Drop in Rankings
-
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
-
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
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
-
Sudden ranking Hike For domain
Hello there, I have domain Which got penalized By google Before 2 nd half years & all First Page Ranking Gone Down by 7-8 pages, But Now It got Sudden up after 3 years, So my Question is Will I need Worry or that Can Be Positive Sign For My efforts Given to Website? Will It stay Up?? As i have Updated My website As Told by Moz experts. Thanx, in advance
Technical SEO | | innovative10030 -
Does server location affect rankings?
Hey guys, I'm just wondering whether you can help me out here. We're considering moving our servers to a new country but are a little hesitant to what - if any - SEO impact it would have on our clients' sites. For instance, if all of our clients are UK-based but their server isn't, would that affect their rank in Google UK? Or is it simply just a case of whether moving a server would affect the site speed or not?
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Ranking overseas
I have a well established website that I market as the busness being based in London, how hard would it be for me to start ranking for phrases in America? (An increasing amount of our work is being carried out in America.) What exactly would it entail? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Major drop in visitor numbers?
Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service . We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress. What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits? Would appreciate feedback.
Technical SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Sudden SERP drop?
I'm wondering why my mainpage of my site just disappeared from google while a post from my site ranks at #11 on google. I currently only have 1 .edu backlink to it and the anchor text is my url site : http://www.domain.c0m What is the meaning of this? I checked my on page optimization and I got an A. The only problem I saw with my site was keyword stuffing on the homepage because my posts contain the keyword and its listed 26 times on the homepage but that shouldn't be the problem.
Technical SEO | | 6786486312640 -
Slight Drop after Minor Link Building
Hi, Last week I build around 10-15 high quality related links to my trampoline pads website which was ranking number 2 for "trampoline pads" and number 1 for "trampoline pad". After building the links this week it has dropped in the serps to around number 5-6 for both. Is this an effect of the link building and will it bounce back in? the url is http://www.trampolinepad.co.uk/. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | GardenGamer
Simon0 -
Pages not ranking - Linkbuilding Question
It has been about 3 months since we made some new pages, with new, unique copy, but alot of pages (even though they have been indexed) are not ranking in the SERPS I tested it by taking a long snippet of the unique copy form the page and searching for it on Google. Also I checked the ranking using http://arizonawebdevelopment.com/google-page-rank
Technical SEO | | Impact-201555
Which may no be accurate, I know, but would give some indication. The interesting thing was that for the unique copy snippets, sometimes a different page of our site, many times the home page, shows up in the SERP'sSo my questions are: Is there some issue / penalty / sandbox deal with the pages that are not indexed? How can we check that? Or has it just not been enough time? Could there be any duplicate copy issue going on? Shouldn't be, as they are all well written, completely unique copy. How can we check that? Flickr image details - Some of the pages display the same set of images from flickr. The details (filenames, alt info, titles) are getting pulled form flickr and can be seen on the source code. Its a pretty large block of words, which is the same on multiple pages, and uses alot of keywords. Could this be an issue considered duplication or keyword stuffing, causing this. If you think so , we will remove it right away. And then when do we do to improve re-indexing? The reason I started this was because we have a few good opportunities right now for links, and I was wondering what pages we should link to and try to build rankings for. I was thinking about pointing one to /cast-bronze-plaques, but the page is not ranking. The home page, obviously is the oldest page, and ranked the best. The cast bronze plaques page is very new. Would linking to pages that are not ranking well be a good idea? Would it help them to get indexed / ranking? Or would it be better to link to the pages that are already indexed / ranking? If you link to a page that does not seem to be indexed, will it help the domains link profile? Will the link juice still flow through the site0