Trying to recover from a ranking crash
-
My site was well established and I'd built up some good rankings in Google using link building and onsite optimization. Then last year it completely fell out of the rankings except for a few keywords. There were some suspicious links but nothing that seemed too toxic, no warnings from Webmaster Tools. 9 months later I still haven't recovered. The site is well optimized. Any ideas?
-
Had the same issue my own. I actually wrote a couple pieces on that.
After working on hard writing good, shareable content, creating a better user experience, removing those links that might look toxic and then disavowing those that weren't remove, you can go ahead and fill a reconsideration request.
Although those are intended to Websites with a manual action (you received a message in your Webmaster tools), you can still fill that request explaining what happened, what steps you took to solve any possible issue (if any) and ask for some guidance on what is actually going on.
They might not respond, but Google claims ALL requests are read, so if your site has some sort of penalty they will look into it, it could just be a google glitch that they can actually fix.
Take a look at those sites outranking you, are those black hats? if yes, REPORT THEM in that reconsideration request too, or you can use the report feedback form (which is linked to in the same page you post the reconsideration request).
As I said at the beginning, I had the same issue. After fixing everything, sent a reconsideration request pointing all my issues, showing them our efforts, etc, and I don't know if they actually read it, but 2 black hats that were outranking us in page 1, spots #1 and #2 disappeared to page 6 or something like that, so until now (2 days later) it is already paying off!
Hope that helps!
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
-
Log-in page ranking instead of homepage due to high traffic on login page! How to avoid?
Hi all, Our log-in page is ranking in SERP instead of homepage and some times both pages rank for the primary keyword we targeted. We have even dropped. I am looking for a solution for this. Three points here to consider is: Our log-in page is the most visited page and landing page on the website. Even there is the primary keyword in this page or not; same scenario continues Log-in page is the first link bots touch when they crawling any page of our website as log-in page is linked on top navigation menu If we move login page to sub-domain, will it works? I am worrying that we loose so much traffic to our website which will be taken away from log-in page sub domain Please guide with your valuable suggestions. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Dramatic drop in SEO rankings after recovering from hacking
A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time. Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?
Algorithm Updates | | FPK0 -
Delay between being indexed and ranking for new pages.
I've noticed with the last few pages i've built that there's a delay between them being indexed and them actually ranking. Anyone else finding that? And why is it like that? Not much of an issue as they tend to pop up after a week or so, but I am curious. Isaac.
Algorithm Updates | | isaac6630 -
Why are Google Webmaster Tools' Google rankings different to actual Google rankings?
Dear Moz, We have noticed that according to Google Webmaster Tools one of our client sites is ranking very prominently for some of the major key phrases that we are trying to rank them for. However, when we perform a Google search for these queries, our client's content is nowhere to be seen, not even on the 5th page (we logged out of the Google account before performing the test). A long-term manual spam action on our client's site was recently lifted by Google - is it possible that Google Webmaster Tools is providing data about our client's estimated Google rankings, without taking into consideration the penalty of the manual spam action which was taken? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BoomDialogue690 -
Would 37,000 footer links from one site be the cause for our ranking drops?
Hey guys, After this week's Penguin update, I've noticed that one of our clients has seen a dip in rankings. Because of this, I've had a good link at the client's back link profile in comparison to competitors and noticed that over 37,000 footer links have been generated from one website - providing us with an unhealthy balance of anchor terms. Do you guys believe this may be the cause for our ranking drops? Would it be wise to try and contact the webmaster in question to remove the footer links? Thanks, Matt
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve0 -
New Zealand rankings - Is Google taking city into account now?
I've just noticed over the last 24 hours that Google New Zealand seems to be taking city into account with the search results - when I search from Christchurch - I get CHCH companies and Auckland results when searching from Auckland. I would like to rank my client nationally - any tips? Has anyone else noticed this? I need to be the top of Google for my keyword throughout the country. Any articles that could help? Kind regards, David
Algorithm Updates | | David_Buckingham0 -
Can AJAX implementation affect the rankings in Google Panda?
Hi there, I have the following situation with one of our job sites. We migrate the site to a new application, which is better from design point of view and also usability. For this we use a lot AJAX especially in searches. So every time a user is filtering down their search new results will be shown on the page, at the same url and with no page load. But, having this implementation. affected Bounce rate - which increased from 38% to nearly 60%, PI/visits - which are now half, at 3 and also Avg Time on Site is half that is used to be coming to 2,5 min from nearly 6 min. From Rand post, it is clearly that the content is very important in Google Panda, and all of these parameters we should consider, as it is telling the quality of the content. So, my question will be, can this site be hit by Panda updates (maybe later on) because Bounce Rate, PI/Visits and Avg Time on site, decreased in such way? At the moment we don't measure the Ajax impresion, but as I understood that we can do that though virtual pages in GA, does anyone of you have the experience how to handle this? Won't be this an artificial increase? Thanks, Irina
Algorithm Updates | | InformMedia0 -
Tuesday July 12th = We suddenly lost all our top Google rankings. Traffic cut in half. Ideas?
The attached screenshot shows all. Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic. Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back. Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine). Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong?? eartheasy.com wtf.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | aran0880