Hi Stephen,

Checking in to see if you had checked the points William has raised above. Do you see anything that could have resulted in the drop? Also, are you comfortable sharing the site here? We might be able to have a look too (feel free to PM if you are not comfortable sharing publicly).

Cheers,

Jane

It can do - as others have said, there is a lot you can get away with with brilliant results if you manage to go undetected, and the linking pages' metrics are good enough to fool search engines about their quality. Spam still ranks - "churn and burn" link development (where you cycle through throw-away domains, ranking one for a short period for a highly-profitable keyword, putting a new site in its place when it is penalised / banned) still legitimately works too, but is obviously not most people's idea of a great long-term business plan if they have any desire to build a brand or use their online brands offline. But if you rank top-three for [buy cialis] for two weeks with a domain you spend $9 on and link development you can spin easily for new sites, you will come away with a healthy profit.

Not saying this is what your competitor is doing, and engaging in outright spam is a bad idea if you don't plan to ditch domain after domain, but it can absolutely still work if quick rankings are all you care about.

How are the indexed numbers looking in WMT today? I see 3,370 results for a site: search on the domain, but those can be iffy in terms of up to date accuracy: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agoautohub.com&oq=site%3Agoautohub.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.798j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8

Not that this should matter too much if you are submitting a sitemap through WMT but your robots.txt file specifies sitemap.xml. There is a duplciate sitemap on that URL (http://goautohub.com/sitemap.xml) - are you using sitemap.php, which you mention here, in WMT? .php can be used for sitemaps, but I would update the robots.txt file to reflect the correct URL - http://i.imgur.com/uSB1P1g.png, whichever is meant to be right. I am not aware of problems with having duplicate sitemaps, as long as they are identical, but I'd use just one if it were me.

Hi Stephen,

Great that you've probably found the cause - this will absolutely cause mass de-indexation. I had a client a year ago canonicalise their entire site (two sites, actually) to the home page. All their rankings and indexed pages dropped off over a matter of about six days (we spotted the tag immediately but the fix went into a "queue" - ugh!).

The bad news is that it took them a long time to get properly re-indexed and regain their rankings (I am talking months, not weeks). Having said this, the sites were nearly brand new - they had very few backlinks and were both less than six months old. I do not believe that an older site would have had as much problem regaining rankings, but I can't be sure and I have only seen that situation take place first-hand once.

Hi Doug,

Checking in on this one - has there been any change in the traffic, or have you uncovered any more information (especially regarding any other updates that might have affected the site) that could have had an effect during that time?

Losing a large chunk of links can hurt a site, but it would be incredibly quick for the link loss and traffic loss to happen on the same day. It would take Google the day to note that all 17k links were gone, then you're probably looking at a number of days for that to actually play out in search results.

Hi Matt,

If you 301 one URL to another, the majority of the metrics previously afforded to the old URL will be transferred to the new URL. Various evidence, some of it quite anecdotal, says that not all the authority passes from the old to the new, but it's certainly the best option you have if you want to change URLs.

If you are moving to a new domain, you can write a rule in your .htaccess file (if using an Apache server) or in your control panel (if using an IIS server) that transfers every URL to its new location. Even if URLs have no external links, this will simply direct any traffic to the old URLs to their new locations.

Hi Doug,

Ah - sorry, I misunderstood about the links disappearing and the rankings suffering on the same day. I am not sure how quickly Ahrefs updates - it might be slightly quicker than Moz, but we're still talking a possible couple of weeks in between. That would be enough to cause rankings and traffic to go down if those links, despite being dynamically generated, were helping before.

Is the significant improvement in traffic coming with improved rankings that you can track? It's incredibly frustrating to have lost keyword data in times like this - you're relying on the rankings you're already tracking through tools like Moz to see which keywords are on the rise...

As someone who used to work at a company on the Recommended list (and who was in charge of the Contact form) - we did get leads. They were about 80% appropriate for the business model, although a lot were too small or wanting short-term projects (my agency generally took on corporate-level accounts for long periods of time). I would say that this sort of linking is different to just linking to clients, e.g. if we then went on to link to an insurance company that came to us through a Moz Recommended referral. But if your SEO company partners with a PPC agency or design firm, provides some services to the other and sends out a relevant link, that seems a little more relevant.

On the other hand, I hate these discussions about what we're "allowed" to link to