Website Suddenly dropping rank
-
Morning Moz Fans:
My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj
According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one.
Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running.
We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH
So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
-
Ok thanks Dan
-
Hi Adrian
It's always tricky! It's a longterm solution. Things will need to get sorted out by Google and the dust needs to settle.
You can really ensure this happens faster by taking all appropriate measures - like redirects, notifying webmaster tools, updating internal/external links where possible (social, local listing, etc).
The fact that rankings were lost, means you have less to lose right now - so it might be a good time to take a step back and "do it right"
-
Great, thanks for that. Just one question, my client says that if we feel it's better he's happy to use the old domain as the main and switch the site, which makes more sense as it's the name of the company, in light of the fact we seem to have lost most keyword ranking, will this have any improvements or disadvantages?
thanks
-
Hi Adrian
I think there's a mixture of things going on here. I'll just spell out the top ones I see after a quick look:
-
On the old domain, URLs returning a 404 code need to also LOOK like 404 pages, right now they just look like the homepage: http://www.perfectprofiles.eu.com/kjhgjkhg
-
On the current domain the alt text on the logo is "dental implants luton - logo" - just make that the company name "perfect profiles".
-
In fact there's only one plain text of "perfect profiles" on the entire homepage, which is in the footer.
-
And the current domain is not the company name (?) which is why it might not be ranking as well for "perfect profiles" which is kind of a vague name to begin with.
-
Also, why not just redirect the old domain homepage to the new? I think that would be considered the best user experience since there's not really any useful content on the old domain - Google's cache shows no content really since the page is an image
-
The old homepage has a few good links as well
-
There's also three Google Plus pages and only one has a verified link to the website - it looks like there are two physical locations and one corporate? You can have three pages, but just really beef them up with as much info as possible.
-
Make sure the corporate G+ page is in fact verified and then Customize your knowledge graph listing
-
Consider having separate pages for each location only if you fill them with helpful unique info on each, like office pictures, staff names/pictures, hours, directions, etc.
I think it's a mix of a) Google not being 100% on the brand/company name - and then b) doing more local optimization for each location.
-
-
Hi Dirk, thanks for this. No we hadn't noticed a difference. Its important to point out that the page rank dropped before the new framework went live though. Although we have been looking at this and have made some improvements this afternoon. Google speed test now says 74 for the desktop so we will work some more on it tomorrow.
Thanks
-
Hi,
Did you see an increase in the load time of your pages in Analytics (pre/post launch). For a site which is not very complex in terms of structure, your load times are not really great. See http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150330_ZF_X41/1/details/ & http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150330_A8_WR6/1/details/
Page speed analysis by Google gives pretty low scores as well - for mobile 47/100 - desktop 63/100
In pagespeed - you can see the content breakdown - on your homepage 66% of the downloaded content is css/js - most of it is not used on page: https://unused-css.com/detect-unused-css?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.perfectdental.eu.com%2F (a disadvantage of most frameworks like bootstrap / foundation)
I would try to work on improving the speed -a similar case with low page speed scores noticed immediate improvement after reducing load times: http://moz.com/community/q/problem-with-getting-a-site-to-rank-at-all
rgds,
Dirk
-
I tend to think something bad must be happening here since it's been almost two months. If it's just re-indexing, it should have been over long ago.
-
No true, but if thats the case does it say "penalty" or just re-indexing
-
I'm actually not totally shocked by that. Google's results are getting more personalized by the day. It looks like Perfect Profiles' two office locations are both quite far from Manchester. It makes sense to me that they rank lower in locations that are further away.
-
Sorry a quick update. If you search in google.co.uk and search with your location being in certain areas of the UK they come up top for the brand name, but if you search for the brand name in say "Manchester" they show at the bottom of the page.
Weird
-
Hi Mark, thanks for that. As it happens the brand name seems to be appearing again today and google webmaster tools also suggests this in WMT with in the ranking section. We've been checking the manual action section for a few weeks now but it just says "No manual webspam actions found"
Thanks
-
In addition to what Becki said (all correct), I feel like it's important to note 2 other things:
-
Even websites that are appropriately redirected, lose some link equity in the process. See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links.
-
With regard to the blog problems, I'm wondering if perhaps the blog being down for 4-5 weeks had something to do with it. If there were historically some links pointing to the blog that were boosting the site, those pages 404ing would effectively remove the links from the link graph.
Still, it seems there's some sort of penalty here because you mentioned them not even ranking for the brand name anymore. I've never seen that unless there was a penalty. Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools' manual action viewer?
-
-
Hello, there! yeah everything has 301 redirects, no duplicate content is live now. They used to come top for "dental implants luton" http://goo.gl/fO74zy
Thanks
-
Hi there, thanks for posting this.
Some questions, before I can help you properly:
Have you redirected all of the old URLs across to any new ones using the 301 directive?
That duplicate content in the subdomain, is it still live somewhere or have you removed this now?
Do you know which landing pages in particular have seen the biggest loss of traffic?
Usually, a site that drops rankings when it moves to another platform is having duplicate content or redirection issues in my experience.
I really would like to help, so please let me know the answers to the above when I can.
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
-
Ranking issue for new website
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
How do i rank for 1000 keywords?
i have dr 25 and 200 referring domains and ranking for 90 kws in usa. i saw this trend that if you rank for more kws then chances are that you can rank for those high traffic kws in 1 to 5 positions. what i mean is that it increases your odds ? possible answer1 :increase dr and da both and ur and pa ( ahrefs and moz) i know pagerank matters but these are some metrics we can look at for right now possible answer 2 : get a lot of backlinks maybe from same site but how does my backlinks can help me to rank for 1000 kws so that i can have at least 100 kws to rank in position 1 to 5? detailed answers will defi be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website?
Hi, Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
Rank on specific Google
Hi folks, a website is hosted with a TLD like .com in the USA. The content etc. is obviously all english but now we want to focus on a specific Google like .co.uk What must be necessarily be done to rank better? Is it enough just to buy a .co.uk domain and set the nameserver up or do we need to get a british hosting? Thanks in advance. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Sudden Index drop, but traffic increased?
Here are the numbers- Pages submitted on sitemap- About 18k Total Pages indexed on 12/30- About 250k Total Pages indexed on 1/6- About 81k We made no site changes in that week, why the sudden drop? Also why is total pages indexed so much higher than sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Why does Google Claimed Local Listing Ranking Drop?
I have two local google places listinggs unlaimed. Both listings were ranking in the blended search in 7 pack. Once I claimed the local listings for the business both listings rankings have dropped. And one has totally vanished from the search rankings. Is this normal as it appears local places that are not claimed are ranking higher than local places claimed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VivaArturo0