HELP: What happened to my rankings? No warning from google how to know if i was penalised?

[edward-may]

Hi Guys

I have just completely a site re-design, I have 3 top level domains.

I have no idea whats causing the drop in ranking.  I have changed the title tags and meta tags to improve them and make them better, as the last ones weren't really doing us justice.  But I see now it has actually dropped our main keyword.  I read somewhere that i had to completed **site search **to check and I don't see our home page showing.  I was ranking for the keyword: "online psychics" for over 4months at #6 and now is not showing anywhere in the top 50 keywords.  I'm also affraid I can not find our other keyword "online psychic readings" which we were ranked #11 seems to have dropped to #44 I have no idea why this would be the case.  Our new home page shows a better user experience and also added more content, unqiue content at that - our last design was content thin so I have no idea why we have dropped so much in rankings.  The site is also new about 6months new.  I have checked WMT and have not received any warnings of any penalties as such, unless it is still coming?

Does anyone have any suggestions here?

Cheers

[edward-may]

WOW thanks again Dirk, your feedback is beyond! Thanks for informing me of these changes and sending me those links!

I will work on getting the above sorted asap with my developer

Cheers for all your help!!!!

Justin

[DirkC]

Forgot to mention: don't forget to change it on all three sites.

The new site looks really nice compared to the old one - and speed seems to have improved. However still some work to do:

• time to first byte takes ages - could be related to the configuration of the server or related to some plugin causing delay.
• ask your programmer to use gzip to compress HTML
• minify your css & js
• optimise your images
• modify your caching (time is too short)

The detailed result from webpage test is here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150503_A2_BZ7/

Also check https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - your score is not too bad but check the improvements that are suggest.

Good luck!

Dirk

[DirkC]

Hi Justin,

Normally everything should return to normal after a few days. You could try to speed up the process a bit by taking your key landing pages from Analytics. Fetch these pages in Webmaster tools (Fetch like Google) - when they are fetched submit them to the index (off course you first have to remove the noindex tag).

It's a quite common mistake - we had a similar case with a test robots.txt which was put in production. I was on holiday at the time and only noticed the error when I returned (3 days after go live). Everything returned to normal within a day.

rgds,

Dirk

[edward-may]

Oh wow hey Dirk, silly me! Yes thank you for that oh how embarrassing.

I had told my developer to remove this last week - seems he hadn't and I didn't bother to check it! After I remove this should all be back to normal again?

[DirkC]

Hi Justin

I fear that you have migrated your test settings to production - you have 196 HTML pages on your site - 115 pages have a content='noindex, follow' name='robots'> in the head section  - this is also the case for your homepage and several other pages that seem important for SEO. Removing the tag will certainly help

Dirk