Sudden drop in rankings and indexed pages!
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Over the past few days I have noticed some apparent major changes. Before I explain, let me say this:
Checking my analytics and WMT:
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There is an increase in traffic (even via google organic)
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There is no drop in impressions or clicks
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There is no drop in indexed pages in GWT
Having said that;
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When I check my indexed pages using site:www.mywebsite.com, I see only 30 results as opposed to the 120K that I was seeing before (it was steadily climbing). The indexed pages have increase 3 fold in the past year, because of the increase in pages, updates, and products on the site.
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I see a sudden drop in rankings for major keywords that had been steadily rising. For example, I had some major keywords that were on page 7-8, not they are on page 20+ or not at all. Also, the page that used to show in the rankings has changed.
I have only done white-hat guest blogging in the past year for link building, on a small scale (maybe 20-30 links in a year).
They only other change recently, is that we are:
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Posting products on Houzz and Pinterest daily
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adding our site to all local directories (white pages, Yelp, citysearch, etc.)
My site got hit by Penguin more than a year ago, but we have done everything right since, and our traffic via organic results has more than doubled since the Penguin release.
What the hell is going on? Should I be concerned?
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Hi, there are hundreds of reasons why a page can drop in rankings for a keyword, so it's impossible to tell what's going on without knowing more specifics. Some common reasons for drops include:
- Overly optimize anchor text
- Losing links
- Google devaluing previously valued links
- On-site changes
- Technical errors
- Google algorithm updates
- Competitors improving their SEO
- Poor user metrics
- Etc.
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Thanks Takeshi!
Any thoughts on the drops in rankings, given all the other metrics?
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Don't panic, it's a bug related to the recent domain consolidation update:
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