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
-
Ranking for combined version of keyword but not separated version
Hi All, My site is currently ranking on page 1 for the term "golfholidays" but is ranking at the bottom of page 3 for the term I am targeting and have optimised for, which is "golf holidays". Does anyone have any experience with the combined keyword ranking above the singular version? Nowhere on my page doesn't it mention the term "golfholidays" and backlinks to my site mostly use the anchor "golf holdiays" Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Andy94120 -
Falling rankings - can't figure out why
I am still fairly green on in depth SEO, however I have a good grasp on making a site SEO friendly, as my skills are more down to website construction than technical SEO, however, I am working on a site at the moment which just continues to lose rankings and is slipping further and further. Keywords are dropping week on week in rankings Search visibility is also dropping week on week On site sales have fallen massively in the last quarter We have made huge improvements on the following; Moved the site to a faster stand alone cloud vps server - taken page rank scores from 54 to 87%. Added caching (WP Rocket) & CDN support. Improved URL structure (Woocommerce) removed /product and or /product-category from URLS to give more accurate & relevant structures. Added canonical URLs to all product categories (We use Yoast Premium) Amended on page structures to include correct H tags. Improved Facebook activity with a huge increase in engagements These are just some of the improvements we have made, yet we're still seeing huge drops in traffic and rankings. One insight I have noted which may be a big pointer, is we have 56 backlinks.... which I know is not good and we are about to address this. I suspect this is the reason for the poor performance, but should I be looking at anything else? Is there anything else we should be looking at? As I said, I'm no SEO specialist, but I don't think there's been any Penguin penalty, but my expertise is not sufficient enough to dig deeper. Can anyone offer any constructive advice at this stage? I'm thinking things to look at that could be hurting us that isn't immediately obvious? The site is www.glassesonspec.co.uk Thanks in advance Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK0 -
Page Rank gone - technical difficulty?
Hi all, after coming back from the holidays, I noticed that our PR (6 on the homepage) has vanished into "Unranked". All other sites are also "unranked". I tested other domains - PR still there, so the problem does not lie in the PR checker. There are no drops in traffic, rankings, no messages in the GWMT, the same numer of indexed pages, inbound links okay (all natural)... As you see, I checked everything I thought could be a hint to a solution, but found nothing... This goes on for the 3rd day now (after my holidays, maybe even longer). Could there be a technical problem causing this "drop"? Our website: http://www.access.de/ I am thankful for all hints/suggestions... Thanx...
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Rankings Issues
website: trophycentral.com Back in February of this year, we took a huge rankings hit on Google. We thought it might be Panda related, but realized it was before the big change. We also thought it could be related to our Mobile rollout and a wholesale system we put in place, but were not sure. Most pages were fine, but our home page was hit hard and taken off line, included for branded terms (although the branded terms came back in a couple of weeks). There were no manual actions against us. We made a ton of changes with the mobile site, crawl issues, reducing links, reviewing and removing potentially bad outside links, etc. After a few months (long time!) almost all of our keywords came back except one, trophies. We used to rank in the top few positions and now are not in the top 500. We believe we are being penalized, but have no idea why this one keyword is being impacted. It is obviously a huge one for us and we want to get it back. Does anyone have any ideas as to why Trophies is not ranking on our home page. We are grateful that we have many other words and phrases in the top 5 positions (not pages) of google, yahoo and bing, but on Google, we cant seem to get trophies to even show up! Please help!!! Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Redirection based on country and impact on rankings
I have a website that ranks number 1 in google.co.uk for its main key term and ranks number 4 in google.com.au. However i would rather that visitors in australia see domain.com.au rather than domain.co.uk. Is there a way to achieve this using some clever 301s without impacting the rankings in australia and so that the .com.au starts to rank in place of the .co.uk OR Would you advise launching a .com.au version of the site hosted separately with unique / re-written content on it.?
Technical SEO | | thefresh0 -
Difference between URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects for Rankings
What is the difference between URL rewriting and 301 redirects? Specifically if my home page is rewriting the www. version and the /index.html version rather than 301 redirecting them is this equivalent? Does it still pass the link juice on those alternate variations the same way a 301 redirect will?
Technical SEO | | rcarll0 -
SEOMOZ Ranking
Im pretty new to all this so hopefuly im going the right way ive been using SEOMOZ Pro for about 3 weeks. I have a website and a blog, I noticed that my website (flash based) was not doing very well but my blog was doing well. So i decided to turn my blog into a website for my main website and my old website into another category for my services. So I have now transferred everything over to my blog and on website grader I have got my rating upto 74/100 from 17/100 which is higher than anyone else in my keyword, my traffic ranking is higher but Im not even in the top 50 in google, they do have more backlins than me significanlty more but I am working on it. So the question is it the backlinks that help MOZ ranking, and how long does it take before google recognises my links to give me a position on google. My keywords are coventry wedding photographer and my site is rnblog.co.uk
Technical SEO | | robanewman0 -
Google rankings tanked....Now what?
We just experience a drop in Google rankings, some pretty harsh, across all of the keywords we have been ranking greater than 50. I’m a noob at SEO, but a technical noob so I started doing my home work. I’ve seen references to the “google dance” and “Honeymoon”, but this hit seems to have effected competitors too. Everyone seems re-ranked with several junk directories jumping up more than I think they should. Has anyone else seen this? Is this more Google algorithm adjustment or a natural settling based on our new SEO attempts? In either case, what should we do next? I know there is a holistic approach and everything is important however, we need bang for the buck at this point to before we start bleeding. One or two next steps? Our industry is residential cleaning and the site is www.bitabliss.com Here is a little history:
Technical SEO | | BitABliss
The site that’s been running for about 2 years. We initially put up a very basic “throw something up” site without much thought of SEO except for some basics and a long tail approach with a blog, FaceBook and Twitter. We launched an updated site on Feb 23. with new theme and this time some, “on page” work to better hit the basics. The site structure was kept the same and we added on some more localized content in hopes to take advantage of local searches. Also, enter SEOMoz to get us tracking things (Yay MOZ). Until yesterday, we had been doing pretty well in some of our target cites even with the more basic site. When we launched the new site focusing on page titles, descriptions and page content, and a few directory attempts. We started to see some incremental growth. It seemed to me that this kind of growth meant that we were doing the right things and doing a better job than some of the other sites. Any way, yesterday we got smacked down. This seems too harsh for a for the slow increases we have seen over the last month. Any thoughts you have would be great appreciated. Thanks! -Shawn1