Can setting up a Domain Forward lead to sudden drop in Rankings?
-
Hi there,
Our website www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk has been ranking on pages 1 and 2 of Google for the past 12 - 18 months for a number of our key search terms. There has been the odd fluctuation but nothing major.
On Wednesday of this week (2 days ago), we purchased the domain www.porcelainsuperstore.com and without thinking I enabled Domain Forwarding on this domain to go to www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk
Today our rankings have shown quite dramatic drops, e.g- Wood effect tiles position 1 to position 3
- Metro tiles position 9 to position 12
- Quartz tiles position 4 to position 9
- Floor tiles position 14 to position 25
Can anyone advise on this? Do you think the domain forward could have created this sudden drop?
I have now disabled the domain forwarding but am worried that this might be irreversible in Googles eyes?I have now disabled the domain forward - I assume this is the right thing to do?
Any help much appreciated.Thanks
Ben
-
Hi there.
Well, 3 spots drop in rankings is surely not "quite dramatic drop". It can happen for many-many reasons. What I would recommend though is to check if the domain name you have purchased ever had (or still has) penalty or spam issues. Usually, if everything is clean, it wouldn't affect your rankings.
As for irreversibility - nothing is irreversable. However, if that domain was in fact the reason of ranking drop due to spam issues, then it might take longer to recover.
Yes, disabling would be the first thing to try if you think that was the reason. See how your rankings react, if there are any sudden changes. However, I do recommend to check other factors like your backlink profile changes, content cnahges, your competition SEO changes and so on.
Hope this helps.
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
-
How to analyze a drop in featured snippets?
Our company site is, in general, performing great in organic search, but we've lost about 10 featured snippets throughout the last 5-6 months, and I'd like to know how to best approach analyzing this.
Algorithm Updates | | vibelingo0 -
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br mented in the key word, how can I find out why at and what to do to get back? He fell after he put the google analytic code on all pages of the site, it may have acid? Meu site caiu da 1º para a 5º Pagna do google br em tadas as palavra chaves, como posso descobrir o motivo e oque fazer para voltar ? Ele caiu depois que coloquei o codigo do google analytic em todas as paginas do site, pode ter cido isso ?
Algorithm Updates | | Guedes0 -
18 years later, Page Rank 6 Drops to 0, All +1s disappear, Scrapers outrank us
18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6 Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery. Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s. I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank? What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.
Algorithm Updates | | seoagnostic0 -
Why is a sub page ranking over home page?
Hey guys! I was wondering whether any of you Mozzers out there could shed some light on this query for me. Currently, one of our clients is ranking (on the second page, at least) for one of their target keywords. However, it's not the home page that is ranking - it is a sub page. I guess you could say both are targeted to rank for the keyword in question but the home page has a considerable more PA (+10) and has a lot more incoming links so it's a little bit baffling as to why the sub page has been given an advantage. Does anyone know why this may be? Also, on a secondary note, should I continue to build links to the home page or target this particular sub page to have a better chance of ranking higher for the keyword? Any advice on this welcome! Cheers!
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve0 -
In the body of index page i want to be able to add text that can be picked up by crawlers but I do not want these text to be visible? How can I code this?
in the body of index page i want to be able to add text that can be picked up by crawlers but I do not want these text to be visible? How can I code this?
Algorithm Updates | | FinindDesign0 -
SEO updates and rank changes
We have been updating page titles and meta descriptions for a client (not changing ANY links and the content we are replacing is "fluff," no major keywords or any relevant information) yet in the past few weeks, rankings have plummeted. I used the SEOMoz grader to check and make sure we have the keywords in there, in the right places for the updated page source info, and we're getting A's yet for those same keywords, the website is nowhere to be found. For example for the phrase "organic t shirts," we get an A for this page: http://greenpromotionalitems.com/organic-t-shirts.htm but when searching organic t shirts, no Green Promotional Items... Ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | laidlawseo0 -
Is it hurting my seo ranking if robots.txt is forbidden?
robots.txt is forbidden - I have read up on what the robots.txt file does and how to configure it but what about if it is not able to be accessed at all?
Algorithm Updates | | Assembla0
