Massive Drop in Rankings
-
Hello,
My site (www.reynoldsdesignstudio.com) has recently dropped off the map (50+ places) for almost every phrase I was ranking between 3 and 6 on the first page. My main phrases on google were "web design rochester mn", "web development rochester mn"
I have been setting up a new web server but have not pointed this domain at that server yet so it shouldn't be anything related there. I also have not updated the site in a couple years (I know that's bad), so it doesn't appear to be a hacking issue either.
I was 'hacked' a few years back where I gained a TON of crappy links from China and what-not but it never appeared to affect anything. I'm not sure if that is what is causing the recent drop in rankings.
If anyone has any ideas on what could have caused the issue that would be great. According to my GA traffic I had a spike earlier in the month and then it has steadily dropped off. This is consistent with my actual page rankings.
Thanks
-
Hi everyone,
I'm not sure how to mark a answer as good but all of these were helpful. I found out that I had a ton of garbage links coming from overseas. I'm not sure how this happened but it looks like it is something the search engines should take into consideration. Especially since they are linking to my site for terms that make no sense for it. You'd think with the infinite wisdom of google they could understand that these links are spam or someone trying to maliciously hurt your site.
I'm not sure if others have had this problem but how do you stop robots from putting links with anchor text like I have onto blogs? This appears to be what the issue is.
-
Also, how is your anchor text profile for each keyword you dropped traffic or ranking? I found that unreal anchor texts with the addition of some spammy links can be really harmful with penguin updates. I used this anti penguin resource in conjunction with unique content creation, social signals, and are seeing some good results.
Best Regards, and best of luck!
-
Thanks everyone. I'm going through the links and adding them to the disavow tool. I wish the search engines would just ignore anything related to cialis, viagra or anything else like that. None of those links are ever useful.
-
Hi Eric,
A quick look in Majestic SEO shows nearly 34,895 external backlinks from 260 linking root domains with large numbers of links being added during March and April.
As mentioned by Bradley and Chris, there is a lot of suspect anchor text (including cialis, adipex, tramadol etc) in there and many of the referring sites are not places would really want to be getting your links from regardless of the anchors.
It seems your site has attracted some unwanted attention which has dramatically lowered Google's trust. While the obvious conclusion is that Penguin might be responsible, it is clear from the screenshot you provided that the dropoff actually happened around 5/6 May (Dr Pete has talked about "something" happening with the algorithm around 5 May and that would seem to correlate with your problems). Of course, it is possible that this was a test rollout of Penguin and your site was captured as a result, or it may be something completely different (which Google has given no information about).
Either way, it is easy to see that the linking behavior is harming your site's trustworthiness and unfortunately, this is likely to also affect your visibility in Bing and other Search engines as well.
Dealing with the backlink problem is the most critical place to start ... site updates will come later I'm afraid.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
As Chris stated above, it does look like a Google Penguin hit.
First plan of action would be to log into Google Webmaster Tools and see if you have any notifications from Google regarding manual penalties. If so, take the necessary steps to resolve these issues.
Second, it does look like you have some really spammy links coming in from spammy sources. I ran an OpenSiteExplorer report on your page and I see the same "cialis" links that Chris alluded to above. You may want to look at disavowing links like these to make your inbound link profile look more organic.
And finally - update your site! If you had somehow managed to make it through Penguin 2.0, you would have eventually lost your rankings anyways because other sites will be coming in and taking advantage of absence.
Hope this helps!
-
If the drop coincides with May 22, you were probably hit by the Google roll out of "Penguin 2.0" Supposed to be much tougher on spammy links.
I am in a similar situation although for some keywords, I have just dropped a few slots. I am pretty new to this so I am sure you will get an answer from one of the very helpful experts here, but you might want to take a look at you link profile using OSE. It seems you have quite a few "cialis" links and that can't be good. Also see if you have gotten any warnings in GWMT. If you did, then it is what they call a "manual" action meaning a human at Google assessed a penalty. There is a process for reconsideration if this is the case. It could however just be the algorithm change.
Either way you should seriously look at getting rid of those links. I will be interested in the community responses here.
Best of luck, I know it is a bad feeling!
