Rankings dropped - Why?

[cottamg]

At the end of November a client site dropped significantly in the rankings.

The drop effected almost all the keyphrases we monitor.

Historically the homepage has always ranked higher than the sub-pages - however now it seems Google is no longer ranking the home page, and instead ranking the sub-pages, just far far lower down.

Any ideas what could cause this?

[cottamg]

Hi Matt & Marie,

Many thanks for your comments.

I think it is Google only. Having not identified any other likely cause, I think that the Panda update on the 21st of November is the likely culprit, the timing is definitely correct.

Thanks again,

Gary.

[MarieHaynes]

Can you tell if the drop happened on a specific date?  November 21 was a Panda update.

I did a traffic drop report for one site that had an unexplainable drop on November 27.  I could have sworn it was a Panda related issue, but Google has not announced a Panda refresh on that date.

It could be totally unrelated to an algo change though.  I have an embarrassing story to share.  Just last week the same thing happened for one of my domains.  The home page was nowhere to be seen and inner pages were ranking.  It turned out that my domain name had expired.  (Long story...there was an issue with email notifications.)  The inner pages were still ranking because they were in the cache and not often visited by Google.

Also look for things like accidental noindexing, canonical tag issues, malware, etc.

[Horizon]

Hi Gary,

Could be any number of things. Can you tell me what sort of work you are doing on the client's website, especially regarding linkbuilding? Do you have access to the client's webmast tools? Is there a notifcation of a penalty within there? Also, has the drop in rankings only occurred on Google, or have they dropped off of Bing and Yahoo results as well?

If you can give a bit more info, I'm sure a lot of people will be able to help

Matt