Whats happened to my rankings
-
Hey everyone, I hope someone might be able to help me figure out what has gone wrong here.
I have a website which was slowly growing in rankings. The domain used was a .net
However, It is a UK based business so I shifted this to a .co.uk domain and then followed googles advice in webmaster tools for moving address. ie, copy site, verify in GWMT and then 301 the old site.
Now the .net had 71 indexed pages out of 73. But after 2 months .co.uk only has 41 out of 73 indexed.
At the end of last week I did change the theme on my website although the content / urls have all remained the same. I have gone to check my rankings this morning and the site has totally bombed. Even the own brand name does not ranking in top 10 pages.
I have not done an major link building at all yet for the site and any links that are there are all high quality from industry related authority sites.
Looking at GWMT the latest links all look ok, nothing spammy but one thing I did notice is that it shows the .net domain providing 193 links via 301and also individually a great deal of the links that point to .net but have shown in .co.uk
What I would like to know if have I actually done something wrong? Should I just kill the 301 (i am loathed to do this as a few of the links to this took me a long time to get), after spending a great deal of money developing my site and just starting to see some nice progress in the natural rankings and google has gone and pulled the carpet from under me. I would understand if I was doing something wrong but I have made strenuous efforts to ensure the linking on this site is whiter that white.
Oh, I have had no warnings in my messages at all.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
-
After spending a great deal of time on the webmaster tools forums I have seen that a fair few people have exactly the same type of problem as me. I cant afford to take risks etc with it so just easier to delete the original domain, put in a reconsideration request and start again.
-
When you are redirecting a website, there will be some kind of loss and gain kinda things. But losing ranking completely is a bit unnerving. However, we need to check your website first, we can provide any feedback.
-
Your rankings MAY come back, but it is a big change in googles eyes, even though it's not. The age of your new domain will keep your rankings down, as will the non direct links to your new site.
Google can and most probably will pull the carpet from under you not matter what you do, so your best bet is to NOT rely on google.
I hope your rankings return quickly, but don't get your hopes up.
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
-
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
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
Technical SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
Suggestions Required to Improve Ranking
My website URL is: http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 Hello, Recently my websites revoked from manual link penalty, impressions in GWT increased from 3K to 9K within 2 months, but most of all keywords are ranking on the 3rd, 4th and 5th page. Please suggest me some onpage changes.
Technical SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk0 -
Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example
Hi All, I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory. My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed. But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs. Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear. Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition) Thank you.
Technical SEO | | georgexx0 -
Pointing Other URL to My Site? Good or bad for ranking.
A few years ago I purchased a few keyword rich domain names and set up some satellite sites. Spammy I now know. What should I do now? I own the domain names for at least another 3 years. Should I point them to my main site or would that hurt my main site ranking?
Technical SEO | | caisson0 -
Are these redirects damaging my rankings
Hi, just been going through my google webmaster tools and i have found a number of soft 404 errors and was shocked to see these redirects going to my home page. | URL | Response Code | Detected |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
| --- | --- | --- |<colgroup><col style="width: 45px;"><col style="width: 80px;"><col><col style="width: 120px;"><col style="width: 90px;"></colgroup>
| | 1 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/475-gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity | | 7/25/13 |
| | 2 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1068-coronation-street-nick-proposes-to-leanne | | 7/28/13 |
| | 3 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1086-coronation-street-fiz-nearly-gets-tyrone-in-trouble-with-kirsty | | 7/28/13 |
| | 4 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1155-coronation-street-kylie-considers-telling-david-about-her-affair | | 7/28/13 |
| | 5 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1157-coronation-street-fiz-is-worried-when-kirsty-pays-her-a-visit | | 7/28/13 |
| | 6 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/750-actress-hilary-duff-is-sued-over-car-accident | | 7/25/13 |
| | 7 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/843-what-your-dogs-bottom-scooting-behaviour%E2%80%99-really-meansI would have thought that the developer who upgraded my site would have either had these blocked or directed them to the correct page. i am now guessing that there are going to be hundreds of these appearing and would like some serious advice.normally with old pages i would have them going to the relevant articles or pages but it seems the developer has redirected hundreds of these to my home page, which i guess is going to confuse google. i would like to know if this will confuse google have all these pages going to my home page.i have tried to find out where the developer in my site has redirected the pages as they are not in my htaccess file, i use joomla.can anyone let me know what i should be doing with these to solve the problemmany thanks |0 -
Sudden drop in ranking google.co.uk ranking
Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Ranking via partial match
If I wanted to rank for "red hot widgets" and my domain was redhot.com, would it be better to obtain backlinks (via "red hot widgets" anchor text) pointing to: A) redhot.com (homepage) or B) redhot.com/widgets Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | martyc0