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
-
Is the MOZ Community Ranking broken?
I have been busy and away from MOZ for a while, but over the years I have been an active member of the community. I have over 2000 Moz points and usually if you haven't been on in the specified time period you become unranked, however this usually updates in 24 hours of logging back in. I have been active again since Sunday and I am still unranked yet I have gained several more points answering a couple of questions. My question is - have I missed something and the system has changed (not according to the top users table) or is the system broken?
Moz Pro | | Matt-Williamson0 -
Is Rank Tracker accurate?
Rank Tracker tells me my page is #3 on Google (US) for a keyword phrase When I check Google.com myself, I see my page is #6 Am I missing something here?
Moz Pro | | brianflannery0 -
Ranking keyword ecommerce product
Hi guys, I run an ecommerce store footdistrict.com. We sell sneakers. My question relates to the name of some of my products and how to rank for them. This concerns to the shoes from New Balance The name of this products follows this format: New Balance XXNumberXXX . But actually I have realized I am ranking for New Balance XXNumber XXX . Note the space between the number and the last 3 characters. All my titles, h1, keywords follow this format. Example: New Balance WL574 RUP vs New Balance WL574RUP My questions are: 1. How would you determine which keyword to rank for: New Balance XXNumberXXX or New Balance XXNumber XXX? I have thought of using analytics data to see the pattern of the users search or maybe the difficulty of the keyword? I am receiving a decent amount of traffic for New Balance XXNumber XXX but I wonder if it'd be higher ranking for New Balance XXNumberXXX 2. Does the algorithmn take into account this space? According to the On page Grader, I have an A for New Balance XXNumber XXX and a F for New Balance XXNumber XXX but I assume the engine doesn't work this way 3. What would you do? Thanks very much Kind regards
Moz Pro | | footd0 -
What is the easiest way to track historical ranking across keywords?
I could not find a way to look at past data dynamically via the SEOmoz interface which would be an amazing feature. For example, people able to change the time period like in Google Analytics to see past results. Has someone developed an excel template to keep track of this data historically if this cannot be done within SEOmoz itself?
Moz Pro | | BlueLinkERP0 -
SEOmoz Rank tracking
I think this tool is a bit off : ) This morning I checked my ranking for a keyword and every time I recheck it I see my results in a different place. I checked on word 5 times and got three different results. Is Google brocken or is the tracker doing its own thing? This is not the first time I am seeing this issue only today its really acting up. IMHO I think it would be best if the tool just says out of order 🙂 rather than 3, 10, 6 for one keyword phrase within ten minutes...
Moz Pro | | SEODinosaur0 -
Why do some of my sites stop showing up as ranking on SEO Moz (listed as not in top 50) when in google ranks they are top five?
Okay - so i have several campaigns. And of these campaigns, about four or five of them no longer show up as ranking after several weekly crawls by SEOMoz... Not sure why the line on the chart just stops when they are ranking in top 5 for google organics am confused by this can you help me do what i need to do so that the seobot can read my pages and save me time on checking where i rank - thanks Creative Guy
Moz Pro | | creativeguy0 -
Rankings failure?
The rankings for all our keywords, and for our competitors as well as us, according to SEO moz have all but completely dropped off the radar. For the vast majority of the keywords, both us and our competitors are showing as not even in the Top 50, despite previously being top 20, first page and top 3 for a large number of them. What's happened? Would this be due to Google, or has some sort of error occurred seoMoz's end? The rankings have dropped so badly for all four websites I can't believe for a second they're real. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | JetBookMike0 -
How to see rankings for a group of keywords over time?
I have around 1200 keywords in an seomoz campaign, chopped into various groups using labels. I am interested in tracking how keywords perform over time, especially groups of keywords. As far as I can tell, in the seomoz tools I can only see historical performance for a single keyword at a time. Is there a way to get a historical performance graph of more than one keyword at once? We often run optimizations for sets of words, so it seems like you would have better stats looking at groups of words vs picking one at a time. Is there a way to export historical data for more than keyword at a time? (So I could graph and analyze this sort of thing myself) Does anyone have other suggestions for tracking rankings in this way? Thanks for any help!
Moz Pro | | mlenz0