So weird sudden drop in rankings
-
Hi All, ok so at the beginning of July we launched our new website, SEVEN weeks later we have dropped completly off all rankings what-so-ever, (except brand) but weirdly if i pan between browsers we dont use (for saved searches/cookies etc) sometimes the rankings show up where they used to be.
Whats strange is we get crawled daily but it took seven weeks for our rankings to drop, ive done all testing i can - no manual actions, no updates when we dropped (15th Aug) no real differences in webmaster tools, no crawl errors, no massive rise in 404s, 500s etc etc, im really a bit stumped!
Any help would be mucho appreciated in diagnosing this stumper!
-
Its not a new website (3 and half years) we think its 301s on our product lines (200 URLS) whats the quickest way to deal with 301s - dont want to be writing up a spreadsheet of every url that we stick into htaccess file!
-
Brand new sites typically get lots of traffic at first because Google sees them as completely fresh content. Then once the content gets older the rankings will drop.
-
Right off the bat, the www and non-www aren't properly redirected. I'm running a crawl right now. I'll let you know if I see anything else.
-
Hi Amelia, it is 3 year old website, 301s have been done in terms of some pages and others have kept the exact same URL as they did previously, the only thing that havent been 301 is product pages which have a different structure now and never where high value content, 301 products is something i am doing currently - we have a LOT of products so if anyone knows of a tool to simplify this please let me know :DApart from that i am stumped, i hate leaving it to see what effects happen in natural course but it is stumping me!
-
Have you recently reblaunched a new version of your old website, or is it a completely new site? Only ask because your original post made me think it was a new company, new website, but your response to James suggests otherwise - 'we have held those keywords for 3 and a half years'...
This makes a difference.
If it's all completely new (new company, new domain, new design) then I think your good listings for 7 weeks were the freshness thing (sorry I call it that...) where Google will give a new site a better place in its index than it necessarily deserves based on links etc because it hasn't had a chance to build any links being so new and all.
If it's a rebrand of an old site then you may want to look at your 301 redirects and make sure they are page-to-page rather than sending everything to the homepage (which is so common I just want to bang my head against a brick wall - highly frustrating for a user, stoooopid for a webmaster). If you've changed domains then you can 'tell' Google via webmaster tools using the change of address tool.
Good luck with your problem - I hope it gets sorted out soon.
-
Hi James, yep i see we are dong ok on bing its a weird one! Masoud, point taken we have got some new content and good links coming inbound, interesting about WMT we have held those keywords for 3 and a half years!
-
Hi
Maybe its a sandbox effect. I suggest you to wait for another week, make contents and update, build brand name and generic links and track the results. I use this strategy when my new site drop like this and it worked.
and another thing, check your content keywords in WMT, if your main keyword is in top 3, you should decrease using it; I had a experience of this, Google thought we are doing keyword stuffing.
-
Wow really struggling with this one also,
Worth mentioning that you are very much in favor with Bing still and rank very well,
I am struggling to understand why so well but not with Google,
I will keep digging, hopefully a few other mozzers will pick this up and take a look,
James
-
Hi James its www.kennelstore.co.uk
-
Can you give a URL ?
Thanks
James
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
-
Google crawl drop
the crawl request of my company site: https://www.dhgate.com/ has dropped nearly over 95%, from daily 6463599 requests to 476493 requests at 12:00am on 9th, Oct (GMT+8). This dramatic dropping trend not only showed in our GSC crawl stats report but also our company's own log report. We have no idea what’s going on. We want to know whether there is an update of google about crawlling, or is this the issue of our own site? If something is wrong with our site, in what aspects would you recommend us to check, analyze and accordingly optimize?
Technical SEO | | DHgate_20140 -
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
Remove sitemap, effect ranking?
We are considering to remove our sitemap because it doesn't display the right structure. Will it affect current rankings if we remove the sitemap en continuing without a sitemap? Thanks
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry0400 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Google PR Rank Question (s)
Hi
Technical SEO | | damientown
My Google PR rank is still 1/10 (www.abouttownmarketing.com) after 12 weeks of daily SEO work building what I thought were quality back links. Does anyone know how often Google updates its PR rank? Also is it a linear measure or link adwords quality score is it exponential?
Many thanks
Damien0 -
Weird links in OSE, wondering if NSEO ?
I was looking through our links since the last OSE update and was surprised to found several links which I have no idead how they got there. What made me suspicious is that the anchor text is relevant, but when i'm checking the page I don't see the link anymore (or can't access it, like in the first example). Some of those links : http://www.samsung.com/global/business/telecomm/product/download/SMT-G3210_opensrc_v2.01.tbz?diskuse=1&reakce=116246&clanek_id=11555 http://www.nyse.com/sspexternal/widget/nyse_dna.gg?location1=1&id=31866&sl2=1?id=28523&ncid=12930 http://www.census.gov/housing/povmeas/pov00/povpu00.sas7bdat?acad=20&dpt=10&niv_scol=CM2&annee=2010&form_action=resultat http://www.aarp.org/espanol/estados/texas.html/privmsg.php?mode=post&u=23 http://www.census.gov/procur/www/2010dris/web-briefing/cust-satisfaction-internal-dmd.wpd?p=9836 http://www.ups.com/asia/cn/chsindex.html/board27-das-wohnzimmer/board31-die-couch/search/Environmental_health/Food_safety__illness_and_contamination.aspx http://my.so-net.net.tw/hvgo2000/web/images/03?faq&page=4392 http://www.familytreemaker.com/users/c/l/a/index.html?replyto=104201 I don't even know if those links are real since I can't access many of those pages...
Technical SEO | | Aeronet0 -
Sub-Page Ranks for a Main Keyword
A sub page now ranks for my main key word (the file name is exact match to the key word) it completely replaced my index page in rankings. Would 301 redirecting the sub-page to my index page (which is more informative and has a whole lot more links pointing towards it) be a good idea or vice versa? Or would optimizing that page (the sub page) be the best way to go (the sub page doesn't have single inbound link pointing to...). This happened about a week ago. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Benj7070