Drastic rankings drop
-
SOS SEOMozzers
hello all. I woke up this morning to find out our rankings for two main keywords:
1. internet marketing firm
2. marketing firmdropped from being #8 on google to not being invthe top 50.
last week we upgraded the site to HTML5 . We checked the on page via pro tools and everthing seemed fine.
We checked Google analytics ( traffic was beginning to fall) and we checked webmaster tools - ( there were not critical issues etc)
So now i am bewildered as to what possible happened to wipe us of the search.
Please can you help - the site is www.gunshotdigital.com
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me Keri - i really appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me i appreciate it Omarzee
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me and helping Robert. I appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
pl could you tell me who you are talking abut? Thank you.
Also it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me Journey man.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
Vijay
First and most importantly is you have a huge problem with page load times. Huge.
In YSlow you are grading out at a D. I have attached an image as the problems are too numerous to list. Your issue is because on home page you are close to timing out and on others you are not resolving at all. As I ran test, it was taking your Vimeo feed a loooonnnngggg time in the test. Don't know if that is part of problem or not.
Given the issues and the title tags, etc. I don't see how you were ranking that highly. With a page load time of at least 10 seconds, you are not going to rank.You need to add expires headers, need to move java script to the bottom of page, need a CDN, need to get rid of all the cookies, etc.
Even after the site was cached on my machine (new macpro 17 with solid state drive, 16 gigs of sdram, etc) it took over 8 seconds to load. This is the problem.
Keri had a great suggestion with checking in the main browsers for compatibility. I noticed in Chrome the video got to where it was hesitating a lot but not in firefox.
Another thought is since this in on a WP platform, did you by any chance change anything in the coding on the theme? Can't think of other reasons for page load problem and the absence of pages all together. I know that the only url I got to resolve was the home page.
Hope it helps.
-
By the way, it looks like you have an SEO consultant on staff. I just clicked on the gal who talks about SEO at your firm. How about asking her?
-
I'd have to agree with Keri on the feel of where I'm landing when going to the site. I thought it was a commercial for givenchy as well.
It's a beautiful site though. I was considering revamping my personal site to be something like this.
If there's any manual raters who got a hold of it, maybe that's why they de-ranked you if they got the same feel as Keri and I did.
When I do a source check on the meta description, I see:
name="description" content="" />
i.e., nothing. I'm a little surprised you were #8 with this and a title of:
<title></span><span>Gunshot Digital | Gunshot Digital</title>
I looked at your backlinks and it makes sense why you were ranking now. But maybe a bunch of your on page got screwed up from your new site? Take some time going through all of the on page factors and make sure they're all o.k.
I thought the recent change in the algo was about ads showing up towards the top and the stuff above the fold not matching search queries were punishing 1% of the sites. This just seems like a) not matching search intent at first glance and b) on page elements getting screwed up, but I only spent a few minutes looking.
-
Hi Vjay,
You might do a site:gunshotdigital.com in Google. There's a bunch of pages that are indexed and not resolving / timing out. If I go to the blog page, then try to go to About, I get a page not found. I'm having a hard time finding any content on your site when I go in through the main page, and the site is slow to load. Have you crawled the page as Googlebot (via Google Webmaster Tools) to make sure the site is crawlable?
The meta description that Google shows when I do the site: command includes Very Irresistible Givenchy. I don't get the sense that I've landed on a page that has anything to do with an internet marketing firm, I get the sense that I've landed on a movie trailer or something, then I figure out it's a perfume ad.
In the source code I'm seeing some text for the search engines, but I'm not seeing anything as a user. Have you checked your site in a variety of browsers to make sure it acts as expected? Have you put in redirects from the old site? Have you made sure the title tags and meta descriptions are correct? Have you reviewed your robots.txt for the platform you're using?
-
I've noticed a significant drop in some of my sites as well. I think it's because of a recent Google algo update (has happened in the last week to week and a half) and a even more recent data refresh. It's affected a lot of webmasters I know, some positive, more negative.
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
-
Any risks involved in removing a sub-domain from search index or completely taking down? Ranking impact?
