Sudden drop in PageRank to Unranked
-
Howdy,
A clients website has just dismorning (8/FEB/13) gone from index page PR:4 to Unranked including all inner pages on the domain.
There is no contact on GWT or penalty email from Google.
All organic rankings seem to be fine, and i read about the GWT backlink glitch earlier.
Should I expect the worst?
Thanks..
Mark
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for your detailed reply, really appreciated.
Seems the site did get some what buggy with the new PR update. It was back to normal after 12 hours or so. No drop in rank or traffic over the weekend so it looks like we're in the clear.
The Google cached image of the homepage has resolved it's self also.
Thanks again for your help.
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
Toolbar PageRank is often not a very good indicator of how Google actually views your site. The important thing is your rankings and traffic, which you say is fine. This would indicate you are both in Google's index and are being served in search results. Yah!
Google did just update it's Toolbar PageRank, so this could be part of the issue, but I am concerned with how you described the page showing up in search results. (php error)
Here's what you can do to test:
1. In Google Webmaster Tools, use the "Fetch As Googlebot" tool to test if Google can access the homepage
2. Is your homepage in Google's cache? There are many ways to do this, here's one
3. Use the MozBar to crawl as GoogleBot. Set the user agent setting for "Googlebot" (I've attached a screenshot)
The reason for this is sometimes Viruses and Spam Attacks will take over your website and show one version to Google, but another version to users.
If all of these things check out, and you maintain your traffic, you should be fine!
-
Wouldn't we all my friend!
Serious client, lets see how the PR issue pans out over the weekend.
Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks for the reply Charles,
The site doesn't have protected WHOIS. Nor does it have 1,000s of backlinks. It would be a 15 year old domain registered on BOTW & DMOZ.So it's very strange!
Google would know the author on Google+ and so forth. It wouldn't be a spammy website. It's a viable business in the training / education industry with 10+ staff.
There is something a bit fishy about the homepage screenshot on the companies SERP.
It's showing a PHP error and a blank white page. But on clicking the result the website is fine. Could this be to do with the site's last indexing? Google have indexed a error homepage which has effected the rest of the site? Note this is the only SERP that has this error.
Thanks for the help!
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
-
Revenue Drops from Organic
Hi We've started to see steady drops in revenue since Jan 22nd each day & I can't seem to pinpoint why. We aren't seeing a drop in traffic for those pages, but we have seen ranking drops in other areas. The main revenue drops are coming from the homepage - it seems like a downwards trend - any ideas at how I can pinpoint the issue? https://www.key.co.uk/en/key
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Dramatic drop in Domain Authority
I have a client who has reported a drop in Domain Authority from 16 to 1 in a matter of a few weeks. Also, MOZ was reporting links, but now none! I know there were some issues with the recent MOZ index update. However, this sounds like something else. Anyone got ideas on where we should start looking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Why is my Bing traffic dropping?
In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Researching search volume drop
I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe. Two questions... Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)? Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports. Thanks. Mark omE1VPc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Number of indexed pages dropped. No manual action though?
I have a client who had their WordPress site hacked. At that point there was no message from Google in webmaster tools and the search results for their pages still looked normal. They paid sitelock to fix the site. This was all about a month ago. Logging into Webmaster Tools now there are still no messages from Google nor anything on the manual actions page. Their organic traffic is essentially gone. Looking at the submitted sitemap only 3 of their 121 submitted pages are indexed. Before this all of them where in the index. Looking at the index status report I can see that the number of indexed pages dropped completely off the map. We are sure that the site is free of malware. This client has done no fishy SEO practices. What can be done?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | connectiveWeb0 -
Penguin 3.0 - Very minor drops across the board. Don't think its a penalty, any ideas?
Hey All, I just can't figure this out. My site has been ranking well for years, i've never done anything suspicious with it and since the penguin update, my rankings have dropped across the board but only by about 4 - 8 places each, some terms have went up from nowhere to page 8 etc. I don't think i've been hit with a penalty, so I don't know what the problem is or how to recover from it. Does anybody have any ideas on what could be wrong? Update: Perhaps some sites that were linking to mine have been hit with a penalty? Update 2: I just found myself somehow in some spammy link network for 600 sites that looked identical, I don't know how or why my website is in this! I have disavowed all of these links 5 days ago, no change to rankings. pY80Dzi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Drop in indexed pages!
Hi everybody! I've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/ for a little while now. Until recently, everything was great - good rankings for the key terms of 'bird hides' and 'pond dipping platforms'. However, rankings have tanked over the past few days. I can't point my finger at it yet, but a site:thewilddeckcompany.co.uk search shows only three pages have been indexed. There's only 10 on the site, and it was fine beforehand. Any advice would be much appreciated,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
"Too many links" - PageRank question
This question seems to come up a lot. 70 flat page site. For ease of navigation, I want to link every page to one-another. Pure CSS Dropdown menu with categories - each expanding to each of the subpage. Made, implemented, remade smartphone friendly. Hurray. I thought this was an SEO principle - ensuring good site navigation and good internal linking. Not forcing your users to hit "back". Not forcing your users to jump through hoops. But unless I've misread http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many then this is something that's indirectly penalised by Google because a site with 70 links from its homepage only lets each sub-page inherit 1/80th of its PageRank. Good site navigation vs your subpages are invisible on Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesFx0