Enormous 7 page drop after switching servers and adding load balancers. Thoughts?
-
Hello Everyone,
I'm a longtime Moz user but I had to switch accounts after switching jobs. I was hoping someone might be able to give me some insight on whats going on if possible. Our startup had first page position for our most valuable keyword: "Crowdfunding real estate" for about 6 or 7 months. Once we launched and switched to a production server behind load balancers, we dropped almost overnight to 7th page and we've been there for about a month. We don't have many links yet and some of the ones we DO have are kind of spammy (no idea where they came from and in process of trying to get them removed) but we thought it'd be strange to see that massive drop. We are even pages below a competitor who has NO links and basically zero content on the page. We don't have any notifications in WMT about a manual penalty or anything. I'd really, really appreciate any advice and If anyone has any ideas, the page is at: PatchofLand.com
Thanks,
Jason
-
Hi Jason
I wouldnt think the duplicate content is the issue, especially assuming the main keyphrase you are after had the homepage ranking for it (which doesnt have the dup issue) right? Moz is not showing you anywhere near as many links to the domain as ahrefs is, I would look at GWT also and have a good look through all your backlinks, at first glance there seems to be a chunk of obvious spam/seo type links in your profile that might be a more likely cause of the trouble. If you are not getting any more of those and have a marketing plan in place then it might just be a matter of keep doing what you are doing and you will start ranking again. But you will want to make sure you know where those dodgy links came from and that you are not going to be getting many more.
-
Hi Jacob and Lynn,
Thank you for the responses. The servers are based in the same country, and Lynn I think I agree with you that it might be a red herring. One thing I noticed just yesterday (while using MOZ's crawl results btw) is that each new property / product we launch has two pages. Our system creates a page using the identical content and identical page title under the root domain and under /investments. For example:
http://patchofland.com/investments/single-family-rehab-in-new-jersey.html
and
http://patchofland.com/single-family-rehab-in-new-jersey.html
Could it be that we are such a new site, with such few links, that a duplicate content penalty like that on a significant percentage of our pages could cause us to drop that far?
Thank you again!
Jason
-
Hi Jason,
Might be the server setup change is a red herring, such a drastic change so quickly sounds odd. Have you checked the dates against known google updates? NOV 14 comes to mind given the time frame you mentioned. A look at ahrefs shows some swings in linking domains in the last 2-3 months and a chunk of them look a somewhat iffy...
-
Are your servers based in the same country as the last?
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
-
Angular JS - Page Load
Website build in process in Angular JS. We are looking at prerendering the pages so its all good. However, because there are going to be few server requests, how would the page load be like for search engines? Also, on the client side (browser) would there be any impact if we prerender the pages? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Website Does not index in any page?
I created a website www.astrologersktantrik.com 4 days ago and fetch it with google but still my website does not index on google as the keywords I use is with low competition but still my website does not appear on any keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ramansaab0 -
Hreflang and paginated page
Hi, I can not seem to find good documentation about the use of hreflang and paginated page when using rel=next , rel=prev
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TjeerdvZ
Does any know where to find decent documentatio?, I could only find documentation about pagination and hreflang when using canonicals on the paginated page. I have doubts on what is the best option: The way tripadvisor does it:
http://www.tripadvisor.nl/Hotels-g187139-oa390-Corsica-Hotels.html
Each paginated page is referring to it's hreflang paginated page, for example: So should the hreflang refer to the pagined specific page or should it refer to the "1st" page? in this case:
http://www.tripadvisor.nl/Hotels-g187139-Corsica-Hotels.html Looking foward to your suggestions.0 -
Are these doorway pages?
I've added category pages for counties/town on http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com but will google see these as doorway pages? If you click on categories from the menu at the top and view some of the pages you'll hopefully see what I mean? Should I continue building these or delete them? Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Merging your google places page with google plus page.
I have a map listing showing for the keyword junk cars for cash nj. I recently created a new g+ page and requested a merge between the places and the + page. now when you do a search you see the following. Junk Cars For Cash NJ LLC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars
junkcarforcashnj.com/
Google+ page - Google+ page the first hyperlink takes me to the about page of the G+ and the second link takes me to the posts section within g+. Is this normal? should i delete the places account where the listing was originally created? Or do i leave it as is? Thanks0 -
Additional Pages in SERP
Hi Mozers, Can anybody help me with this. For "keyword phrase" SERP looks like this: 1. keyword.com/page1 2. keyword.com/page2 3. Mysite.com/page1 4. mysite.com/page2 ... 13. Mysite.com/page3 14. Mysite.com/page4 Is it possible to include Mysite.com/page3-4 both to the top 4th-5th, or better merge this pages and promote only one? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | de4e0 -
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page?
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page but only views it as one page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ibex0 -
We are changing ?page= dynamic url's to /page/ static urls. Will this hurt the progress we have made with the pages using dynamic addresses?
Question about changing url from dynamic to static to improve SEO but concern about hurting progress made so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h3counsel0