Huge drop in rankings for specialist life insurance site
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I work with a site who specialise in life insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions - http://goo.gl/Drwre6. The site has ranked really well historically, but was hit hard on 16th June when we saw an almost 100% drop in rankings overnight.
We picked up on quite a few issues straight away and rectified these. A list of steps we've taken so far are below:
- removed CSS & JS files from robots.txt
- changed hosting provider back, as it had recently been moved somewhere new
- updated copy on main landing pages to remove small amounts that were duplicated
- requested removal of some suspicious looking backlinks and submitted a disavow
- found and removed a test site that was live and indexable
- found an external site that had scraped copy from our site - requested removal (this site is no longer live)
- cleaned up any 404 and ensured all redirects are working correctly
- updated the diabetes page to include more valuable info - including linking out to authority sites
After taking all these steps, we have still seen no improvement. It could be that Google just hasn't yet re-crawled the site to take the changes into account...?
We're aware of one other site in our industry that has noticed a drop in rankings in the last couple of months, but a number of our competitors are still ranking well for our target terms.
We wonder if the site was caught up in the Payday Loans update, as the timings almost line up. Other sites with spammy medical content seem to have been hit, so we wonder if the "medical" type content on our site could have been penalised? Incredibly frustrating if so, as it's a valid, genuine service being offered!
Really at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, so any help would be hugely appreciated!
Katie
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Also make sure that no one in WMT has checked the box to remove the site from Google's index. Doing so will usually result in a warning, so it's unlikely you wouldn't have seen it. The only thing you mentioned that I'd look into more would be the hosting change, but that impact should have been more or less immediate.
Are you receiving any organic traffic from Google? A huge drop could mean a lot of things, but 0 traffic usually means a technical issue is to blame. If you've just lost most of your traffic, it's possible that it's a penalty or algorithm adjustment of some sort. There are a few directory links that I'd be concerned about, and I'd disavow any questionable sites with sitewide links (I saw at least one). It could also be a Panda or a "Payday" adjustment.
Check the algorithm history and see if it aligns with your drop in traffic:
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Hi Katie,
Sounds like you've ticked off most of the boxes.
May we suggest you consider these as options:
- Check GWT>Change of Address to check no one has redirected the website. We are seeing hackers using this approach more frequently.
- Resend a disavow to GWT. A quick report with CognitiveSEO says the domain still has 51% unnatural links. ahrefs.com confirms the removal of links which is a good sign.
The domain doesn't seem to be indexed often. Using the 'tbs' query, you'll notice within the last 30 days (give or take 3/5 days) Google says it only indexed 3 pages. Searching by hour, 24 hours and week produce no results. Do the server stats confirm the reduction of visits from Google?
A Copyscape batch analysis says 8 pages contain large amounts of content that exists on 30 over websites. Five of these are seemingly important landing pages whereas the rest are news pages or quote form.
Don't want to teach you how to suck eggs, however while you have been trying to put out the fire, has proactive outreach been applied too?
Thanks,
Phil -
How about a sampling of some of the terms you used to rank highly for and now are not?
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Hi Ruben
Thanks for your reply.
Google have cached the majority of main pages since we made the changes.. but perhaps if they haven't crawled the site very deeply, they won't have picked up some of the site wide changes that we've made. Eg. in WMT, they haven't yet picked up that some of the bad links are no longer live, and these were taken down a few weeks ago now..
Katie
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It could be that Google just hasn't yet re-crawled the site to take the changes into account...?
Do you know how to check that? If not, type your company into google. Then, in the SERPs, you'll see your company's site. At the far right of the url for your site, you'll see a little arrow. Click the arrow. There will be a chose of "cached" or "similar." Select cached and at the top of page, you will see that last time google indexed your site. Then, at least you'll know if the changes haven't worked at all or just haven't been indexed.
Best,
Ruben
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Hi Donna - no notices in WMT.
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Do you have any notices in GWT Katie?
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