Hi all, One of our sub-domains has thousands of indexed pages but traffic is very less and irrelevant. There are links between this sub-domain to other sub domains of ours. We are planning to take this subdomain completely. What happens if so? Google responds for this with a ranking change? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
How to optimise non-homepage to beat homepage in rankings? Are we on right path?
Hi all, We have a page with "keyword" in slug like "website.com/keyword" where our homepage is "website.com". This "keyword" difficulty is very high, so every minor factor contributing here and we have noticed competitors' pages with "keyword" in URL ranking. Then we also planned to rank this page "website.com/keyword" and interlinked high, so it'll be favoured by Google which didn't happen. So may be we should reduce the interlinking to homepage and optimise this keyword page more to rank for this keyword. Still I doubt the chances of ranking this page is difficult and need much more. How to make this page ranked replacing homepage? If there are no options for this, we are planning to redirect our homepage to this page; so Google will slowly adopt it. Suggestions please. Thank you.
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
What might be exact reasons to vary rankings in countries
Our website ranking always fluctuates from US and India. Our primary visitors are from US followed by India. We can see 10 ranking positions difference in these countries whenever we did some changes. Why this? More precisely to say, rankings are inversely proportional like rank drops in other country while improved in one country and vice versa. What could be the possibility? We been facing this from an year and searching for someone who could really make a move on it.
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Heavy rank drop post migration
Our website has been migrated from Joomla to Wordpress at the end of 2015 and we have tasted the loss of 20% of the traffic. After an year at the end of 2016, we have relaunched the website in same word press with new theme. Again we lost n rankings and traffic. I would say ranking. Because mostly people land on our website by searching for our brand. Now we almost went invisible for "keywords" we been targeting. We have checked all the possibilities like duplicate content, redirection, alt tags, speed, canonicals, backlinks, etc..and couldn't find what is hitting us. What could be such strong factor hitting us ?
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Website Redesign and Migration to Squarespace killed my Ranking
My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace. I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host. And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case? And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks
Web Design | | StillLearning1 -
301 Redirect ! Joomla Pages, Already ranking. ( just wanted to change the url
hey guys hope everyone had a new year. I am ranking for a page on my site that i want to ( not specifically move ), but just change the url name: It is too long i think and i want to move it from one portion of my architecture to another menu. I have never physically done a 301 redirect myself, always had someone do it for me. I wanted some pointers. Since it is a fairly new site 4 months old! What are my options. Do i need to 301 redirect the page, if i am changing the Structure and AI of my site, or can i just change the url as is and it will still get ranked? How do i keep that url put delete the page and redirect it ? Sorry its very simple but i wanted to get the communities help to continue on ! Best Wishes HAmpig
Web Design | | BizDetox0 -
Site Ranks on Page 1 - Would launching new site hurt that
Hello, I currently have a website ranking in the top 7 for my main keyword. The website was built in 2004 and is definitely outdated, yet still ranks very high and brings in business. If i launched a new site on this domain, what would happen to my rankings? Would they drop? would they rise? If i don't launch the new site, will this site eventually drop due to being old and outdated? Any advice would be helpful...
Web Design | | Prime850 -
$100 to who discovers why our rankings drop
I'm offering $100 to the SEO that pinpoints why our rankings dropped. Here's details: Some very good people have this site: nlpca(dot)com and it has dropped for many of it's keywords, including the keywords "NLP" "NLP Training" and many other keywords. We dropped from 19th to 42nd for the term "NLP". Here's what I'm doing about it: (1) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the titles reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more. (2) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the URLs reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more. (3) We're redoing the home page as (1) above. (4) We're fixing the 404s (5) We're shortening the titles that are too long, and we're thinking of reducing the home page keyword count to 3 keyword phrases, although 4 keywords work in all of our other sites that have the keywords showing up at least 3 times in the content. If it is something else, and you pinpoint it, and if because of you, we rise back up to around 19th (more or less) again then we'll give you $100 payable via paypal as a thank you. I'm going to leave this question 'unanswered' until this is resolved.
Web Design | | BobGW0