A huge drop in rankings since last 10 days, and not recovered yet.
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a serious topic to discuss and want help from the experts here.
Our website has 6 PR and we have been consistency staying at the top for very competitive terms in the niche.
Since last Friday (24th February, 2012) we have been facing massive fluctuation in the rankings for most of the keywords we are focusing on. After this fall, we checked the following details but didn’t find any serious/critical issue that might be contributing towards these fluctuations:-
- We analyzed Google webmaster tools, there’s no update/warning from Google regarding any negative activity and other things seem to be normal.
- We checked our website through site search (site: www.domain.com) and found that we haven’t lost any indexed pages and things appear normally as they used to. So, we are sure that we haven’t been banned or penalized.
- We also cross verified our link building and other promotional activities and we didn’t find anything suspicious that could lead to such a big fluctuation.
The drop is really big, some keywords went to 5th or 6th page from top 3 position; some keywords are not in top 200 or 300 spots which were usually staying put between 5th to 10th position. We have analyzed a lot but haven’t come to know the reason why we are facing this fluctuation.
Our website is 4 years old and this kind of fluctuation has happened for the first time.
Has anyone faced this kind of issue before?
I’m looking forward to your support in identifying this trouble.
Thanks
-
Unless you're mega-popular (like Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc), I would expect things like this from time to time.
I tend to find that precipitous drops are due to a shift in algorithms. You might be going "well duh", but it's important to note that an algorithm change can cause shifts like this on a temporary basis while either the indexation process catches up or Google evaluates a set of changes (internally or by using quality evaluators). My bet is it's the latter since Google announced they rolled out a lot of new changes (which is not something Google does on a regular basis). That, to me, screams "testing" (remember that Panda did the same thing to a lot of sites about 1 year ago). Eventually the SERPs return to "normal".
That having been said, are you sitting still? If so, that's not going to help you in the long run. Add links and content. Keep up with your competitors. Remember, they want to sell your products as much as you do.
-
Hi Mark,
A couple of suggestion to check:
- Long load times of pages during Google’s last crawl.
- Pages with poor content on bring the whole site down – caused by recent Google updates
Hope these help.
K
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
-
Page Rank grows, but Trust falls
Why it's happening? How to fix it? This problem is on this website http://www.skydas.lv http://www.m-lux.lv Supporta metāla durvis dzīvoklim ngm_445922407.jpg
Technical SEO | | Felter0 -
Added Schema and Rankings Went Down
Hello - We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
Technical SEO | | Erin_IAN0 -
Detailed ranking question for the pros
Hi Community, We've been struggling with the search engine ranking of our SEO optimised homepage for a number of months. I'm going to provide an overview of the page stats in hope that somebody might have a suggestion as to what the problem might be or where we should be focusing our efforts. I have also provided the stats of our main competitor as I have no idea why they are ranking so high based on the stats provided: URL in question: https://mysite.com On Page Grade for our targeted keyword: A Domain authority: 36 Page authority: 45 Root Doman Links: 57 Total Links: 634 SE Ranking: #17 Competitor URL in question: https://competitorsite.com On Page Grade for same targeted keyword: A Domain authority: 32 Page authority: 43 Root Doman Links: 28 Total Links: 919 SE Ranking: #1 Another strange this about our homepage is that a second tier page on our site is actually ranking higher in the search ranking for the Targeted Keyword (#9), even though this page has not been optimised and has an On Page Grade of F. Does anybody have any suggestions of what we might be overlooking or what the issue here might be? -JF
Technical SEO | | ERpro0 -
Need suggestions on what might be causing rankings drop from top5 to "not in 50"?
Hi All, Below a list of 4 keywords & respective URLs which raked in top 3 to 5 till around 2 months back, now all these are "not in top 50", and I need help with finding the exact reason. Can you all please help with suggestions on what I should be looking for under the hood. Oticon Hearing Aids:http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/oticon-hearing-aids.aspx Phonak Hearing Aids:http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/phonak-hearing-aids.aspx Widex Hearing Aids: http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/widex-hearing-aids.aspx Resound Hearing Aids:http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/siemens-hearing-aids.aspx Thanks in advance, any help will be very much appreciated, checked all the basic stuff, and appreciate that there is scope for improvement in terms of page content, internal links etc etc, but cant figure out the reason for such a massive drop in such a short while given the fact, that the these URLs ranked in top 3 to 5 for a few years till 2 months back. Please help!!!
Technical SEO | | LolhcSEO0 -
Recovering from Blocked Pages Debaucle
Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Google ranking downgraded
On Sept 29th our website 'keyword' rankings who totally destroy. We were always #1 to #2 for these keywords 1. listing presentation
Technical SEO | | RandyRoussie
2. real estate presentation Our website is: http://www.agentpresentations.com We asked Google through Webmaster Tools to reconsider the site and they replied back saying nothing was wrong. We run Google Adwords and we contacted them and they looked at the keywords and sent screenshots to us showing the ranking we still there. But they are not... as proven in Webmaster tools. So Adwords told us to ask Webmaster Tools to reconsider the site again. Nothing yet... What do you suggest?0 -
Organic Traffic Dropping. 404s found. Is this it?
My organic traffic has dropped 20% in the past month. I noticed some major 404 errors today on a very commonly clicked link on our website. I had the developers fix the error today, but then I thought I'd look in Google Webmaster Tools. That's when I saw the attached picture. 2454 404 errors were found. We only have 1500 pages in the entire Google index. Could this massive amount of 404 errors attribute to this drop in organic traffic? dU240 dU240
Technical SEO | | davewjones0 -
What caused my huge drop in search ranking?
On February 8th, 2012 my site's non-branded search traffic dropped overnight by over 80%. It appears I've been hit by a Google penalty. I submitted a reconsideration request and one of Google's staff replied letting me know it was NOT a manual penalty. So it's clearly a result of an algorithm. What is the cause? I haven't made significant changes to the website in the previous months do to being out of the country and the holidays. I'm extremely careful not to out source SEO so there is no chance of questionable link building strategies, unless my competitor launched an attack on my site. I've considered these possible causes: Duplicate content - My site had some redundancy from a marketing plan before Google Panda launched. Last month, I removed all duplicate content. Unnatural link building - I've been moving slowly my site, page by page, from adbio.com to bioworldusa.com after a brand change. Perhaps the 301 redirects triggered a flag in Google's algorithm. I've since removed all redirects to see if that will fix the issue. Poor User Experience - I recently upgraded my Drupal CMS and had to change themes. Currently my theme is an ugly, grey theme which may cause a higher than usual bounce rate. I've been trying to compensate by making sure the content is high quality. The penalty affected these website: www.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) blog.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) www.adbio.com (2/17/12)
Technical SEO | | bioworld1