Rank Drop Possibly due to links but no warning in GWT

[BobGW]

Hello,

We've been experiencing rank drop in all major keywords for the past 9 months.

I've had different people say different things here at Moz about how backlinks effect rank drop. Brilliant answers, but different opinions.

Nothing is showing up in GWT for this site.

Here's the backlink breakdown:

72 linking root domains. 20 of those are blogs. These blogs have no backlinks in and of themselves, and were created originally as easy links. Not white hat stuff. Three additional root domains are still paid links in this profile, though all but one was made to look editorial. The one that doesn't look editorial has links sprinkled throughout their website, among other paid links.

The rest of the linking root domains (49) are legitimate. Again, nothing shows up in GWT. We had 96 root domains last March but in March of 2013 we cut most of the paid links and half (20) of the blogs. This brought our ranking down immediately by 2 or 3 slots. We've been slipping every since.

I would like people to speak from experience and let me know if you think the backlinks could be causing the ranking drop and what to do about it.

Thanks!

[Kingof5]

I agree with Moosa - his suggestions on checking things besides links are spot on. If rankings are dropping continuously over a 9 month period, that doesn't sound like just a links issue. Algorithmic penalties (speaking from experience) cause a drop at a certain point, but they don't make rankings continue to drop.

If other things look fine and you think links may be the problem, run Link Detox. You'll still need to manually review each link in there (you'll occasionally find false positives), but it'll give you a very good idea of how healthy your backlink profile is.

[MoosaHemani]

In most cases when your rankings are continuously going down ad you haven’t received any penalty, I would recommend to give a detailed looks to every part of the website and see where the problems are.

If the on-page is bad this is possible, especially check quality of content and make sure the content you have on your website is not duplicated or copied from somewhere else because bad or copied content can also cause this.

And similarly check the quality of links and if you doubt on the links quality, you probably have figured out where the problem is!

The good part is that it’s not a manual penalty that means even if the website facing a drop in rankings, it’s automatic. All you have to do is to collect all the links you find, GWT, Moz.com, ahrefs.com, Majestic.com and more and audit each link manually (tools like link risk might help to an extent).

Try to remove the bad links as much as you can, use disavow link feature as well and at the same time collect some good quality links that point back to your website and looks natural to you too!

Once the ratio of good links will increase the same algorithmic change will start to work in your favor J

Hope this helps!

[GlobeRunner]

BobGW, you're not the only one experience this. In the past year or so, Google has updated their internal algorithms on how they deal with links to sites. If your site has a low quality or even toxic (bad) links pointing to your website from other sites, your site's rankings will go down. And in many cases, you're not going to get any sort of warning messages or messages from Google in Google Webmaster Tools.

If you do have unnatural links that violate their guidelines, then they may send you a message, and in that case they'll ask you to file a reconsideration request after you've cleaned up the links and made good attempts to get those links removed.

The good thing is that it doesn't sound like you've received any sort of penalties--the rankings have gone down algorithmically. That doesn't mean that you don't need to evaluate all of the links to your site and get the low quality links removed.

I would look at all your links (you can use Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, or Majestic SEO or a combination of those to find the links) and review them with a fine tooth comb. Not all of the bad links will be shown in Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need to look at other tools to gather the link data.

Get rid of the ones that are low quality and get new fresh quality links and your site's rankings should come back.