Rankings Dropped Dramatically
-
Hi All,
I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why.
We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com.
The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella
However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs.
In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically.
keyword 1
4th Jan position 22
9th Jan position 90
keyword 2
4th jan position 34
9th jan position 89
keyword 3
4th jan position 12
9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others)
We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings.
I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz.
Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment.
Many thanks
Andy
-
Hi Andrew -
If this question has been answer/the issue has been fixed, could you please mark it as Closed?
Thanks!
-
No nothing had changed on the homepage, the only thing we are trying to do is link build to internal pages so directories / social bookmarks would go to the specific page and not just the homepage.
However looking through the old stats before we worked on the site, he regularly had keywords going from page 1 to page 10, then a month or so later he would regain positions.
On the old site he relied on a search results page to generate different keyword positions, so they were not fixed pages. I wonder if this had an impact?
-
Odd that that the home page should disappear but not the other pages! Any ideas why that should have happened?
-
Good news, the rankings have re-appeared. Google decided to remove the homepage listing from its index hence the drop. However the homepage has now returned and listings have gone from outside 100 to positions between 8 - 20!
-
If it's had a complete overhaul then there's lots of things that might have affected the rankings. I'd tell your clients that any change is risky and may cause some disruption.
I don't see that there's been a total collapse of the rankings so the last thing you want your clients to do is panic.
Good luck!
-
Thanks John & Doug, really appreciate your feedback the site has had a complete overhaul and I think I underestimated the jump from .co.uk. The site never had many inbound links except from one website so I didn't think I would lose rankings.
I know the new pages are good as they are ranked well, so I will just boost the link building. But when clients are upset you want to make sure you have covered all bases and you haven't missed something obvious.
Cheers!
-
A few more thoughts - Did anything else happen apart from just the move to the .com domain? Any content changes or periods where the site was unavailable?
Apart from your rankings changing have you seen any other disruption of the SERPS?
I think I'm right in saying that a redirected link passes less link-juice than the original link. How competitive are the keywords your targetting? Will a small change in domain/page authority cause the changes to the rankings you're seeing?
What keywords are you targeting?
What was the reason for the switch to .com. Looks like both domains were registered at the same time and the domain name is pretty specific so I'm guessing that there are no negative signals associated with the .com domain.
I think John has the right idea. If you've ruled out all the obvious causes, I wouldn't get bogged down trying to work out what happened. I'd put the energy into building more links to compensate.
I don't know when this happened, maybe the drop in rankings isn't a long term thing.
-
Did you consolidate many domains into the .com, or just move the domain over completely from .co.uk to .com? In which countries have your rankings dropped? I am guessing UK.
The backlinks you have are not on great websites. Have you tried to get listed in places like the UK's version of the Better Business Bureau? Put in some work doing some guest posting and I bet your rankings will go up.
My guess is that if your rankings have dropped mostly in the UK, that it's the loss of the .co.uk ccTLD, which is definitely not an insurmountable hurdle, just might take a bit more work.
-
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Content-Length: 160 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Location: http://www.TangoHolidaySolutions.com/ Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:46:04 GMT
looks like that is the right response.
-
I believe I have, as webmaster shows all the inbound links to the .com and not the .co.uk. the domain is www.tangoholidaysolutions.com. If you or John notice something stupid please don't be afraid to say!
-
Oh I see now. I honestly thought your site was myclient.co.uk. I see my mistake!
If OSE has picked up the 301, when you type in your old domain it will say something like "That URL redirects to (new url). Would you like to see that URL?"
Also, to spot-check server header responses, I use this tool: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/
-
I haven't even given you the domain name? But if I do want to check the OSE index how would I do this to ensure the 301 re-direct is working for google.
I know it works for the human as if you type in the old domain i.e. co.uk it goes to the .com.
Thanks
Andy
-
Hey Andrew -
From what I'm seeing in the OSE index and in my browser, you moved the content over to your new domain but did not forward your old domain. I know you said that you had a lot of links to your homepage on www.myclient.co.uk, and since you did not 301 this page and older pages, you've lost all your links.
Can you explain why you did not 301 your old domain?
-
I'm guessing that you're not getting the benefit of your inbound links that you had pointing to your old domain.
Have you followed these guidelines from google:
Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help
You say you've redirected to the .com domain. How have you set up this redirection?
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
-
Large amounts of ranking data
Hello all, I am currently conducting some keyword. I need to check a websites rankings for around 1000 keywords. I currently use chrome on a Mac. This presents a problem, because all of the APIs I've seen are for excel on windows. Does anyone have any ideas of how to do this on a Mac & Chrome? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | chris.kent0 -
Database Crash affecting our rankings
Here is one for you. We had a database crash, and was down for an hour and 15 minutes, on Dec 18th. During this time our system automatically sent out a 301 redirect to our product home page. (iboats.com/boat-parts-accessories/dm/) On Dec 24th I noticed a huge ranking drop on a lot of our keywords, and some keywords that were serving up the redirect page from our database crash, in place of its normally ranked page. So my assumption is that Google was crawling our site during the database crash and caching the redirect pages in place of our regularly ranked pages. So when a search query is made that would normally display our ranked page, it is now displaying the redirect page from the crawled cache. And on other keywords where we normally would rank for, Google no longer has that page cached, so it drops it from ranking. My question: Does this assumption sound accurate? If so, I'm assuming over time that our past ranked pages will show up once again after Google recrawls those pages and saves them in their cache. I have several sites that were affected with this: boatcovers.iboats.com boatpropellers.iboats.com iboats.com Thanks in advance for your input
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Why has my keyword dropped and risen so much in only 7 days?
