Switch hosting to be closer to site visitors, and 99% dropped from rankings?
-
Last week I decided to switch for a UK server to a US one at Hostgator since most of my visitors are from the US.
About nine hours later 99% of my pages disappeared from google rankings, only a few non-relevant pages are at position 100-200. All decent (1000-2000 word) articles on specific topics, are gone.
These pages were getting 2-3 minutes per user of readership and a low bounce rate, so I think they were pretty good quality.
Does anyone think it's possible I got accidentally added on a blacklisted IP? Or why would something like this happen.
Since then, I've tried switching back to the old IP for 3 days, that didn't work. Now I've filed a reinclusion request with the details.
Has anyone had a similar experience? What can possibly cause this massive drop in rankings and traffic?
Any help is much appreciated!
-
That was my first thought also, but no returns of rankings after 4 days now
-
One other possibility--especially if some pages are gone completely--could be that Google decided to crawl it at the exact moment it was down. Since propagation can take up to 48 hours, you're going to have some down time in some locations. If that's the case, once Google crawls it a second time, you should go back to your old positions.
-
Hello Peter.
Blacklisted IP is a possibility, but this is the kind of dance that happens when you move a site.
Another possibility is that this is the new reality.
I've had my site in google adsense since 2005.
I changed the company and they made me request a new adsense account and when I did that, they rejected my site so now I have no ads at all.
They seem to love destroying businesses, and there is no comeback and no way to talk to someone about it.
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
-
Why rankings dropped from 2 page to 8th page and no penalization?
Dear Sirs, a client of mine for more than 7 years used to have his home page (www.egrecia.es) between 1st and 2nd page in the Google Serps and suddenly went down to 8 page. The keyword in question is "Viajes a Grecia". It has a good link profile as we have built links in good newspapers from Spain, and according to Moz it has a 99% on-page optimization for that keyword, why why why ??? What could I do to solve this? PD: It has more than 20 other keywords in 1st position, so why this one went so far down? Thank you in advance !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tintanus0 -
How much SEO damage would it do having a subdomain site rather directory site?
Hi all! With a coleague we were arguing about what is better: Having a subdomain or a directory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Let me explain some more, this is about the cases: Having a multi-language site: Where en.domain.com or es.domain.com rather than domain.com/en/ or domain.com/es/ Having a Mobile and desktop version: m.domain.com or domain.com rather than domain.com/m or just domain.com. Having multiple location websites, you might figure. The dicussion started with me saying: Its better to have a directory site.
And my coleague said: Its better to have a subdomain site. Some of the reasons that he said is that big companies (such as wordpress) are doing that. And that's better for the business.
My reasons are fully based on this post from Rand Fishkin: Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO - Whiteboard Friday So, what does the community have to say about this?
Who should win this argue? GR.0 -
Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario..... BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store. BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team. The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain. The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other. We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer. BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPM
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year old Our SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?0 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
HTTPS sitewide move has resulted in huge rankings drop...
Hi all, An e-commerce site has recently moved protocol to https sitewide. The site ranked page one for some great terms and now appear to be page 2 or below. Brand terms seem unphased and are still very strong, on both Google and Bing. The following has been done; Everything 301'd from http to https Sitemap Edited Updated Webmaster Tools Robots.txt edited Crawled and Fetched all pages daily. Checked Paged are all follow,index. PPC Ads mass updated to new url's. Most terms were ranked 1 - 9 on Bing, and Page 1/2 on Google. HTTPS upgrade was done less than one week ago. The site is not payday loan related, nor was it hit by latest panda escapades. Everything on the site is relevant to the content. Has anybody else been in this position, what else can be done? I'd appreciate any help and advice. Thank You K9gB7hz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Any reasons why social media properties are ranking higher than the site's own name?
The site below has social media properties and other sites coming up before it's own listing even for the exact search of the site name. Any ideas why this is happening? Link Any input is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
My site dropped 10 spot on Google last week... why ?
Hello I have launched my site in April last year. http://www.hobartphotographertasmania.com.au/ It took a while but I finally got to rank 2 on Google for "Hobart photographer" and rank 1 for "photographer Hobart Tasmania". Suddenly last week my site dropped to page 2 and I don't understand why. Was there a Google update ? If not, what can be the reason for such a sudden drop ? Thanks Loic
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | loiclg0 -
Sudden drop in ranks and traffic after migrating community website into main domain
Hi, We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain. It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website. e.g. Before - we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com After - we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com This change took place on July 19th. After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com. Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped. We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made. Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged? Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages? Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation? Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0