change it for SEO, so I setup a perm redirect through my web host (before it was a temporary one I think) At the same time I installed a sitemap plugin for Wordpress and also registered for a Google Places account. I can't remember the exact order I did this -- does it matter? Anyway, within a couple days of doing the above, my ranking dropped to the bottom of the second page. I would like to fix this, but I'm not sure. I need help please!
Technical SEO | | fsvatousek0 -
Malware ranking drops
Hi, One of our sites got hit with malware in November. We cleaned it up and sent a reconsideration request and no malware warnings are in WMT anymore. We still haven't seen an improvement in rankings even though people say it can take up to 90days? Organic traffic is down 40% and still dropping. Any advice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0