Rankings Dropped Dramatically
-
Hi All,
I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why.
We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com.
The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella
However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs.
In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically.
keyword 1
4th Jan position 22
9th Jan position 90
keyword 2
4th jan position 34
9th jan position 89
keyword 3
4th jan position 12
9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others)
We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings.
I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz.
Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment.
Many thanks
Andy
-
Hi Andrew -
If this question has been answer/the issue has been fixed, could you please mark it as Closed?
Thanks!
-
No nothing had changed on the homepage, the only thing we are trying to do is link build to internal pages so directories / social bookmarks would go to the specific page and not just the homepage.
However looking through the old stats before we worked on the site, he regularly had keywords going from page 1 to page 10, then a month or so later he would regain positions.
On the old site he relied on a search results page to generate different keyword positions, so they were not fixed pages. I wonder if this had an impact?
-
Odd that that the home page should disappear but not the other pages! Any ideas why that should have happened?
-
Good news, the rankings have re-appeared. Google decided to remove the homepage listing from its index hence the drop. However the homepage has now returned and listings have gone from outside 100 to positions between 8 - 20!
-
If it's had a complete overhaul then there's lots of things that might have affected the rankings. I'd tell your clients that any change is risky and may cause some disruption.
I don't see that there's been a total collapse of the rankings so the last thing you want your clients to do is panic.
Good luck!
-
Thanks John & Doug, really appreciate your feedback the site has had a complete overhaul and I think I underestimated the jump from .co.uk. The site never had many inbound links except from one website so I didn't think I would lose rankings.
I know the new pages are good as they are ranked well, so I will just boost the link building. But when clients are upset you want to make sure you have covered all bases and you haven't missed something obvious.
Cheers!
-
A few more thoughts - Did anything else happen apart from just the move to the .com domain? Any content changes or periods where the site was unavailable?
Apart from your rankings changing have you seen any other disruption of the SERPS?
I think I'm right in saying that a redirected link passes less link-juice than the original link. How competitive are the keywords your targetting? Will a small change in domain/page authority cause the changes to the rankings you're seeing?
What keywords are you targeting?
What was the reason for the switch to .com. Looks like both domains were registered at the same time and the domain name is pretty specific so I'm guessing that there are no negative signals associated with the .com domain.
I think John has the right idea. If you've ruled out all the obvious causes, I wouldn't get bogged down trying to work out what happened. I'd put the energy into building more links to compensate.
I don't know when this happened, maybe the drop in rankings isn't a long term thing.
-
Did you consolidate many domains into the .com, or just move the domain over completely from .co.uk to .com? In which countries have your rankings dropped? I am guessing UK.
The backlinks you have are not on great websites. Have you tried to get listed in places like the UK's version of the Better Business Bureau? Put in some work doing some guest posting and I bet your rankings will go up.
My guess is that if your rankings have dropped mostly in the UK, that it's the loss of the .co.uk ccTLD, which is definitely not an insurmountable hurdle, just might take a bit more work.
-
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Content-Length: 160 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Location: http://www.TangoHolidaySolutions.com/ Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:46:04 GMT
looks like that is the right response.
-
I believe I have, as webmaster shows all the inbound links to the .com and not the .co.uk. the domain is www.tangoholidaysolutions.com. If you or John notice something stupid please don't be afraid to say!
-
Oh I see now. I honestly thought your site was myclient.co.uk. I see my mistake!
If OSE has picked up the 301, when you type in your old domain it will say something like "That URL redirects to (new url). Would you like to see that URL?"
Also, to spot-check server header responses, I use this tool: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/
-
I haven't even given you the domain name? But if I do want to check the OSE index how would I do this to ensure the 301 re-direct is working for google.
I know it works for the human as if you type in the old domain i.e. co.uk it goes to the .com.
Thanks
Andy
-
Hey Andrew -
From what I'm seeing in the OSE index and in my browser, you moved the content over to your new domain but did not forward your old domain. I know you said that you had a lot of links to your homepage on www.myclient.co.uk, and since you did not 301 this page and older pages, you've lost all your links.
Can you explain why you did not 301 your old domain?
-
I'm guessing that you're not getting the benefit of your inbound links that you had pointing to your old domain.
Have you followed these guidelines from google:
Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help
You say you've redirected to the .com domain. How have you set up this redirection?
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
-
Why my site is not ranking for any of the keywords?
