Drop in Rankings
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Hello Webmasters,
My site has incurred a sudden dip in rankings across sections. We conducted an analysis and have observed the following two major issues:
- Unnatural Links Penalty: Our site was issued an Unnatural Links Penalty on May 23.
Basically, we have both 'http' and 'https' versions of our website registered on Webmaster tools. Initially, the warning showed up on the 'http' version and thus we started a cleanup by extracting the linking domains and have also filed a reconsideration request once all the spammy domains were removed and rightly disavowed.
Recently, we got another manual action warning on the 'https' version regarding the unnatural links. So we have started with the cleanup activity right away. While analyzing this issue, we came across another major problem regarding the two versions which is our next concern and is mentioned below.
- https Canonical Issue: For more insights, we went through our site’s content and found that our website is following the below pattern
Our 'http' version of the webpages get 301 redirected to the 'https' version. This 'https' version again has a canonical pointing to the 'http' version thus creating a loop.
To conclude, I request your valuable learnings and thoughts on the following:
- Which of these issues are likely to have affected our website’s ranking
- Which version is likely to be preferred by Google (https or http) in our case
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Making sure that the https pages are canonicalized to https pages should be relatively easy and within your control. I would get that done right away.
If the canonicalization wasn't done right in the migration, it makes me wonder what else may not be right with the move to https. You might want to look here https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl, especially the links under "best practices" and double check all that.
The unnatural link clean up and reconsideration request will be more work intensive and take a lot more time and is on some level not entirely within your control, as you are left at Google's mercy.
Both need to be done, but they seem like very different sized problems with very different timelines to payoff.
Best of luck! ... Mike
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