Sorry if this question is really obvious (or unanswerable) but my client asked me for an explanation and as a relative SEO 'noob' I couldn't really answer them. The client's site http://www.solentlep.org.uk/ dropped 29 places for the keyword LEP last week (all the other keywords had small rises and falls) and then this week has jumped back up the same 29 places. I made no changes to the site in the 7 period (as I hadn't worked out what to change) and although everything is fine now I'd still like to let the client know what caused the blip, or is it one of those things that 'nobody knows'.
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Ranking Internationally
Whats the best URL strategy to rank for one term in different countries? We currently rank well in Australia, but are tackling many countries over the next few months. The page I am ranking is http://www.spendbitcoins.com/buy for the term 'buy bitcoins' or 'buy bitcoins in Australia' (replace Australia with each specific country, i.e. New Zealand, Japan, etc.) These are the strategies I have come up with, is one of these good or is there a different better way? Use country specific TLDs, pulling the content from the same site w/ translations Use country specific TLDs and create separate sites and create completely original content Use country specific TLDs, forwarding to the primary domain use a subdomain from the same site modify the page link to be something like spendbitcoins.com/buy/new-zealand Don't worry about any of this and just get links from sites with the proper TLD
Technical SEO | | jaychristopher0 -
My Website Ranking is terribly drop
So sorry I really need your all help 😞 I'm really frustrated and stressed. For my website http://www.cma-academy.edu.sg , it has been ranking on Google 1st page (with the keywords "design course/design courses") for the past over 6 months and the traffic was really good... But it has been almost 2 months since the big drop... my ranking all is gone in just a week and now it's even not on the top 50.. While my competitors websites are stand stil. 😞 I seriously really want to cry because of this.. And I'm sure there is nothing much wrong with my SEO to be abandoned by Google like this and Google still index my webpage, but the crawling rate is so much slow than before.. I really need some help from the expert, especially from seomoz.. Please help me in this, I'm willing to answer any questions as well...
Technical SEO | | AngieDang0 -
Severe Drops in Google UK rankings
Hi Guys, I'm Chris - SEO Noob & appointed website man @ www.customdesignedcable.co.uk I signed up to SEO moz at the end of February and i have slowly but surely been trying to implement the on-page optimisation suggestions with my selected keywords against the appropriate pages. Since i have done this, our pages are still ranking but no where near what they were at before. Out of 70 keywords, we've gone from at least 60+ pages on the first page down to 20+ and the number in the top three has dropped from 55 to 33. Obviously i'm no seo guru far far from it but all of the changes that have been suggested i have adhered to and the result is the exact opposite of what i was hoping for and expecting. I'm after some advice as to how to use seomoz to target my keywords to google primarily to get these page rankings back. Should i just upload backup copies of the site? How would you suggest that i move forward to try and achieve at least similar rankings to what i had previously? Any help is much appreciated as most of our enquiries come from the internet and it has almost completely dried up these last couple of months. Thanks Guys! Chris. P.S. Would redesigning the site look, layout and feel with the same content negatively affect seo? Also, as a completely separate question, how come sites with content that is a lot worse than ours rank higher for the same keywords as ours? Thanks Again
Technical SEO | | Chris_CDC0 -
Google India Rankings Drop Suddenly
Keyword: indian wedding planner page:www.hukamievent.com/indian-wedding-planner.php It didn't drop, it just disappeared. No, I didn't do anything to be penalized at all and I am still in there index. I know this question has been asked many times here, while I apply all the suggestions given to other people with similar problem, here's a quick question I need to ask, I made following changes recently, could either of these be the reason for ranking decline? In google webmasters' tools, I had changed geographic target from - india, to- nothing, few weeks ago. could this be the reason. Around 2 weeks ago I paid someone to submit articles to 500 article directories, same article spun many times, he did the job in around 6 days and got back to me with a list of around 150 submissions with as many backlinks, all with same anchor text, "indian wedding planner", one of my targeted keywords. Before the submissions I was on page 9, yes that was nine, and just after the submission I was at page 2 position 1, within a matter few days. I saw my the targeted page improve in ranking and jump on to page one position 10, for a short while, before it disappeared. is this something they call "google dance"? My website is fluctuating on google SERP for many other keywords too, in most cases, my ranking fell. P.S.:With the same keyword,"indian wedding planner" my rankings in google US improved, I am on position 6 page 1. please enlighten fellow mozzers!
Technical SEO | | virtualhandshake0 -
Does ViewState affect SEO Rankings
We are redesigning our website and looking at our large data in the viewstate hidden field. Our thoughts are to move to bottom of page but our developers are stating this is an old myth and no resent documentation if it improves our SEO. Does ViewState (big data in hidden fields ) effect SEO in any way? If ViewState (hidden field) is present at the end of HTML document instead of near the start of HTML document then will it increase our ranking in search engines? Does Google or any other engine read the hidden fields? or do they ignore them? Can you point me to some valid documentation to back this up? Feed back is appreciated. Cathy
Technical SEO | | SEO-Team0