Sudden inexplicable drop in important keywords

[SEO_Selectaglaze]

I have been running around in small circles trying to work out why, after a year of careful SEO my companies site has suddenly dropped for all it's main keywords out of the first page to the second or third in our weekly report.

One theory was that five backlinks with a spam rating of 10 might have had an impact - these have been removed, but I have been advised that these may not have been the cause.

Our crawl diagnostics remain squeaky clean.

I add one, carefully checked and optimized (as per Moz recommendations) blog posts once a week and nothing has been changed other than that.

We have slowly and carefully built up a good backlink profile, but as well as the drop in rankings our weekly report also showed that we lost 109 backlinks from the previous week.

I have not been able to find out what I could possibly have done wrong!

I've checked all our crawl reports and webmaster tools and nothing has been flagged up.

I did discover, whilst typing in some longtail keyword phrases that our preview site URLs as well as our live site URLs appeared in SERPs.  I checked with our web agency who assured me that this was fine, but that they had put a redirect on these yesterday.  I thought this was a bit strange as that seems odd as we have been live for a year.  I guess my question is could the fact that these redirects have not been active (until yesterday) have any bearing on what has happened or is this completely unrelated?

Thanks

Catherine - very stressed Mozer

[Deacyde]

The rel canonical tag to the root of the site could work, but would be better to have a metatag like

<metaname="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> </metaname="robots">

For each page that is developmental and not supposed to be live. This will tell google to just ignore these pages, that they are not ready to be indexed and be part of the internet.

It's generally not recommended to do a rel canonical to the homepage, just because it's saying that every page on the developmental site is from the homepage, as well google is still indexing these pages and this could cause issues later on. It's just better to noindex nofollow the dev pages before they go live, since then you can migrate the new to the old and not have some huge issue later on.

I send something like this to your private message as well.

[SEO_Selectaglaze]

Hello Deacyde

Could I ask you another question related to this issue?

The web developer has now added a rel canonical (I'm assuming to the root of our site).

My question is, is it good practice to add a rel canonical to a site which has a development (preview) site, where there will potentially be two urls for each page (the development page and the live page) within serps?

I was told by the web developer that this was not an issue and that it was unimportant.

Is this the case or have they simply forgotten to do it and are now dismissing it as non issue?

That's my question - I hope you don't mind me following up with you - it's just you know the story from the start.

Kind regards

Catherine (work with Zoe)!

[Deacyde]

You're very welcome, glad this helped.

As a web developer and SEO I understand far too often that the two worlds are not in constant communication about many of the things that matter. As well aren't always up to par with latest knowledge from each opposing fields.

This far too often leads to those moments where things happen.

Glad you monitored these and spoke up to seek answers, if not you, who else would have? That's always the scary part.

[SEO_Selectaglaze]

Hello Deacyde

I'm writing to thank you again for you help.  I asked our web design agency to remove the 92 offending urls yesterday.  They did as requested but I got a curt email a close of play last evening telling me that the remove process would not be immediate and the preview site urls where not the reason for the drop in ranking.

Today, I checked and all the urls for the preview site have disappeared.  Our visibility has risen 45% and we are now ranking #2 for our main keyword phrase (we had dipped down to 10 last week).

So thank you very much for you advice and constructive help

Kind regards

Catherine Joyce

[Deacyde]

Hello,

Ok, that certainly can cause some ranking issues, if persay you've for whatever reason got both the preview / development site being indexed as well as the live site, that will confused google and possibly mean that you'd either loose ranking for those keywords or even not be considered at all for that keyword query.

Something that could be tried is to go into Google's Webmaster Tools and click on Google Index > Remove URL, this is a temporary url removal tool that google has incase of mistakes and such. Might be worth it to have the preview sites you've seen indexed entered in the URL removal tool and even do a site:domain.com ( replace the domain.com with the preview site domain ) to see what all is being indexed still and maybe even add those as well.

You're main goal is to basically tell google to forget those URLs, as long as the preview site has noindex nofollow on it now and you remove those currently indexed urls in WMTs you might be able to recover some of that rank loss if not all.

I'd also do some research to see if competitors have made any recent changes that would increase their visibility but to ultimately remember that there is signs of a google update release brewing as well, so if the above actions yield no results, next best option is to wait a few weeks while tackling other tasks.

Hopefully this has helped

Here is some site migration guides to help in the future as well to prevent this kinda issue:

https://www.branded3.com/blog/website-migration-guide-building-an-seo-checklist-for-moving-your-site/

https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/06/02/how-to-retain-at-least-95-of-your-organic-traffic-after-a-site-redesign/

[SEO_Selectaglaze]

Hello Deacyde

When I'm talking about the preview site, I'm referring to the site we build our site in.  When we are happy we then build live.  However I have noticed that we now have both the preview url and the live url (with the same content) appearing in serps.  When I pointed it out the the web design agency who sold us the software and manage the site they told me that they had set up the redirect yesterday (the same day I told them about the rankings drop)!

[Deacyde]

When you say preview site do you mean your development site as in when you do redesigns, is the preview site domain where you host the redesign site before it's live?

Also, not sure if you have noticed but there seems to be some testing or even a Google update in the works, and with Google still yet to release Penguin never know.

I've been experiencing 1 to 2 page dances with keyword rankings over the last 6 days for our major keywords, some appearing on page 2 at the beginning of the day and then appearing on page 4 around the end of the day, doing this consistently over the last 3 days.

So certainly seems SERPs is being adjusted, just not sure as to the why.

If you have been concerned about keyword changes over the passed week, I'd say to hold tight that the rest of us are experiencing this as well and just are in the mercy of Google.

If it's been longer than that, then you might have competition that's doing things better, got to remember that for every site that increases in rank, the rest of the sites adjust to that.

**Edited to add the link of the recent update chatter: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-chatter-22306.html