Dramatic decline in rankings
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Hi
I'm in need of some advice, one of our clients has had a very sudden and dramatic decline in rankings. On the week commencing 20th Jan, 23 of our keywords declined from pages 1, 2 and 3 of Google out of the top 50. We haven't been carrying out any bad practice SEO, just some on page optimisation so that we achieve A grades with the Moz tool. We have also built 4-5 links in the past 3 months with quality and relevant sites such as biz crowd and industry relevant blogs so I don't see why this would be a problem.
I noticed on the Moz Cast that there was some increased algorithm activity on 23rd and 26th Jan which would correlate with this decline in rankings, but our other SEO clients seem to be unaffected - I'd be interested to see if anyone else has been affected by this?
I welcome any advice or further insight on this.
Thanks in advance.
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Hey,
It will be very unfair to advise without analyzing website in terms of On Page and Back-links.
Just a favor, similar issue happened with one of our USA based client last week. Complete collapse in rankings suddenly but rankings got backed within 2 days. That was mysterious. I wish the same for your client!
Still, without analysis, we can't identify issues! There could be one or more reasons
- Some Sort of Robot
- Back-links Issues (Anchors, Diversity, Quality)
or others.
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Thanks for that James, I've checked WMT and we have no manual penalty notices.
I'll definitely carry out an link audit, thanks for those resources.
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Firstly - check in Google Webmaster Tools to see if you have got a manual penalty.
Secondly make sure you haven't done anything silly like blocking search engines on robots.txt or response headers.
Thirdly I would then do a full link audit of your site - use OSE, Ahrefs, Majestic and WMT. Go through the links and ask yourself if they were honestly and naturally placed, and if you think Google could have an issue with them - and if so try and get them removed.
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