Rank Drop Possibly due to links but no warning in GWT
-
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!
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Tiered back links
Playing catch up with latest SEO techniques and wanted to ask the community what opinion is with generated tiered back links. For example, in one month having - 50 tier one links, 250 tier two links and 1000 tier three links generated within articles forums, social networks, guestbooks etc. In my view this is blackhat, my question is - is this still acceptable? or will it be damaging my domain? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | w4rdy0 -
Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
Website that lost ranking and now starting to recovery
Hello guys,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WayneRooney
About a month ago we got in the webmaster tool a message that saying that we have unnatural links to the website.
We got drop from 200 keys that was in page 1-2 to pages 5-8.
We check our links and notice that someone links more then 1000 links to our site. We apply for reconsideration request plus we send the file with the links to Google to ask to remove. Yesterday we got message from Google that say : Manual spam action revoked.
We check today the ranking and we saw that from 3 keys that was in the first page, now we are with 24 in the first page. Very good improvement but still very far from the 130 keys that was in the first page a month ago. I wanted to ask, what can we expect ?
Are we gonna get the lost ranking now ?
Is this happen overnight ?Maybe the big change will be in the next penguin update ? Bottom Line, what is the chance to get back the ranking as we had before ?
This is the most important thing right now... Thank you0 -
Do inbound links from forums hurt our traffic?
We have a manual action against us on Google webmaster tools for unnatural links. While evaluating our back links, I noticed that forums with low page rank/domain authority are linking to us. Is this hurting us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imlovinseo0 -
Redirecting old domains for SEO ranking?
It's been a while since I read anything seriously out of the box on SEO but I thought I would see what others thought of the bold assertions made in this article. Most of it revolves around buying expired domains and using a 301 to point them, and their juice, to new sites. This guy makes a living doing this so he has to know a bit more than the average Joe but I'm wondering where the other shoe is and when it drops.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Highland0 -
Negative SEO impacting client rankings - How to combat negative linking?
I have a client which have been losing rankings for the key term "sell gold" in Google AU. However, while doing some investigating I realized that we have been receiving links from bad neighborhoods such as porn, bogus .edu sites as well as some pharmaceutical sites. We have identified this as negative SEO and have moved forward to disavow the links in Google. However, I would like to know what other measures can be taken to combat this type of negative SEO linking? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dancape0 -
NEED HELP, Figuring Out Ranking Drop!
Hello, I need help from somebody, anybody, in trying to figure out why my site dropped so much for the keyword “wildblue” and “wild blue”. On the week of Feb. 13, 2012, my website jumped from middle of the first page to the fourth page, and then a week or two later jumped completely out of the index (or at least off the top 5 pages). We do not engage in any deceptive practices. Our entire website is centered around this keyword, and we are very relevant, and have informative and continually updated content for visitors. I thought at first we got hit by Panda, but our overall organic traffic has not decreased, it has actually been steadily increasing compared to same time last year. I have tried over the past several months to get us back up, or at least figure out what happened, with no luck. If anyone could advise me on what might have happened, how to correct it, or even has any ideas of how I could figure out what happened I would greatly appreciate it. Website is: http://www.mybluedish.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MyNet0