Ranking dropped off massively: 25 August
-
HI have been working on the site http://www.schoolguide.co.uk/ we had something odd happen around the 25 of August our ranking just tanked.
- Now there was no warning in webmaster tools.
- Moz weather forecast didn't show anything crazy.
- We didn't do anything major to site.
The site lost pretty much all it's long tail ranking and about 5% of the indexed pages. What could cause this? The only thing of prominence we did was get a link from huffington post article.
Thanks again everyone
Ed
-
Hi Ed,
Something similar just happened to a website I am managing. Did you ever figure out what happened to your website? I do not have a manual action email in my GWT inbox. I got hit September 13th and today is the 22rd and still no email. I am in Argentina land www.google.com.ar and all updates come later than in the USA.
I am also thinking it is a server issue. Got this message from GWT when trying to verify the Google Analytics code.
The connection to your server timed out.
Thanks
-
Have you checked your Google Business pages. Google just launched a major update which is driven by Google Local pages.
This might be a possible source. If your local searches dropped off then it could be that you have not got your Google Business, (was Places) up to date etc.
Keep us posted as this is interesting
Bruce
-
The ranking drop was in Google.co.uk. So Pigeon is possible, but it wasn't a small drop it's fell off the face of the earth.
The search terms we were looking at were localised though:
<colgroup><col width="246"></colgroup>
| schools in low garth |
| schools in low hawsker |
| schools in low hutton |
| schools in low mill |
| schools in lower bebington |
| schools in maentwrog |
| schools in mallwyd |
| schools in manfield |
| schools in margrove park |
| schools in marlesford |
| schools in marsett |
| schools in masham |
| schools in methersgate |
| schools in minllyn |
| schools in nantlle |
| schools in naughton |Averaging around 10 th. We are a directory so we didn't have Google local listing entries. Do you think it could be pigeon? The local page are often like this:
|
http://www.schoolguide.co.uk/best-schools-in/Seacroft
|
-
Hello EdBen...
That date seems a bit "after" the July 24th Google Pigeon update...about a month or so...but can I ask, was this rankings drop at google.com or google.co.uk?
Up here in google.ca land (Canada that is) we tend to get the changes to the major google.com algo about a few weeks after...so while Pigeon did change many things (like local listing packs, local directories, carousel items etc.) it took those weeks to be "seen" up here...
Could then, Pigeon be the culprit for your drop? Have you been able to drill-down to see if your own site has been re-ranked based on IBLs (incoming back links with authority) or new local directory reviews from say Yelp etc?
-
Your robots.txt looks good. Check your Webmaster Tools for any link domains that are spammy (such as links4you.com). It's possible you got a penalty. Are you just now noticing because you looked at Google Analytics today?
It's possible this is a link penalty. However, the only suspect linking domain I see is: http://www.cannylink.com/ - the sole purpose of that website is just for links. That is not valuable. I suggest that you look closer (I looked for 2 minutes) and see if there are any other spammy linking domains.
To remove these spammy linking domains: use the Google Disavow Tool within Webmaster Tools.
I hope this helps.
Cole
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
-
Webpage is not ranking
https://www.nextheadphone.com/oneodio-a10-hybrid-review/ I just published a new article. Keyword is : OneOdio A10 Hybrid Review Before writing the article, I researched that This is Easy keyword. I should rank as soon as I publish the article. After publishing the article my Current rank is #32 Why its not ranking? Any idea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NextHeadphone0 -
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
Does you page need to be unique to rank
What I mean by unique is : Let's imagine I want to rank one "seo ranking factors." In order to compete do I need to have (in terms of design) that is totally different than everything out there or can I rank with a page that is presented in a very similar way than everything out there but with different content. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Sudden Rankings Drop for Good Keywords.. Did I Do This? Please Help :(
Hello, I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either. Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada). My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41). I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer) The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
New pages not ranking
I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better. The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages. Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
No Google Ranking..yet
I have een working on my site for soem time. Trying to take the right steps to achieve good ranking in the long run and present the information we need to showcase to prospective clients. After several months I still see no ranking at all and I'm wondering if its becasue the front page is using a design similar to a one page website design? If anyone can provide some insight I would appreciate it. Even the smallest nudge i nthe right direction. We are also developing some new content for a blog and expanded written content for our services page. http://thatworksdesign.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bvrettski0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Penguin 2.0 update, ranking dropped. Advice needed!
Hello After another penguin 2.0 update the website i've been working on dropped in rankings,some of keywords that i ranked in #1 are now on second and third page, you can see this screenshot here http://screencast.com/t/MramoXgTr 95% of my competitors were not even effected with this update at all, most of them don't even optimize their website for SEO, rather they use paid directories. First thing i did is analyzed my backing profile using OSE, to my surprise i found a lot of low quality domains pointing to my pages with a keyword in anchor text. A lot of them blog commenting and low quality article directories. Since i don't have control over these links and i cant remove them i used Disavow tool to do the job. For the past 3 months, i've been doing a lot of hight quality link building; such as
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentR
press releases once in 2 months, squidoo lens and hubpages 3 posts a week for each keyword, youtube video, in fact my youtube video still ranks in #3 for high competitive search, i was involved in social media, posting tweets every week and Facebook posts. I really hope that someone can help me here with a good advice on getting my rankings back here's my website, let me know what do you think about it. Thank You0