A huge drop in rankings since last 10 days, and not recovered yet.
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a serious topic to discuss and want help from the experts here.
Our website has 6 PR and we have been consistency staying at the top for very competitive terms in the niche.
Since last Friday (24th February, 2012) we have been facing massive fluctuation in the rankings for most of the keywords we are focusing on. After this fall, we checked the following details but didn’t find any serious/critical issue that might be contributing towards these fluctuations:-
- We analyzed Google webmaster tools, there’s no update/warning from Google regarding any negative activity and other things seem to be normal.
- We checked our website through site search (site: www.domain.com) and found that we haven’t lost any indexed pages and things appear normally as they used to. So, we are sure that we haven’t been banned or penalized.
- We also cross verified our link building and other promotional activities and we didn’t find anything suspicious that could lead to such a big fluctuation.
The drop is really big, some keywords went to 5th or 6th page from top 3 position; some keywords are not in top 200 or 300 spots which were usually staying put between 5th to 10th position. We have analyzed a lot but haven’t come to know the reason why we are facing this fluctuation.
Our website is 4 years old and this kind of fluctuation has happened for the first time.
Has anyone faced this kind of issue before?
I’m looking forward to your support in identifying this trouble.
Thanks
-
Unless you're mega-popular (like Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc), I would expect things like this from time to time.
I tend to find that precipitous drops are due to a shift in algorithms. You might be going "well duh", but it's important to note that an algorithm change can cause shifts like this on a temporary basis while either the indexation process catches up or Google evaluates a set of changes (internally or by using quality evaluators). My bet is it's the latter since Google announced they rolled out a lot of new changes (which is not something Google does on a regular basis). That, to me, screams "testing" (remember that Panda did the same thing to a lot of sites about 1 year ago). Eventually the SERPs return to "normal".
That having been said, are you sitting still? If so, that's not going to help you in the long run. Add links and content. Keep up with your competitors. Remember, they want to sell your products as much as you do.
-
Hi Mark,
A couple of suggestion to check:
- Long load times of pages during Google’s last crawl.
- Pages with poor content on bring the whole site down – caused by recent Google updates
Hope these help.
K
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
-
Google crawl drop
the crawl request of my company site: https://www.dhgate.com/ has dropped nearly over 95%, from daily 6463599 requests to 476493 requests at 12:00am on 9th, Oct (GMT+8). This dramatic dropping trend not only showed in our GSC crawl stats report but also our company's own log report. We have no idea what’s going on. We want to know whether there is an update of google about crawlling, or is this the issue of our own site? If something is wrong with our site, in what aspects would you recommend us to check, analyze and accordingly optimize?
Technical SEO | | DHgate_20140 -
Accidentally blocked Googlebot for 14 days
Today after I noticed a huge drop in organic traffic to inner pages of my sites, I looked into the code and realized a bug in last commit cause the server to showing captcha pages to all Googlebot requests from Apr 24. My site has more than 4,000,000 in the index. Before last code change, Googlebot are exempt from being shown the captcha requests so each inner pages are crawled and indexed perfectly with no problem. The bug broke the whitelisting mechanism and treat requests from Google's ip addresses the same as regular users. It leads to the captcha page being crawled when Googlebot visits thousands of my site's inner pages. This makes Google thinks all my inner pages are identical to each other. Google remove all the inner pages from SERP starting from May 5th before when many of those inner pages have good rankings. I formerly thought this was a manual or algorithm penalty but 1. I did not receive a warning message in GWT
Technical SEO | | Bull135
2. The ranking for main url is good. I tried with "Fetch as Google" in GWT and realize all Googlebot saw in the past 14 days are the same captcha page for all my inner pages. Now, I have fixed the bug and updated the production site. I just wanted to ask: 1. How long will it take for Google to remove the "duplicated content" flag on my inner pages and show them in SERP again? From my experience, Googlebot revisits urls quite often. But once a url is flagged as "contains similar content", it could be difficult to recover, is it correct? 2. Besides waiting for Google to update its index, what else can I do right now? Thanks in advance for your answers.0 -
Rankings drop after Panda
Hi All, My site dropped completely out of the SERPS on September 27th. I've tried everything I know to do (re-wrote all content, disavow links tool, filed DCMA complaints, de-optimized on-page content, made anchor text less aggressive, etc). Can you all please take a look at www.doctorloanusa.com and let me know what you think the problem is and how much you'd charge to help? Keywords used to be: doctor loans, physician loans. I ranked 2 or 3 for those keywords consistently for over 4 years. I know I need more content, but I feel like it's a waste of time creating it. If a thin site was the issue, wouldn't I at least rank SOMEWHERE in the 1000 results? Thanks for your consideration. At my wits end.
Technical SEO | | Cary_Forest0 -
Rankings Issues
website: trophycentral.com Back in February of this year, we took a huge rankings hit on Google. We thought it might be Panda related, but realized it was before the big change. We also thought it could be related to our Mobile rollout and a wholesale system we put in place, but were not sure. Most pages were fine, but our home page was hit hard and taken off line, included for branded terms (although the branded terms came back in a couple of weeks). There were no manual actions against us. We made a ton of changes with the mobile site, crawl issues, reducing links, reviewing and removing potentially bad outside links, etc. After a few months (long time!) almost all of our keywords came back except one, trophies. We used to rank in the top few positions and now are not in the top 500. We believe we are being penalized, but have no idea why this one keyword is being impacted. It is obviously a huge one for us and we want to get it back. Does anyone have any ideas as to why Trophies is not ranking on our home page. We are grateful that we have many other words and phrases in the top 5 positions (not pages) of google, yahoo and bing, but on Google, we cant seem to get trophies to even show up! Please help!!! Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Drop down navigation and link juice
Hi! We are desperately needing to overhaul our site navigation setup, and we have so many categories that we think our site could really benefit from a drop down navigation similar to what these sites have: http://www.paychex.com/ http://www.bmc.com/ We've held off doing this type of navigation in the past because we were only seeing people use flash to create it and we knew that it wouldn't be good for link juice. But these two sites are using HTML and CSS - which seems like a much better style and good for SEO. Do you agree? We want to make the switch but are worried about losing linking power by nesting our navigation in 's and CSS styling.
Technical SEO | | sciway0 -
Sudden ranking drop, no manual action
Sort of a strange situation I'm having and I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts. Here's what has happened... Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected. I immediately figured that this was some sort of keyword-specific penalty that I had incurred. I had done a bit of link building over the weekend (two or three directory type sites and a bio link from a site I contribute to). I also changed some anchor text on another site to match my homepage's title tag (which just so happened to be the exact phrase match I had dropped in) - I assumed this was what got me. I was slowly beginning to climb up the rankings and just got a bit impatient/overzealous. Changed the anchor text back to what it originally was and submitted a reconsideration request on Tuesday. This morning, I get the automated response in Webmaster Tools that no manual action had been taken. So my question is, would this drop have been an automated deal? If that's the case, then it's going to be mighty hard to pinpoint what I did wrong, since there's no way to know when I did whatever it was to cause the drop. Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions to regain my modest original placement?
Technical SEO | | sandlappercreative0 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0 -
Mobile site ranking in desktop searches
A robots.txt file is properly implemented on the mobile site to block Googlebot from crawling, yet, when running a site: query for the site in google, it still returns over 104,000 pages from the mobile site in the index. Why could this be happening?
Technical SEO | | craigsmith3330