Site Penalty After Changing Hosting Companies?

[ddwilliamson]

In one week's time, we've dropped from #3 on Page 1 of Google to Page 7 (similar on Bing). It looks like our traffic started to drop on 9/5 to 9/7 and has been a steady, rapid decline ever since. 1000s of pages are indexed, just suddenly ranking poorly -- even for branded terms.

History:
--In January, we switched to a web redesign & new domain
--In August, our hosting server was slow & kept crashing so we migrated our site to a new hosting company. We're not currently using the old hosting server. All domains, redirects, .htaccess files should now be correct and site speeds are improved.
--In early September, our NEW hosting company had a DNS issue causing more slow speeds and downtime for about 1 wk. Originally they thought it was htaccess so they changed our htaccess file - no luck - then discovered it was DNS. DNS issue was finally resolved on September 6th -- one day before the penalty/traffic issue seemed to begin.
-- According to GWMT, it looks like there were crawls completed around 9/4-9/5

What we've tried:
--Webmaster Tools - Googlebot dropoff since 9/5 (see attached screenshot). Nothing flagged. No site health alerts. Fetch as Google works. No manual webspam actions found.
-- W3C link checker, screamingfrog SEO spider, Xenu Link Sleuth, OSE (found some 4xx errors so we've updated those links)
-- Majestic SEO - backlinks reviewed 9/3 to 9/8
-- spoke to two different Adwords salespeople; unable to help
-- Bing Webmaster Tools
-- not showing organic search traffic since 9/6
-- 15% fewer pages crawled this month
-- top keywords are very odd -- stuff like "mt1 google apis" and "aaremel"
-- there are 4xx crawl errors under Crawl Information. We've fixed those URLs but they still appear in Webmaster Tools
-- some missing h1's and meta's, and dup titles, which we're working to fix
-- spike in crawl errors 9/11-9/12 and again on 9/14-9/15

It's been one thing after another this year, but all issues are now resolved with the exception of this newly-discovered penalty. We also have sites on a separate hosting server (with a different hosting company) that rank just fine.

googlebot-crawls.jpg

[RobertFisher]

D.D.

I had a feeling re the .htaccess piece, so glad to hear things improved. I can tell you that with both Rackspace and Firehost I have had very very good experiences and would recommend either heartily. I did find your company interesting and I wish you the very best going forward. 
Robert

[ddwilliamson]

Robert, thank you so much for your quick and thorough responses. We've been using the Moz software and lurking the forums for a few months, but this was our first time posting for some help, and this has truly been a wonderful first experience. Thank you!

Quick update... We're back on Page One of Google (even #1 on P1 for some terms) as of 11pm EST last night! Other than what was mentioned in the original post, the only additional change we made was we deleted all .htaccess changes that had been made by the new hosting company.

To answer your question, the htaccess changes were made without our knowledge while we were placed on hold during a call to the hosting provider during the DNS outage. They didn't realize it was DNS at first so they placed us on hold to "investigate" and when they came back, they informed us that they'd found & "fixed" some issues in the .htaccess file & that the site should be working properly again. Of course, .htaccess wasn't even the issue to begin with, and it seems their changes ended up creating more issues for us.

We've looked into Rackspace -- always heard good things! We will definitely be looking into them if we move hosting again.

Thank you for offering to have your team take a look into the server. I will keep an eye on things and let you know if we run into anymore issues -- and yes, please let us know if you ever find yourself craving some naturally colored cupcakes.

[RobertFisher]

Great, now you need to go to Advanced on the same page and click on blocked by Robots and leave the Total indexed where it is (checked). This will show if someone did anything re robots.txt that caused your pages indexed to drop by over 500.

404's are not necessarily a problem, but if you fixed them, did you mark them as fixed in WMT? If not they will show. Mark them as fixed and then if they show up again you will know there is still a problem.

I ran the site in ahrefs and it looks like you did a considerable cleanup or change in linking back in March and I see no Penquin type problems. You don't say you dropped on or about late June as well.

Here is a question I do not want you to take the wrong way; I am curious is the reason for asking: Why is your hosting company touching your .htaccess file?

In SEO an idiom we try never to forget is correlation does not equal causation; understanding that, I still cannot help but think you have an issue resulting during the hosting change. You are using WP so there should not be a hurdle for your host to get over, but I do have a bias against registrars with hosting, etc. I prefer to use hosting firms like firehost, rackspace, etc. as the knowledge level is typically much higher on server side issues. I can't tell you that you need a dedicated per se, but that is a costly bias I have.

If you would like to PM me, I will be happy to have our server people take a peek for you and just tell you what they see. Typically, they can figure out the error quickly as we handle a lot of client sites on our servers. (I am in no way seeking your business, etc. I would just have them take a look as I am baffled at the problem you are having. And, hopefully it is obvious, but no charge at all. The next time I need colored cupcakes, you can hook me up

Best

Robert

[ddwilliamson]

Thanks for the quick response! We've not received any penalty notices -- just assuming a penalty based on what we've been seeing, having never been through this particular situation before. You are correct that Manual Actions in GWMT shows "No manual webspam actions found."

As requested, I'm attaching some screenshots of the index status and crawl stats from webmaster tools. Let me know if there's any additional information we could provide that might be helpful to you.

google-site-index.jpg crawl-stats.jpg

[RobertFisher]

D.D.

First I made an assumption as to the site and am not going to mention since you have not. First, did you receive a penalty notice from Google or are you making an assumption?

Next, in GWMT, can you send a screenshot of the index status of the site? In case you don't know go to dashboard, 3rd or 4th item below is Google Index - click and the first one will be index status. This will show how many pages have been indexed over time. Also, in dashboard, above Google Index you will see Search Traffic - click that - and you will see Manual Actions - click that and you will see any penalties that need to be handled. (You state none so I am assuming you learned that in GWMT).

On the page where you grabbed the two screenshots, the first item is pages crawled; Can you show that as well? From the kilobytes downloaded, it appears your problem occurred toward the end of week one of September. Has the number of indexed pages dropped?

This would give a reasonable start to what the problem might be.

Thanks,