We have a site for Property management software, we have done everything like set proper Title and descriptions, heading tags, robots tag is also ok, set schema and its ok with Google webmaster too also we are doing Social media promotion. can you please check our website and tell me what is the problem??
Technical SEO | | rootwaysinc0 -
Domain vs Sub Domain and Rankings
Hi All Wanting some advice. I have a client which has a number of individual centres that are part of an umbrella organisation. Each individual centre has its own web site and some of these sites have similar (not duplicate content) products and services. Currently the individual centres are sub domains of the umbrella organisation. i.e. Umbrella organisation www.organisation.org.au Individual centres are sub domains i.e. www.centre1.organisation.org.au, www.centre2.organisation.org.au etc. I'm feeling that perhaps this setup might be affecting the rankings of the individual sites because they are sub domains. Would love to hear some thoughts or experience on this and whether its worth going through the process of migrating the individual centre domains. Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Spam links - which link is most damaging to my rankings.
I have just started using Open Site Explorer and discovered a lot of spam links to my website.
Technical SEO | | A.Ronny
(I have mostly ranked on page for many years one but in the last two weeks ranking have dropped to page two)
The links have Anchor Text such as Scam - Dishonest - Drugs. Most of the of the links are "nofollow".
Will links with "nofollow" affect my ranking and if so which of the links should i priorities to remove?
Do I look at Link Equity - Domain Authority - Page Authority or other criteria? Many thanks
Ronny0 -
How to improve ranking of a website again, after being penalized by Google?
The ranking of our website has gone down in past 2 months. The reason,
Technical SEO | | TGA123
I believe is that we had more than 300,000 spammy comments posted on it
(the website is based on wordpress) so Google treated it as
un-monitored forum and penalized. We have deleted the older comments
and new comments can no longer be posted. Need suggestions on what else
should we do to rank better. Any advice would be very welcome.0 -
My keyword ranking suddenly went down in google.
Hi, Need urgently help, one of our website http://www.bannerbuzz.com keywords ranking is down suddenly since 6-11-2012, even we don't have done any changes on the website & we were on top on many keywords. We have done only one change recently is we have moved our website from shared server to dedicated server on last 21st October & we can see some traffic fluctuation after to redirecting from shared server to dedicated server, also website load time has been increase in Google Analytic, so it that reason to get rank down suddenly?, because all keywords has been down. We have also some affiliate sites like bannerbuzz.ca, bannerbuzz.co.uk & bannerbuzz.com.au which design and coding structure is as same as bannerbuzz.com, so is that a problem (Duplication issue)? We have tried to find out the solution for the same, but we didn't get any proper reason to get rank down suddenly. Can it happened due to dedicated server which we have moved recently or Google has changed anything in algorithm? Can we put website in Google reconsideration to know proper reason about the website? Following are the keywords on which we loose the ranking. Banners
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
Vinyl Banners
Custom Banners
Vinyl Lettering
Custom Signs
Car Decals We were on top for above all keywords. Your help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks,0 -
Increase Search Ranking for CEO
Hi guys My company CEO is concerned that when her name is googled pictures of a glamour model appear in the image results area. The glamour model shares a second name with our CEO and this is why the model's images are appearing. I have been asked to rectify this situation. My CEO has a linked in page and twitter account which are underused but no personal page on our company website. I was thinking of buying the url for the CEO's name and optimizing a small site for her name with bio etc and links to twitter, lined in etc. Would this be the best strategy? Thanks Gavin
Technical SEO | | gavinr0 -
Wrong page ranking even after fixes. Why?
Howdy, I've read a number of posts on this issue and followed all the advice I could find. My issue is this: several of our targeted keywords have the wrong page ranking which results in a loss of conversion and high bounce rate. I use the site:mydomain.com operator to see how the pages are ranking which I find really useful. One of our targeted keywords is 'wedding stationery' and the page which should rank is shop.confetti.co.uk/branch/wedding-stationery however this page ranks 3rd on our domain. I've done the following: Optimised the correct page De-optimised the ranking pages Added links from the incorrectly ranking page to the page I want to rank using keyword anchor text Added internal links to the page I want to rank from high Page Authority pages using keyword anchor text Here is a link to the SERP which shows the ranking for our domain for the 'wedding stationery' search term. I made the changes a couple of weeks ago. Any advice or explanations as to what is causing this would be greatly received. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
Technical SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0