What caused my huge drop in search ranking?
-
On February 8th, 2012 my site's non-branded search traffic dropped overnight by over 80%. It appears I've been hit by a Google penalty.
I submitted a reconsideration request and one of Google's staff replied letting me know it was NOT a manual penalty. So it's clearly a result of an algorithm.
What is the cause? I haven't made significant changes to the website in the previous months do to being out of the country and the holidays. I'm extremely careful not to out source SEO so there is no chance of questionable link building strategies, unless my competitor launched an attack on my site.
I've considered these possible causes:
- Duplicate content - My site had some redundancy from a marketing plan before Google Panda launched. Last month, I removed all duplicate content.
- Unnatural link building - I've been moving slowly my site, page by page, from adbio.com to bioworldusa.com after a brand change. Perhaps the 301 redirects triggered a flag in Google's algorithm. I've since removed all redirects to see if that will fix the issue.
- Poor User Experience - I recently upgraded my Drupal CMS and had to change themes. Currently my theme is an ugly, grey theme which may cause a higher than usual bounce rate. I've been trying to compensate by making sure the content is high quality.
The penalty affected these website:
- www.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12)
- blog.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12)
- www.adbio.com (2/17/12)
-
I've reversed the domain migration and am waiting for results. Already the old site is starting to gain ranking after 3 days.
How should I go about migrating this content in the future?
-
Same here
-
The domain transfer happened over the last 2 years.
I would transfer a few pages using 301 redirect, wait a few months and track the outcome in ranking.
Before Feb 2012 this was working great. The last major redirect happened on Jul 28, 2011 when I redirected the homepage.
I recently started the Blog on Dec 19th, 2011 by moving irrelevant content that was originally on adbio.com and partially moved to bioworldusa.com. My hunch is the blog got hit by Panda updates for being low-quality. But I thought the Panda update treated sub-domains differently.
-
On first glance I would blame this on the domain migration.
-
I gave question a thumbs up. Sounds scary. I am looking forward to an answer too. I will have to look up branded and non-branded but I also had 43 terms go down on me this past week.
-
Are you comparing adbio.com to www.bioworldusa.com when you are calculating rankings drop or are you saying traffic to www.bioworldusa.com has dropped?
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
-
Drop in Rankings
Hello Webmasters, My site has incurred a sudden dip in rankings across sections. We conducted an analysis and have observed the following two major issues: Unnatural Links Penalty: Our site was issued an Unnatural Links Penalty on May 23. Basically, we have both 'http' and 'https' versions of our website registered on Webmaster tools. Initially, the warning showed up on the 'http' version and thus we started a cleanup by extracting the linking domains and have also filed a reconsideration request once all the spammy domains were removed and rightly disavowed. Recently, we got another manual action warning on the 'https' version regarding the unnatural links. So we have started with the cleanup activity right away. While analyzing this issue, we came across another major problem regarding the two versions which is our next concern and is mentioned below. https Canonical Issue: For more insights, we went through our site’s content and found that our website is following the below pattern Our 'http' version of the webpages get 301 redirected to the 'https' version. This 'https' version again has a canonical pointing to the 'http' version thus creating a loop. To conclude, I request your valuable learnings and thoughts on the following: Which of these issues are likely to have affected our website’s ranking Which version is likely to be preferred by Google (https or http) in our case
Technical SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
PDF in search results?
Hello community! I am not an SEO professional, though I am a practitioner, I would say. I am seeking a solution on behalf of a friend. If you search the term "Peter Blatt" you will discover a "black eye" on the first page, towards the bottom of SERPs. It's a PDF published on the Florida Department of Financial Services website regarding the final order for a settlement he and his company ("Blatt Financial Group") reached with the state as it related to professional conduct allegations. Does anyone have any advice on how to address this? I don't want "game" the search engines, but at the same time, this document looks really scary and much worse than it actually is to people, and I would love for it do drop below page one. Any advice or suggestions from the community? Thanks! Tom
Technical SEO | | 800GoldLaw0 -
Hamburger nav causing drop in organic traffic?
This may sound crazy but is it possible a hamburger nav used on a desktop responsive site could lead to a drop in organic traffic? Our hamburger nav requires between 3-4 clicks to arrive on a subpage. Here's an example of necessary clicks for a given page: click hamburger menu2) resorts (expands resorts nav) city (expands various cities where our resorts are located) actual resort (this opens up resort menu) resort overview (first clickable link) Is there any way we're getting penalized for excessive number of clicks? All our old pages were 301 redirected and content is relatively the same on the new redesigned website. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Changing URL - Ranking Disappeared?
Hi All, I named a page URL /plectrums/ within the back end framework. But then decided to change it to /personalised-plectrums/ I resubmitted a GWT sitemap and 301 redirected plectrums -> personalised-plectrums My ranking for personalised plectrums has disappeared and has not come back does anyone know why this is? Or is there something I have missed? Lewis
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
How to know that i work well in my rank ?
Hi everyone, i'd like to know if i rank my keywords , how to know that i do well? every day
Technical SEO | | engmtamous0 -
# in url affecting rank
Hi I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there. Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines? If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php be transferred to www.companyname.com/category.index.php# and affect the ranking of the non # page? I hope this makes sense! Thanks
Technical SEO | | sicseo0 -
Searching on root domain words = ranking on > page 10 in SERP
Hello, Our website wingmancondoms.com (a new condom brand) is not ranking in Google on the keywords "wingman condom", and I don't know why. In Yahoo and Bing everything is allright. I saw on this forum that it is maybe best to change my language URL's to wingmancondoms.com/nl /de and /fr instead of a direct URL like http://www.wingmancondoms.com/wingman-kondome (german translation). But is this our problem or are there more problems. Google is indexing our page well, no errors etc. Any other possibilities?
Technical SEO | | jogo0 -
Removing a URL from Search Results
I recently renamed a small photography company, and so I transferred the content to the new website, put a 301-redirect on the old website URL, and turned off hosting for that website. But when I search for certain terms that the old URL used to rank highly for (branded terms) the old URL still shows up. The old URL is "www.willmarlowphotography.com" and when you type in "Will Marlow" it often appears in 8th and 9th place on a SERP. So, I have two questions: First, since the URL no longer has a hosting account associated with it, shouldn't it just disappear from SERPs? Second, is there anything else I should have done to make the transition smoother to the new URL? Thanks for any insights you can share.
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0