Sudden big drop in ranking - update, tech issue or penalty?
-
We are managing a website that was previously consistently ranking on P1 or top position on P2 and over the weekend (28th Jan) suddenly dropped to P5.
What is the best way of ascertaining whether this was down to an update, a tech issue or a penalty? There are other pages on the site (sub-folders) which are still continuing to rank well on the site for similar kws.
Regards,
V -
Thanks Greg & Marie,
The site in question was acquired a few months' ago a fairly old site on a WP engine and had a couple of tech issues at the start but they were fixed and seemingly all was back to normal.
I have since gone on and disavowed some poor backlinks and also fixed some 'Missing Author Missing Updated' issues that were popping up on GSC
No crawl errors and no Manual Actions showing up, hoping it is just a temporary blip.
-
I've found that there has been a lot of turbulence in the SERPS in the last few weeks. I've had two clients that dropped from page 1 for many terms to beyond page 6 and then a few days later jumped up to rank even higher than they were before.
Have you made any changes to the site in the last couple of weeks? Here are some things I'd be doing to assess a traffic drop:
-Check in GA to see if the drop is across all pages or just certain pages. If it's certain pages, is there a pattern?
-Is the drop across all devices? For example, if the drop is just in mobile, perhaps the site was affected by Google's changes to the mobile interstitial algo.
-Have there been changes to the robots.txt file?
-Is there anything in Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions?
-Are there any crawl errors in GSC that could alert you to a problem?
-Do your pages fetch and render properly in GSC?
Another thing to consider is the age of the site. If this is a new site, it's not uncommon for the site to get a honeymoon boost and then drop down again.
If none of those apply, then what I'd recommend is to wait it out for a few more days and see what happens. You may find everything pops back up again.
-
I would give it a bit more time to settle, its very easily to jump the gun. You can also check sites like serpmetrics and algoroo as well as webmaster world etc. for any news but Google is constantly trying different things that result in SERP moving about. I normally leave things for a week before i conclude that may be the final position. I would also potentially check and changes you've done off-site or on site that may have affected the rank, not forgetting search engine console.
Hope this helps.
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
-
How to rank for multiple keyword phrases
Hello everyone! My website is smartyprogrammer.com. How do you go about ranking for multiple keyword phrases? Using the Site Grade Tool, I rank really well for one keyword phrase, like "Smarty Programmer", but then rank really poorly for another phrase like "Smarty Tuner". However, if I change my titles and all my wording towards "tuner" instead of "programmer", it seems like it will make my content either be spammy sounding, or I'll starting lacking in the "programmer" department. Is it best to just create a separate page to rank for "Smarty Tuner"? Or what is the best way to go about ranking for multiple important keyword phrases? Thanks everyone for your help!
Moz Pro | | dieselprogrammers0 -
On Page URL's not updating?
I recently moved my site to Shopify which completely changed the URL structure. I went to my old pages and created permanent 301 redirects to my new pages on shopify. For some reason, the On Page reports are not picking up on one of the new pages. This is effecting my grading. Just wondering why this is happening & whether this may be an indication of a larger problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Moz Pro | | PedroAndJobu0 -
What could cause your Domain Authority score to drop?
We have 3 websites that are on 3 different campaigns. Our flagship website is www.cannontrading.com. The Domain Authority score on it was 42. When I first (Mid November 2012) started, we had 295 keywords allocated for Cannontrading.com and 5 other keywords for allocated to our other websites... e-futures.com and e-mini.com. What I wanted to do was optimize the other two pages and I did this by taking taking 50 the keywords that were not ranked in the top 50 from Cannontrading.com and assigned them to the our other two sites. Could this have caused the drastic drop in the score? Our keyword rankings for the "Top 3" has dropped from 93 to 34 since November 2012. We did have a company that did article submissions for us up till October 2012. Could this have caused our drop in the Domain Authority Score and our Keyword Rankings? I didn't make any other changes to Cannon website beside taking away those keywords and given them to our other sites. Any suggestions or thoughts would really help me. Regards, David
Moz Pro | | ACann0 -
Historical data in rank report not matching summary?
I got a new rank report today. For a lot of keywords in Yahoo and Bing it is saying things like >49 etc. When I hover over it, it tells me that these are new keywords for me that I didn't rank for before. When I look at the historical graph for those specific engines though it just shows me going back at the same position historically. For example like position 17 going back many months without change. Can anyone tell me what is up with that?
Moz Pro | | edu-SEO0 -
Rankings in Google.be - 3 languages
As the site of my customers is in 3 languages, I also want to monitor the rankings in 3 languages. I do have the possibility to monitor them in seomoz: google.be english google.be dutch google.be french However, in the report (http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/227154/rankings) I do see the 3 columns, but the title is only google.be, WITHOUT the language selection. Not really helpfull... Any advice? oNDu9
Moz Pro | | nans0 -
Why are results different on Rank Tracker tool and New Rankings Weekly Reports?
Good Morning... Every week i get an email from SEO Moz that is showing me where the keywords i am tracking are currently in the SERPS (New Rankings and On-Page Reports)... Is there a reason that the current rank shown on these emails would be so different than what is shown when i use SEO Moz's rank tracker? For example, it shows one keyword has a rank of 48 (via email) and a rank of 16 through the rank tracker. What would cause such a great discrepancy? Thanks
Moz Pro | | Prime850 -
Panda Update Hurt, but why?
Hi, my name is Sam and I am new to this forum and SEOMOZ. I got hit hard in rankings after the Panda Update and was really suprised. I do not use any black hat SEO I am aware of, do not keyword stuff, and dont even have a tag cloud. Just wondering what in the world I did to get hit hard. Anyone else have this happen, and If so what would be good SEOMOZ tool(s) to use? I will admit SEO has always confused me. From my experience it's not always the best site (relevance) that gets ranked the highest. I feel like I'm missing something with SEO. I'm hoping this SEOMOZ site will help. I may end up hiring someone from Elance to do my SEO, lol. Sam
Moz Pro | | dfwgolfer0 -
Site Ranking Report
Hi guys, My site ranking report says that I've gone from being 1-20 for a variety of keywords in Google UK to not in the top 50. When I do a search myself I see that my site remains where it previously was (between 1-20). How reliable is the site ranking reporting on a weekly basis? Is it best to look at it monthly?
Moz Pro | | columbus0