HOW!??! Homepage Ranking Dropped Completely out of Top 100 on Google....
-
So I'm competing for a very competitive keyword, and I've been on the bottom of page 2 for a while now, ranking for my homepage, which is very content rich and has GREAT links pointing to it.
Out of nowhere, last week I dropped completely out of the top 100 or so, yet one of my article posts now ranks on page 6 or so for the same keyword.
I have great authoritative links, my on-page is spot on, all of my articles are super super high quality, I don't understand how my homepage, which has ranked for the main keyword for months on page 2, can just completely drop out of the top 100 or so....
Can anyone help provide some insight?
-
This is normal. First you need to evaluate this guide: http://www.elite-strategies.com/flavors-types-google-penalties/ and see what kind of penalty you have. Then you need to get all data from Analytics, Search Console both Links and Analytics there.
And here is huge analysis...
- You need to check timeframe of your sudden drop. Are there some turbulence in SERP? New algo released? Anything weird in your own castle (server, CMS, hosting provider, etc)? If there is something - fix it. Also read about algos/turbulences in industry news sites.
- Check for messages in SearchConsole about "Manual Actions" and fix them if it's any.
- Check for sudden change of your links and create linking profile. If there are new and weird links from spammy sources - disavow them ASAP. If there is overoptimization for keywords - change anchor or disavow. This can be something Penguin algo related.
- Check for sudden change of your site - thin content, aggregated content, duplicate, irrevelant, etc. Check also user signals - low CTR, high bounce rate, low time on site and low % of returning users. Also check bad UI - design, navigation, mobile redirects, site speed, ads. Check for low trustworthiness - in Google Raters Handbook that was recently released. This can be - providing contact information, ToS, PP, etc. And last - overoptimization. This can be something to Panda algo related.
- Check for other algorithms - like TopHeavy aka Page Layout Algorithms that may affect your site.
So after you know what can be your drop related then check and recheck. Isn't first nor last time when you can think about Panda but in reality was Penguin or vice versa. This can save you few months. After you're 100% sure what was then try to make changes to escape from algo penalty.
Same happens to me almost year and half. We're running brand new site and faced sandbox algo. But we make few links more than we should and from low quality sites. So site was shown in SERP for month in first or second page and then suddenly drop to 10 page. Our organic traffic was fell to 1/10 of before almost overnight. But we make new traffic sources - social media and referral traffic so we could live without organic. We change links, make diversify linking profile changing links, anchors or even both. We also delete some links. But nothing happen in SERP position. Then i use disavow tool and 2 weeks ago there was algo refresh (Penguin). Almost overnight search traffic jump more than 10x and recovering previous positions and getting new and ever better positions. Today - this site make traffic as 10x than after recovering.
The problem is that you need to make changes in site against penalty. And wait for algo refresh. You also need huge patience because some drop can happen anytime, but for recovering you need algo refreshes. And refreshes take months or even years.
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Any more info on potential Google algo update from April 24th/25th?
Apart from an article on Search Engine Roundtable, I haven’t been able to find anything out about the potential algorithm update that happened on Monday / Tuesday of this week. One of our sites (finance niche) saw drops in rankings for bad credit terms on Tuesday, followed by total collapse on Wednesday and Thursday. We had made some changes the previous week to the bad credit section of the site, but the curious thing here is that rankings for bad credit terms all over the site (not just the changed section) disappeared. Has anyone else seen the impact of this change, and are there any working theories on what caused it? I’m even wondering whether a specific change has been made for bad credit terms (i.e. the payday loan update)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thatkinson0 -
Our organic homepage traffic just recently spiked from about a typical under 20 per weekend to about 820 -- what could be causing this?
Website: http://www.myinjuryattorney.com Our homepage typically receives under 20 organic visitors per weekend, but I just checked traffic this morning, and it was at a whopping 821 for just Saturday and Sunday. It's already at 212 this morning. I'm heavily assuming this is fake traffic as there were about 818 drop offs after visiting the homepage, an 84.41% bounce rate, and an average session duration of 5 seconds. Our typical metrics -- last weekend for example, were: 13 visitors to the homepage, 38% bounce, and an average session duration of 1 minute 26 seconds. Does anyone know who or what could be causing this? Could it be a competitor using negative SEO of some sort? Thank you in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marketingdepartment.ch1 -
How to remove this type of external link from Google
Hello, My website has been hacked few days Before, But after resolved it It is generating bad links, So i am Dis-vowing it , But as it is generating links like this,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | innovativekrishna1
http://domain.com/a></p><h1>DIXCEL HS-typeスリットディ
i am Not able to disavow it As it generating Spacing between. So my question is : Is there any Way to remove this Type of link from google???
If any body know Please Let me know, I need Do remove this As soon as possible,
please Help, Thank you0 -
Please Please Please help (not ranking any more)..
my website is: www.tcclinic.com it was a static website which was ranking well. total about 400 pages. I also had my blog hosted on another domain (www.shopify.com) about 800 pages. I was told if I bring the blog to my domain, then I will have more content on my site and will rank even better, and also was advised to switch to WordPress. so about two weeks ago I did the following changes: I moved the site and blogs to my domain (tcclinic.com). and switch to WordPress. total of 1200 pages Since it was changing to WordPress all the URLs was changed and named differently. I did 301 redirect for all the pages. all the URLs now contains "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" which is the name of my clinic example: www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-liposuction-surgery/ www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-tummy-tuck/ most of my pages are indexed by google now BUT Now as the result I am not ranking anywhere in first 5 to 6 pages. I am not sure what is happening. have I been hit by a penguin, panda or any other black and white animal ? if this is the case how do I know this happened. Haveing "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" in all the URLs is considered as keyword stuffing ? moving 800 pages of blog to my domain caused it ? (blogs are removed from shopify.com) Is it just the matter of time to come back to the first page? Please let me know what you think.... Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Google 'most successful online businesses'
how come this guy has all but 1 of the top ten results? (UK results - I'm guessing same in USA?) - with thin content on a spammed keyword on multi-sub domains? How can we 'white hat' guys compete if stuff like this is winning?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheInternetWorks0 -
Does Google Penalize for Managing multiple Google Places from the same IP Address? Can you manage from same google account or separate? Or does it matter since it's created from the same IP?
I manage a number of client's Google Places from the same IP and heard this is not a good thing. Are there Do's and Don'ts when managing multiple Google Places? Create separate google accounts for each or can you use the same account?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Souk0