Rankings drop from the new update

[Silviu]

Hello,

I've noticed some big ranking downs on important keywords, from the last Google update, and don't really know what seams to be the problem, but have an assumption. In April 2015 we had 3.000.000 pages indexed by Google, and 80% of them had duplicated content for about 90% of it. The site I'm talking about is http://nobelcom.com/. The duplicated content came from variations between calling from and calling to selections, because each of this selection was making a new url (ex. nobelcom.com/caling from/calling to). If "calling from" and calling to were the same country the url was nobelcom.com/calling-from, but after you chosen another calling to, the url become like the one in the example. To solve this I've decided to keep the nobelcom.com/calling-from urls and for different calling to country to display the content trough a javascript, because it was the same, it changed only the country names and the rates. I thought that this change will help us with the duplicate content, and still deliver our client what they are interested in, without affecting the UX, and also reducing the link juice dilution because we had 3.000.000 indexed by Google and most of them with no added value

Can this be the reason for the drops? Now we have 590.000 pages indexed by Google.

[Silviu]

I've made a disavow, and I keep an eye for bad link every month. We had a manual penalty and solve it in July. I see rankings downs for "phone cards" "calling cards", "international phone card", "international calling card" and other variations, and it happen from 10-13 January, when the new core algo was released.

[evolvingSEO]

Hello

There could be a lot of issues. It's possible the way you're handling URLs can be a factor.

What specific keywords are you seeing rankings down for? And what was the exact date?

Also, I think links could be a big factor here. There are many with exact match anchors (calling cards, phone cards etc) according to open site explorer. Some of them I checked, and they look like they are on spammy sites (like this for example thenewyorkads .com)

Have you done a link disavow and/or cleanup?

[Silviu]

It is normal that the number of pages to drop, that was my idea, because the old urls,nobelcom.com/caling from/calling to, were redirected with 301 to the ones like http://nobelcom.com, so the dropping of the pages was normal, and I wanted that, to reduce the dilution.

No manual action, no bad link, I check my link profile every 2 weeks.

[DHS_SH]

Sounds very much like this fairly large change may be attributed to the alteration of your URL structure/process

Its weird that the number of pages has dropped, so it might be worth logging into Google WebMaster Tools and looking at the "Blocked resources" tab or using the robots.txt checker to see if you are preventing spiders from crawling your website (maybe the script you've added is blocking the search engines)

While you in GMT it is also worth looking at your inbound links to ensure these aren't spammy and double check that you haven't got any Manual webspam warnings (unlikely to be this but worth checking)