Whats happened to my rankings
-
Hey everyone, I hope someone might be able to help me figure out what has gone wrong here.
I have a website which was slowly growing in rankings. The domain used was a .net
However, It is a UK based business so I shifted this to a .co.uk domain and then followed googles advice in webmaster tools for moving address. ie, copy site, verify in GWMT and then 301 the old site.
Now the .net had 71 indexed pages out of 73. But after 2 months .co.uk only has 41 out of 73 indexed.
At the end of last week I did change the theme on my website although the content / urls have all remained the same. I have gone to check my rankings this morning and the site has totally bombed. Even the own brand name does not ranking in top 10 pages.
I have not done an major link building at all yet for the site and any links that are there are all high quality from industry related authority sites.
Looking at GWMT the latest links all look ok, nothing spammy but one thing I did notice is that it shows the .net domain providing 193 links via 301and also individually a great deal of the links that point to .net but have shown in .co.uk
What I would like to know if have I actually done something wrong? Should I just kill the 301 (i am loathed to do this as a few of the links to this took me a long time to get), after spending a great deal of money developing my site and just starting to see some nice progress in the natural rankings and google has gone and pulled the carpet from under me. I would understand if I was doing something wrong but I have made strenuous efforts to ensure the linking on this site is whiter that white.
Oh, I have had no warnings in my messages at all.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
-
After spending a great deal of time on the webmaster tools forums I have seen that a fair few people have exactly the same type of problem as me. I cant afford to take risks etc with it so just easier to delete the original domain, put in a reconsideration request and start again.
-
When you are redirecting a website, there will be some kind of loss and gain kinda things. But losing ranking completely is a bit unnerving. However, we need to check your website first, we can provide any feedback.
-
Your rankings MAY come back, but it is a big change in googles eyes, even though it's not. The age of your new domain will keep your rankings down, as will the non direct links to your new site.
Google can and most probably will pull the carpet from under you not matter what you do, so your best bet is to NOT rely on google.
I hope your rankings return quickly, but don't get your hopes up.
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
-
Rankings Dropped to Nothing
We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next. Site: https://indoorgardening.com Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago. 1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability. 2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase. 3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. 4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. 5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary. 6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary. Results:
Technical SEO | | Jbyron
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google. At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. -John0 -
Added Schema and Rankings Went Down
Hello - We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
Technical SEO | | Erin_IAN0 -
Not ranking - Scarped content
Hi, I have a problem with a website, that never compe up with before. The website is: https://www.enallaktikidrasi.com It has a bunch of excellent articles, good enough on-page SEO and a medium backlink profile. However, it is ranking just for very very few keywords. The major problem is that there are original articles that searched by their title won't appear in top100 results but they will appear in other websites that scapre them (even if they give a backlink to our original article!) Also, the website has good rankings in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google. There are keywords ranking in #1 in Bing but nowhere in top10 pages in Google.... I am guessing for 3 issues: 1. Majestic shows a very low trust score (just 13). However, the website has not got any kind of penalty in the last 3 years. 2. There are many scarpers. The odd is that scarpers with no real value outrank our content. (Scarpers with almost zero backlink profile) 3. We ran Sucuri on website as there were a large bots attack. Is there a correlation between it bots attack and Google results? (but why not in Bing and Yahoo too?) It seems like Google underestimates the website when indexing websites for some reason. Moreover, some of the articles are really the best around but the keywords they are targeted are not either within the 30 first pages... Any help?? Thanks..
Technical SEO | | alex33andros0 -
Ranking going down and down and disappears.
I asked a question a few weeks ago about a main keyword that we are targeting that is fluctuating up and down. The keyword is "trash bags" and that is what my company sells. All different colors, thicknesses and sizes. This isn't just a random keyword we are trying to optimize for, this is our business. Before I started optimizing the website for "trash bags" we used the term "garbage bags", now that we started we have been off the charts and on the charts, but we have never regained rankings. The trend finally looked like it was going upwards... but now I see I dropped off of google again. Is this normal? Should I be worried that google is penalizing me for this keyword (There is many links that have trash bags in the anchor text - but we do sell that!)? Here is a screenshot of our ranking history for trash bags: https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/no01
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd1 -
Massive Rank Fluctuation in Bing/Yahoo
About two months ago we dealt with some issues that were causing weak rankings in Bing and Yahoo! since then, we've seen rankings rise and plummet dramatically with no changes to the site. On Bing and Yahoo! we've gone from 1st page to less than 50th and back again THREE times. This happens across all keywords, even branded ones that are an exact-match for the domain. Google rankings have continued to rise steadily. We benefited greatly from Penguin, which tanked a number of competitors. Bing webmaster tools aren't showing any server or other kinds of errors during the rank drops. Has anyone every experienced this before?
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0 -
Whats the quickest way of diagnosing a canonical problem
Salut from from positivley tropical 10 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 Ok here goes... on this site http://www.cedarcourthotels.co.uk/ there is a canonical problem but I'm interested to know if my method of spotting a canonical problem is the most efficient. In the case of Cedar Court I started with http://www.cedarcourthotels.co.uk/ then i entered this https://www.cedarcourthotels.co.uk/ and noted they were pointing to the same home page. My question is there a quicker way of diagnosing a canonical problem or is it a case of knowcking out w's and adding s etc. Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Does a CDN affect search rankings?
I feel kind of stupid asking this, but if i use one it would speed things up quite a bit. It is for a ecommerce website, any guidance on this would be awesome!
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0 -
What Parts Of Domain Registration Change Affect Rank
Could changing one's physical address for a domain or going from public to private registration have a negative affect on rank? Other factors? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 945011