Sudden drop in PageRank to Unranked
-
Howdy,
A clients website has just dismorning (8/FEB/13) gone from index page PR:4 to Unranked including all inner pages on the domain.
There is no contact on GWT or penalty email from Google.
All organic rankings seem to be fine, and i read about the GWT backlink glitch earlier.
Should I expect the worst?
Thanks..
Mark
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for your detailed reply, really appreciated.
Seems the site did get some what buggy with the new PR update. It was back to normal after 12 hours or so. No drop in rank or traffic over the weekend so it looks like we're in the clear.
The Google cached image of the homepage has resolved it's self also.
Thanks again for your help.
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
Toolbar PageRank is often not a very good indicator of how Google actually views your site. The important thing is your rankings and traffic, which you say is fine. This would indicate you are both in Google's index and are being served in search results. Yah!
Google did just update it's Toolbar PageRank, so this could be part of the issue, but I am concerned with how you described the page showing up in search results. (php error)
Here's what you can do to test:
1. In Google Webmaster Tools, use the "Fetch As Googlebot" tool to test if Google can access the homepage
2. Is your homepage in Google's cache? There are many ways to do this, here's one
3. Use the MozBar to crawl as GoogleBot. Set the user agent setting for "Googlebot" (I've attached a screenshot)
The reason for this is sometimes Viruses and Spam Attacks will take over your website and show one version to Google, but another version to users.
If all of these things check out, and you maintain your traffic, you should be fine!
-
Wouldn't we all my friend!
Serious client, lets see how the PR issue pans out over the weekend.
Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks for the reply Charles,
The site doesn't have protected WHOIS. Nor does it have 1,000s of backlinks. It would be a 15 year old domain registered on BOTW & DMOZ.So it's very strange!
Google would know the author on Google+ and so forth. It wouldn't be a spammy website. It's a viable business in the training / education industry with 10+ staff.
There is something a bit fishy about the homepage screenshot on the companies SERP.
It's showing a PHP error and a blank white page. But on clicking the result the website is fine. Could this be to do with the site's last indexing? Google have indexed a error homepage which has effected the rest of the site? Note this is the only SERP that has this error.
Thanks for the help!
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
-
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
Google suddenly indexing 1,000 fewer pages. Why?
We have a site, blog.example.org, and another site, www.example.org. The most visited pages on www.example.org were redesigned; the redesign landed May 8. I would expect this change to have some effect on organic rank and conversions. But what I see is surprising; I can't believe it's related, but I mention this just in case. Between April 30 and May 7, Google stopped indexing roughly 1,000 pages on www.example.org, and roughly 3,000 pages on blog.example.org. In both cases the number of pages that fell out of the index represents appx. 15% of the overall number of pages. What would cause Google to suddenly stop indexing thousands of pages on two different subdomains? I'm just looking for ideas to dig into; no suggestion would be too basic. FWIW, the site is localized into dozens of languages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
My page ranking dropped after I made it responsive
Recently, I made one of my site page responsive. It was ranking on 13th Position and after I made the page responsive, it dropped to 24 desktop and 35 on mobile rankings. I ran mobile friendly test and it said "awesome, your page is mobile friendly". Not sure, what went wrong here. Page in question is: https://www.itcontractorsuk.com/ Can someone please advice? Please Note: My site is partially responsive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkWebUK0 -
Site experiencing drop in Google rankings and organic traffic after redesign.
Hello, The company that I work for recently implemented a complete redesign for our company website. The former site was old, cumbersome and in desperate need of an update. We streamlined the site structure and made sure to redirect as many pages as we could find to new thematically related pages with 301 redirects. After the launch of our new site we saw a large upswing in "soft" 404 errors despite the fact that most of these pages do redirect upon inspection. So in relation to the soft 404s, for example, is it merely a matter of labeling them as fixed if they redirect properly, or could their be an underling issue with the site itself? Also, a majority or the urls labeled "not found" in webmaster tools are properly redirected. Do these merely need to be marked as fixed, or is there something else that needs to be fixed like the sitemap structure? I appreciate any and all input. Beyond Indigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeyondIndigo1 -
Massive 40-50 page drop for primary keyphrase, no apparent reason, + map listing weirdness
Hi. I manage the site http://physiowinnipeg.com, which has had some interesting yo-yo effects lately, culminating in a 40-50 page drop as of last Friday. The phrase in question: physiotherapy winnipeg Background: The site has ranked on the first page for this keyphrase since about May There was the occasional blip where the homepage would disappear from rankings altogether for a day or two, and then return back to its regular listing This would coincide with a sudden increase in organic places listings (our site would hit the top of the local map listings, but the homepage would vanish) Other pages would still appear for the target phrase, just not the homepage About a month ago, the organic places listing settled, and the homepage permanently vanished Other pages still ranked high, and we commanded many of the listings on the first 10 pages of Google, first page included The homepage would still appear for some other searches We had been affected by the Google Places --> Google+ Local transition, so I was of the opinion that we needed to wait it out a bit to see if it, like the other issues related to the transition, would work itself out This time around, it worked itself out again, just today -- but we are now ranked slightly lower on the first page and our Google local listing has disappeared (again) Our other pages are still (currently) absent from the first few pages, for this keyphrase The main differences I noticed here, aside from the much longer timeframe of our drop, was that other pages disappeared as well, and that the homepage was actually found, between page 38 and 50, depending on the day According to SEO Moz and other tools, the site is doing pretty much everything right. I should note, however, that there is a service we use for educational content called Patientsites that loads in the subdomain http://education.physiowinnipeg.com -- and this site has pulled many warnings in SEO Moz (around 10,000, actually, mostly long URL related), as well as a few errors. I'm not sure if this is a part of the problem, but I am considering having the content of the subdomain blocked via robots.txt and Webmaster Tools. Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or have any insight? This weirdness has gone on too long. Thanks! Bobby
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinnacleWpg0 -
Why traffic to my link has dropped suddenly?
Hi I would like to know why the traffic for the website link http://theindustrymeasure.com/2010/07/15/rediffmail-login has dropped suddenly on google.I used to get around 5000 page views on this page and then suddenly dropped to 15-20 . I still get good traffic from yahoo (around 500). Just before the drop I noticed that I started to get spammy trackbacks from Many questionable sources. I have not approved any of these trackbacks. The trackbacks are regular frequency of. 1 per day. is there any action which I can take to ensure that I get back my traffic. Traffic to other links are fine , only this page seems to have dropped off ever since the spam attack. As per seomoz tool I have a grade a for keyword rediffmail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShoutOut0