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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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 -
Migrating Magento site to Shopify Plus without dropping in SERPS
We have been looking at moving our ecommerce store www.pretavoir.co.uk from Magento to Shopify Plus. However, as we rank quite well at present we are interested in hearing experience others may have had making this change and also any advice that you may have... Also, any general comments on Shopify appreciated..
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
What causes rankings to drop while moving a site.
Hi, we recently moved a PHP based site from one web developer to another (switched hosting providers as well). Amidst the move our rankings drastically dropped and our citation and trust flow were literally cut in half as per Majestic SEO. What could have caused this sudden drop?
Web Design | | Syed_Raza0 -
New Mobile Site Traffic Drop
With all the talk about how much mobile is important and how it is going to return its own search results, we finally decided to make a mobile site for one of our smaller websites to test the water. We put it up about two weeks ago and did Vary HTTP header method to serve the site. Before the change, on the average week we would get 270-300 mobile visitors from organic search results and we converted 0.78% to sales. Since the change, we are now getting about 70 mobile organic visitors per week but converting 2.47% So what can I say but WOW. We are converting way way better but our organic mobile search traffic has dropped off a ton. Luckily our desktop and tablet traffic(we serve the desktop version of the site to tablets) has stayed the same and has not dipped. Do any of you guys have experience or gone through launching a mobile site before? Did you see the immediate drop in organic mobile traffic and did you recover your traffic back to previous levels? If so, do you know how long it takes to recover? I am thinking it is a big change and will take time for Google to adjust but I am not sure since the mobile version has so much less text now on the home page and on category or product list pages or whatever you guys want to call them.
Web Design | | KurtL0 -
The impact of using directories without target keyword on our Rankings
Hello all, I have a question regarding a website I am working on. I’ve read a lot of Q en A’s but couldn’t really find the best answer. For one of our new websites we are thinking about the structure of this website and the corresponding URL-structure. Basically we have a main product (and a few main keywords) which should drive the most traffic to our website, and for which we want to optimize our homepage. Besides those main keywords, we have an enormous base of long-tail keywords from which we would like to generate traffic. This means we want to create a lot of specific pages which are optimized. My main question is the following: We are thinking of two options: Option 1: www.example.com/example-keyword-one Option 2: www.example.com/directory/example-keyword-one With option 1 we will link directly from our homepage to the most important pages (which represent our most important keywords). All the pages with the long tail content will be linked from another section on our website, which is one click away from our homepage (specifically a /solutions page which is linked from the footer). All the pages with long-tail content will have this structure www.example.com/example-keyword-one so the URLs will not contain the directory /solutions With option 2 we will use more subdirectories in our URLs. Specifically, for all the long tail content we would use URLs like this: www.example.com/solutions/example-keyword-one
Web Design | | NielsB
The directories we want to use wouldn't really have added value in terms of SEO, since they don’t represent important keywords. So what is the best way to go? Option 1, straightforward, short URL’s which don’t really represent the linking structure of our website, but only contain important keywords. Or option 2, choose for more directories in our URLs which represent the linking structure of our website, but contain directories which don’t represent important keywords. Would the keyword ‘solutions’ in the directory (which doesn’t really relate to the content on the page) have a negative impact on our rankings for that URL?0 -
Does a loading homepage animation effect rankings?
Our website ( panphoenix dot com) has a Javascript animation when you load it for the first time which takes just over 2 seconds to load. Does having this animation effect rankings negatively? Would appreciate your thoughts!Thanks Rob
Web Design | | roberthseo0 -
Affected by the Penguin 2.0...Lost Rankings!! Which one from the following causes did that?
Hi Moz Community, we lost our rankings for almost all of our keywords due to penguin 2.0 I'm trying to rectify the situation by getting our rankings back and better. Here are the potential causes for our rankings drop. 1. My Company has the exact same site (in English) on different country-specific domains. companyname.com, companyname.ch, companyname.ca, companyname.nl etc.. We are using link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://companyname.com" **Would this solve the duplicate content issue? ** 2. All the international domains have footer links in the homepages, pointing to our main .com site. Google webmaster tools shows that every page on these international domains as a backlink source. Would that be a problem? Should I ask our web designers to remove those footer links from the international domains? 3. In the past, our company had a partnership with forum...Like the forum promotes our company's services. I don't know how did that forum promoted our site, But Google webmaster tools shows that we have some 25K backlinks from that forum!!! But when I try to visit those backlinks, none of those pages have any links to our site....Could they be hidden? Or Some thing wrong with GWT? I'd appreciate your valuable suggestions to help us understand the situation better... Thank you.
Web Design | | hninformer0