Rankings dropped overnight

[FLDESIGN]

We have been doing some optimization for a client. They were not ranked for many keywords before we started, and up until last week 10 were on page 1, with the the last few following closely behind. Everything was moving in the right direction.

In this weeks ranking report every one has dropped significantly and some 30 places in one week. We have made no significant changes to the site in the last few weeks.

The only issue we picked up on was the slow site speed on their current host 1&1.

Any ideas what could have caused the site to have lost ground on all rankings so significantly?

[FLDESIGN]

Thanks everyone for the comments.

• We have manually checked the SERP's most look fairly accurate, some are higher ranked than actually quoted.
• We checked robots.txt all was fine.
• We did have a quick look in WMT for any crawl errors. They were showing 32 404 not found which we have corrected (mainly old links to tags on the blog on their old website), The new site has been up around 4 months a d we redirected all main page URLS to the new ones
• No keyword stuffing
• Maybe a honeymoon period. But they were ranked for most keywords before, all we did was improve on the on site SEO.

Think we will monitor it. Its only the first ranking report back that all keywords had dropped.

Thanks a lot for all the feedback.

[MarieHaynes]

Self made links on just 5 sites is unlikely to cause you to be drastically penalized.  I'd still remove these links but I'd look for something else.  As David Liu asked, make sure you confirm that there actually is a ranking drop and it's not just something that Moz is reporting.

Have a good look for technical issues.  For example, make sure you haven't accidentally noindexed pages or altered your robots.txt to block Google.  It sounds silly, but I've seen it happen.

How long have you been ranking on page 1?  If this was a fairly recent thing then it's possible that was a honeymoon phase.  Sometimes Google allows new sites to experience the first page for a while and then drops them to their correct rankings.

Also look at any recent changes you have made.  For example, have you changed urls?  Have you done any keyword stuffing?

Slow hosting for a short time period shouldn't make any drastic differences.  However, if you were completely offline for a good amount of time that could affect your rankings but things should improve quickly.

One final tip would be to check WMT for crawl errors.  Sometimes you can get some hints there as to what is going on.

[Kingof5]

Did you manually check your rankings? Moz is known to post massive drops like that despite little to no real movement in the SERPs.

[FLDESIGN]

HI Martin,

Thanks for info. I have checked Webmaster tools straight away and don't see any notices. I have checked back on the report done by the other company and they have listed the same article on the following 5 sites:

• http://www.freenewspos.com
• http://press.designshuffle.com
• http://www.allvoices.com
• http://www.pressnews.biz
• http://www.forpressrelease.com

Think I will get the removed and see how it goes...

[indigoextra]

Hi,

What you've described sounds like a standard penalty for 'Unnatural Links' as Google would call it.  If you've submitted the same article to multiple sites, or a spun article to multiple sites it's highly likely that this is the cause.  Sorry!

If you have access to Google Webmaster Tools, then go to the 'Manual Action' section and if you've been manually penalized, it will tell you there.

I recommend deleting the articles where possible and disavowing all the sites that you submitted the articles to, then filing a 'Reconsideration Request' with Google.

If there's no manual action, still delete the articles.  Google now has negative link juice from poor quality links, so even without the manual action, this could still be the cause.

Hope that helps!

[FLDESIGN]

To add, the only thing I believe it can be is some links that we had built back to the site by another company local to us.

They did some directory submission & article creation and sharing which was completed on the 14th of April. So this would maybe tie in with the recent change in rankings.

Is there any way to see if these links are damaging the sites reputation?