Google rankings dropped like a stone
-
I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!
-
Hey James, don't forget the Wild, Wild, West is not a static lab environment.
How old is your site?
What has changed with your competitors - look specifically at any new entries into the top ten and try and determine why they might have moved up to replace you.
Any server/page load speed issues?
It is supposed to be an algorithm, but I doubt there is a single person (probably by design) that has any clue what it really is doing and barely what is supposed to be doing
It could be a million different things - is your dev sub-directory blocked from crawling, did some high quality comment links get archived, did some of your quality links go away, did someone you are linking to get whacked or go away, etc, etc
Are the pages that dropped still ranking for other terms - i.e. was it a "surgical drop" that I have experienced on another site of mine that I'm still trying to figure out.
Just do an audit of everything and keep doing quality things... and theoretically, as we tell ourselves, your rankings should come back.
Finally, were your ranking drops in the 10-50, 200+, or 950 range? The smaller ones are supposedly algorithmic and "easier" to correct while the higher ones are manually and "time out" once the offense has been corrected - all kind of witch craft
Good luck.
-
Good catch. This is our original content, which has been scraped by several other sites. I'll suggest this to the client ASAP. Thanks.
-
What are some of the terms that dropped? I see your site ranking #8 for Bookkeeping courses in Google.
-
My guess is it it due to the content. I did a quick search for the first sentence on the home page content: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Starting+a+business+is+usually+thought+of+as+something+that+takes+lots+of+money+and+carries+lots+of+risks.%22
It looks like there are MANY sites using the same content. It appears that Google really dislikes content that is duplicated nowadays. The same thing happened to one of my sites. There were some spammers that grabbed our content and our rankings fell. Create some new original content and your rankings should come back.
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
-
Do content copycats (plagiarism) hurt original website rankings?
Hi all, Found some websites stolen our content and using the same sentences in their website pages. Does this content hurt our website rankings? Their DA is low, still we are worried about the damage about this plagiarism. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Is this thumbtack.com pop-up modal allowed by Google?
When you click on a Thumbtack organic result, there's a pop-up modal on the landing page. Is this allowed by Google? E.g. Go to these SERPS and click on the first Thumbtack result. The landing page has this modal appear. Is this likely to hurt their rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RealSelf1 -
Recovering from Google Penguin/algorithm penalty?
Anyone think recovery is possible? My site has been in Google limbo for the past 8 months to around a year or so. Like a lot of sites we had seo work done a while sgo and had tons of links that Google now looks down on. I worked with an seo company for a few months now and they seem to agree Penguin is the likely culprit, we are on page 8-10 for keywords that we used to be on page 1 for. Our site is informative and has everything in tact. We deleted whatever links possible and some sites are even hard to find contact information for and some sites want money, I paid a few a couple bucks in hopes maybe it could help the process. Anyway we now have around 600 something domains on disavow file we out up in March-April, with around 100 or 200 added recently as well. If need be a new site could be an option as well but will wait and see if the site can improve on Google with a refresh. Anyone think recovery is possible in a situation like this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xelaetaks0 -
When you get a new inbound link do you submit a request to google to reindex the new page pointing at you?
I'm just starting my link building campaign in earnest, and received my first good quality inbound link less than an hour ago. My initial thought was that I should go directly to google, and ask them to reindex the page that linked to me... If I make a habit of that (getting a new link, then submitting that page directly to google), would that signify to google that this might not be a natural link building campaign? The links are from legitimate (non-paid, non-exchange) partners, which google could probably figure out, but I'm interested to know opinions on this. Thanks, -Eric
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ForForce0 -
What penalty would cause this traffic drop (Google Analytic Screenshot)
This ecommerce site was hit (mostly) slowly by updates but there is nothing in GWT. Below is the graph. Keep in mind that most of our traffic is return customers, so the drops don't look dramatic, but they are. "New Visitors" doesn't show the drop. This is a "Daily" Google Analytics setting. The drop I've circled is May 23-May 24, 2013. It was a huge hit in non-return customers. This graph is "Unique Visitors" I don't know why the "New Visitors" graph is not showing the dip Although we had some big drops, a lot of the drop was gradual. Any help in identifying what could be causing the problem is appreciated. ga.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
What Google considers to be a branded keyword?
We can set our own keywords as branded in SeoMoz campaign, but Google would not necessarily see them like branded. After reading the Blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update I had a question: Are there known rules (or at least guesses) what Google considers a branded keyword/anchor text? I guess the first one would be your website domain. So bluewidget.com for example would be a branded keyword for bluewidget.com website. How about Blue Widget or Blue Widget Company?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SirMax0
