Why did my rankings drop so fast?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi Mozzers,

One of my clients have suffered from a sudden ranking loss that started beginning of August.

A little background: My client is a big cleaning company that has many franchises nationwide and had very good rankings for the past few months. Generally the busiest time of the year is summer and the 4th quarter is the slowest. Organic Traffic generally drops by 5 to 10% between Q3 and Q4 of each year.

2 things have caught my attention while investigating these ranking losses

1. The latest recent Update from the moz index evaluated the website's DA of 48 when in the summer we had a DA of 56. Never seen such a drop before!! My first question is how accurate is the moz index? How can I make sure this data is accurate? I am very surprised because we have been working hard on getting good quality links for the past year and a half. If the DA is accurate then that could explain the ranking loss
2. Google updating its search engine to the Hummingbird version. Do you guys think this has anything to do with the drop in rankings? The content on the website is not the best but is fairly decent. I am still not sure how the ranking drop could be related to Hummingbird?

I have also checked webmaster tools to see if I got hit somehow by penguin and it seems fine.

Thanks mozzers

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Just to add to Remus's answer (which was very thorough, thanks for that) - to explain a little bit more about Moz's DA. Each time Moz updates there linkscape index (which open site explorer is based on) there index may change slightly.

So you may still have links from sites out there on there net, but every once and a while month Moz will have them in their index and the next month their index might get a little smaller and they may not show, and thus you didn't really lose authority, it just appears that way.

So I'd track something like DA with a long term approach (like 6-12 months) and watch for it to go up year over year - especially if your in a space that's not going to pile on links as quickly as like retail etc.

Hummingbird was the end of August, and didn't throw off people's rankings so much, so this is very unlikely to have anything to do with the ranking change.

I don't see any other major alo changes at that time. (you can check here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change) - but it would be worth doing what Remus suggests and digging a little deeper into your analytics, backlinks profile etc and see if you can pinpoint anything more specific. One good approach is to try and pinpoint if it's sitewide or just specific keywords/pages.

-Dan

[zoicaremus]

Hi Taysir,

Domain Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given webpage is likely to rank in Google's search results. It uses a machine learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across the thousands of search results that we predict against.

In terms of accuracy (the level of correlation with Pagerank and other signals from Google) it's pretty good. A lot of professional SEM's are using it to get a general idea of how competitive a given site is in Google.com. But, in your case, a difference of 7 points does not say anything. If we compare two different websites which have a 7 point difference we can't say that one is ranking better than the other. One of them could focus on very specific terms and rank better there (even with a lower DA) than the other with more general approach for users.

There are a few other things that cause fluctuations in DA, which are not in your control:

• Moz says: "We constantly update the algorithm used to calculate Page Authority, so you may see your score fluctuate from time to time."

• Some of the websites you got links from might loose some of their powerful links - and even if you constantly add more, if the loss is bigger than what you gain - you will see a drop in DA

And a few more things:

• Don't rely on DA to "explain the ranking loss". It was not meant for this. Instead try to match the Mozcast Google Algorithm Change History with the drop in your rankings.

• Webmaster Tools does not tell you if you were hit by Penguin, Panda, or Hummingbird. It tells you if you have a manual penalty which is a totally different thing. If you see a drop in impressions in GWT you could be hit by any of the above. Try to do the timing check mentioned above.