Rankings dropped overnight
-
We have been doing some optimization for a client. They were not ranked for many keywords before we started, and up until last week 10 were on page 1, with the the last few following closely behind. Everything was moving in the right direction.
In this weeks ranking report every one has dropped significantly and some 30 places in one week. We have made no significant changes to the site in the last few weeks.
The only issue we picked up on was the slow site speed on their current host 1&1.
Any ideas what could have caused the site to have lost ground on all rankings so significantly?
-
Thanks everyone for the comments.
- We have manually checked the SERP's most look fairly accurate, some are higher ranked than actually quoted.
- We checked robots.txt all was fine.
- We did have a quick look in WMT for any crawl errors. They were showing 32 404 not found which we have corrected (mainly old links to tags on the blog on their old website), The new site has been up around 4 months a d we redirected all main page URLS to the new ones
- No keyword stuffing
- Maybe a honeymoon period. But they were ranked for most keywords before, all we did was improve on the on site SEO.
Think we will monitor it. Its only the first ranking report back that all keywords had dropped.
Thanks a lot for all the feedback.
-
Self made links on just 5 sites is unlikely to cause you to be drastically penalized. I'd still remove these links but I'd look for something else. As David Liu asked, make sure you confirm that there actually is a ranking drop and it's not just something that Moz is reporting.
Have a good look for technical issues. For example, make sure you haven't accidentally noindexed pages or altered your robots.txt to block Google. It sounds silly, but I've seen it happen.
How long have you been ranking on page 1? If this was a fairly recent thing then it's possible that was a honeymoon phase. Sometimes Google allows new sites to experience the first page for a while and then drops them to their correct rankings.
Also look at any recent changes you have made. For example, have you changed urls? Have you done any keyword stuffing?
Slow hosting for a short time period shouldn't make any drastic differences. However, if you were completely offline for a good amount of time that could affect your rankings but things should improve quickly.
One final tip would be to check WMT for crawl errors. Sometimes you can get some hints there as to what is going on.
-
Did you manually check your rankings? Moz is known to post massive drops like that despite little to no real movement in the SERPs.
-
HI Martin,
Thanks for info. I have checked Webmaster tools straight away and don't see any notices. I have checked back on the report done by the other company and they have listed the same article on the following 5 sites:
- http://www.freenewspos.com
- http://press.designshuffle.com
- http://www.allvoices.com
- http://www.pressnews.biz
- http://www.forpressrelease.com
Think I will get the removed and see how it goes...
-
Hi,
What you've described sounds like a standard penalty for 'Unnatural Links' as Google would call it. If you've submitted the same article to multiple sites, or a spun article to multiple sites it's highly likely that this is the cause. Sorry!
If you have access to Google Webmaster Tools, then go to the 'Manual Action' section and if you've been manually penalized, it will tell you there.
I recommend deleting the articles where possible and disavowing all the sites that you submitted the articles to, then filing a 'Reconsideration Request' with Google.
If there's no manual action, still delete the articles. Google now has negative link juice from poor quality links, so even without the manual action, this could still be the cause.
Hope that helps!
-
To add, the only thing I believe it can be is some links that we had built back to the site by another company local to us.
They did some directory submission & article creation and sharing which was completed on the 14th of April. So this would maybe tie in with the recent change in rankings.
Is there any way to see if these links are damaging the sites reputation?
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
-
Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?
I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords. I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them. I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic. My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
New Pages - Stable Rankings
Hello, Not a direct question really, just a poll really of your experience - I work with a few companies and have noticed recently that there seems to be an increase in the time it takes to go from a) showing up in the index (quickly within a day or two) to b) getting a stable ranking. I see spikes over the first few weeks (even up to 3 months) before the rankings eventually settle. Have you noticed the same, is it taking longer to achieve a stable ranking, do you work with any sites that get indexed, rank, and stay in the same slot for moderately competitive terms comparing to a year or tow ago? Interested to hear other people's experience and how long we expect to wait for new content to settle Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | xoffie0 -
Lost Page Rank after directing http:// to WWW?
Hi I am trying to redirect all the non www urls to WWW. After I redirected them, most of my category page PR are dropped to 0. Can someone please tell me if this is the normal after effect after the redirect? Example url: this is PR2 before the redirect http://www.ilovebodykits.com/category/95/Body_Kits_Front_Bumpers.html
On-Page Optimization | | ilovebodykits0 -
Does keyword usage in the footer have an effect on how high a page ranks?
My client has a lot of text about their company in their footer. Is the text in the footer associated with the on page keyword usage and density for all pages or none of the pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Santaur0 -
Does a phone number in the title tag hurt your rankings in SERP?
Hi Mozzers, One of my client is a carpet cleaner and I was wondering if adding a phone number into the title tags would hurt our rankings . I am asking because the client has mentioned it and that we do have some space to add a phone number into the tag. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Moving Top rank Page urls off my Home page and nesting them on one page? Good idea?
I am basically trying to cut down the amount of links on my home page to make it less eye boggling and move stuff around. So i have of my Urls on my home page that lead to pages that rank very well within google. My questions is can i remove those urls to a separate page to group them together and then showcase that one link to that page on my home page. Is that a good idea or i am going to loose my link juice and position in search? The physical urls on those pages wont change at all.
On-Page Optimization | | Dante130 -
Some of my pages are ranking for terms which I want other pages to rank for. What can I do to effectively switch the ranking?
Some of the pages are ranking for terms I have optimised other pages for. The pages which are ranking are quite rightly falling, because they aren't optimised for the terms they're showing for. However, I have pages which are optomised for those terms. How do I switch the SERPS to the page I want?
On-Page Optimization | | GlobalLingo1 -
Does a page's url have any weight in Google rankings?
I'm sure this question must have been asked before but I can't find it. I'm assuming that the title tag is far more important than the page's url. Is that correct? Does the url have any relevance to Google?
On-Page Optimization | | rdreich490