Massive Drop in Rankings

[reynoldsdesign]

Hello,

My site (www.reynoldsdesignstudio.com) has recently dropped off the map (50+ places) for almost every phrase I was ranking between 3 and 6 on the first page. My main phrases on google were "web design rochester mn", "web development rochester mn"

I have been setting up a new web server but have not pointed this domain at that server yet so it shouldn't be anything related there. I also have not updated the site in a couple years (I know that's bad), so it doesn't appear to be a hacking issue either.

I was 'hacked' a few years back where I gained a TON of crappy links from China and what-not but it never appeared to affect anything. I'm not sure if that is what is causing the recent drop in rankings.

If anyone has any ideas on what could have caused the issue that would be great. According to my GA traffic I had a spike earlier in the month and then it has steadily dropped off. This is consistent with my actual page rankings.

Thanks

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[cwsinc]

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure how to mark a answer as good but all of these were helpful. I found out that I had a ton of garbage links coming from overseas. I'm not sure how this happened but it looks like it is something the search engines should take into consideration. Especially since they are linking to my site for terms that make no sense for it. You'd think with the infinite wisdom of google they could understand that these links are spam or someone trying to maliciously hurt your site.

I'm not sure if others have had this problem but how do you stop robots from putting links with anchor text like I have onto blogs? This appears to be what the issue is.

[JesusD]

Also, how is your anchor text profile for each keyword you dropped traffic or ranking? I found that unreal anchor texts with the addition of some spammy links can be really harmful with penguin updates. I used this anti penguin resource in conjunction with unique content creation, social signals, and are seeing some good results.

Best Regards, and best of luck!

[reynoldsdesign]

Thanks everyone. I'm going through the links and adding them to the disavow tool. I wish the search engines would just ignore anything related to cialis, viagra or anything else like that. None of those links are ever useful.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Eric,

A quick look in Majestic SEO shows nearly 34,895 external backlinks from 260 linking root domains with large numbers of links being added during March and April.

As mentioned by Bradley and Chris, there is a lot of suspect anchor text (including cialis, adipex, tramadol etc) in there and many of the referring sites are not places would really want to be getting your links from regardless of the anchors.

It seems your site has attracted some unwanted attention which has dramatically lowered Google's trust. While the obvious conclusion is that Penguin might be responsible, it is clear from the screenshot you provided that the dropoff actually happened around 5/6 May (Dr Pete has talked about "something" happening with the algorithm around 5 May and that would seem to correlate with your problems). Of course, it is possible that this was a test rollout of Penguin and your site was captured as a result, or it may be something completely different (which Google has given no information about).

Either way, it is easy to see that the linking behavior is harming your site's trustworthiness and unfortunately, this is likely to also affect your visibility in Bing and other Search engines as well.

Dealing with the backlink problem is the most critical place to start ... site updates will come later I'm afraid.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[brad.s.knutson]

As Chris stated above, it does look like a Google Penguin hit.

First plan of action would be to log into Google Webmaster Tools and see if you have any notifications from Google regarding manual penalties.  If so, take the necessary steps to resolve these issues.

Second, it does look like you have some really spammy links coming in from spammy sources. I ran an OpenSiteExplorer report on your page and I see the same "cialis" links that Chris alluded to above.  You may want to look at disavowing links like these to make your inbound link profile look more organic.

And finally - update your site!  If you had somehow managed to make it through Penguin 2.0, you would have eventually lost your rankings anyways because other sites will be coming in and taking advantage of absence.

Hope this helps!

[Chris661]

If the drop coincides with May 22, you were probably hit by the Google roll out of "Penguin 2.0" Supposed to be much tougher on spammy links.

I am in a similar situation although for some keywords, I have just dropped a few slots. I am pretty new to this so I am sure you will get an answer from one of the very helpful experts here, but you might want to take a look at you link profile using OSE. It seems you have quite a few "cialis" links and that can't be good. Also see if you have gotten any warnings in GWMT. If you did, then it is what they call a "manual" action meaning a human at Google assessed a penalty. There is a process for reconsideration if this is the case. It could however just be the algorithm change.

Either way you should seriously look at getting rid of those links. I will be interested in the community responses here.

Best of luck, I know it is a bad feeling!