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Site has lost all rankings, can't work out why

by d0de
15 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey.

I've been working on an authority site that consists of a blog and a number of permanent pages.

All the content is written by me. It's well-researched, engaging, unique content. Most pages are 800-1500 words. It also has a number of photographs I've taken.

I've slowly been building the content and had made a little headway in the rankings. I haven't really put much effort into link building yet, I wanted to get a solid base of content first.

It had ranked pretty well for a site with very few links. I was tracking about 15 keywords with exact-match searches between 80k and 1k per month.

Here's a selection of how it was ranking:

Code:
50k search term - #50
22k search term - #15
7k search term   - #8
6.5k search term - #21
4k search term   - #25
And so on. Not amazing, but decent for a site at this stage. The blog was also doing ok, with a couple of articles picked up by social media sites and getting >20k views.

But around April 6th, all the rankings dropped. Simultaneously, my site dropped out of the top 200 results for all the keywords I was tracking, even the really uncompetitive ones that get less than 1k searches per month.

Here's what webmaster tools shows:


Before then, I was getting around 50 search visitors a day. Now, I'm getting virtually 0.



The drop seems site-wide. However, I have not received any warnings in webmaster tools, and my site still looks healthy: all the pages are still indexed, it's still the #1 result when you search for the site name.

I have no idea what could have caused the sudden drop in rankings.

This site has literally 0 black- or grey-hat SEO. No spammy linkbuilding or anything at all like that.

Here's a list of linking domains from webmaster tools. There's nothing even slightly shady:



I can't think of anything that changed with the site around that time. There was no redesign, no change in hosting, no new links, nothing different.

Only possible thing I can think of: I added an adsense unit to a small number of pages around March 22, and I added a few relevant affiliate links to those same pages. Only for about 10 pages in total, out of 50 or more. But I don't think that could affect rankings?

Can anyone suggest how to move forward? It seems very likely that my site has been hit by some kind of Google penalty, but I don't know what could have caused it so I don't think I can submit a reconsideration request.

What should I do?

I'd be really grateful for help, I've been working extremely hard on this site and I'm really discouraged that it's been slapped like this.
#lost #rankings #site #work
  • Profile picture of the author Wes888
    How old is your site? If it is still pretty new, it might be a case of Google Dance.
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  • Profile picture of the author STLSEO
    Could you please share your domain with me. I will look into this for you.
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  • Profile picture of the author jodiesmitham
    I doubt the Adsense or affiliate links caused the damage. Did you over optimize your pages i.e. keyword stuffing in page titles, descriptions etc? Such a drop in rankings infers Google is not happy with something and if you haven't worked on backlinking, it's probably related to the content.

    It may be worth removing Adsense and the affiliate links and monitor over the next few weeks or so, just to eliminate that possibility.
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  • Profile picture of the author d0de
    How old is your site? If it is still pretty new, it might be a case of Google Dance.
    About 4 or 5 months, but for most of that time it was only 8 or 9 pages. Started adding content in earnest about 8 weeks ago.

    I doubt the Adsense or affiliate links caused the damage. Did you over optimize your pages i.e. keyword stuffing in page titles, descriptions etc? Such a drop in rankings infers Google is not happy with something and if you haven't worked on backlinking, it's probably related to the content.
    I don't think this can be it, because the most highly-optimized content is the oldest on the site, the stuff that's been there for 5 months or so. And even then, it's all very white-hat, readable etc. It's optimized, but there's no keyword stuffing.

    The content I've been adding lately isn't even optimized, it's just quality content that I've been adding to try and attract links and social media attention organically. It's not designed to rank for any particular term.
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  • Profile picture of the author Hansons
    Sorry to hear, if it is penalized then I would say that start with a new domain name for better response.
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    • Profile picture of the author Stefan Shields
      If it is a wordpress site it could be the botnet/ddos attack that's been happening, your site might not have been available to google when they were trying to crawl it, the attacks knocked many servers out due to too many http requests.

      I couldn't get some of my sites to load at all while this attack was going on.

      Don't know if this is the problem but it could be.
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      • Profile picture of the author d0de
        Originally Posted by Stefan Shields View Post

        If it is a wordpress site it could be the botnet/ddos attack that's been happening, your site might not have been available to google when they were trying to crawl it, the attacks knocked many servers out due to too many http requests.

        I couldn't get some of my sites to load at all while this attack was going on.

        Don't know if this is the problem but it could be.
        It is wordpress, but I think if that had happened then I would have had a warning in webmaster tools, and the pages might even have been deindexed.
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  • Profile picture of the author awj888
    you say no blackhat/greyhat links however its pretty obvious you have an almost sitewide link at the top of that list - google in its quality guidelines clearly sais that those types of links should be nofollow - im not saying that you have gotten that link on purpose - it could have been from social traffic etc - but check the latest links for your site that google discovered if you have all those showing up at once then it could be the issue
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    • Profile picture of the author d0de
      Originally Posted by awj888 View Post

      you say no blackhat/greyhat links however its pretty obvious you have an almost sitewide link at the top of that list - google in its quality guidelines clearly sais that those types of links should be nofollow - im not saying that you have gotten that link on purpose - it could have been from social traffic etc - but check the latest links for your site that google discovered if you have all those showing up at once then it could be the issue
      Thanks for this - how do I check the latest links google discovered? I only know how to get the aggregate list from WMT
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  • Profile picture of the author danielph
    The same thing was happen to me few month ago, and i can't get my website up again. I was make for my site seo, with freelancer. And after i have find a lot of stupid blog comments on almost all indian websites. And my website from first page drop to will not able to find my keyword. So maybe you have some bad link back to your website, or maybe some new panda update...
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  • Profile picture of the author PanditaC
    If you are using shared ip it could be the server has been blacklisted. I had the same happen to one of my sites, dropped from position 10 to invisible over night, no indexing, nothing. I also use only white hat SEO and all original content. Couldn't figure out what happened . . . recently, after almost 8 months, ran it through woo-rank and found out the server had been blacklisted due to another site on the shared IP sending spam mail or something of the sort. Research said that had nothing to do with ranking. . .BUT. . . I bought a dedicated IP and a week later appeared on page 4 and am once again climbing the ranks. So I would check that out if I were you if you are using shared IP.
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  • Profile picture of the author Joelle Hoban
    DOde,

    Your rankings with Google can change at any time depending on many factors. However backlink building is the single most important task for increasing your Google ranking.

    This may have happened because you focused too much and too long on content. You mentioned you have not done much link building. Linkbuilding is at the center of increasing your Google rankings. With good quality backlinks being the backbone of your Google rankings then it is no surprise your rankings fell. You may never know the exact cause.

    You didn't mention how old your site is. If your site is relatively new it may be that the cause is "The Google Dance". If you don't know, it is a sporadic fluctuation of website rankings that may show your site ranking well with Google only to lose this place then move up and down and finally fall in the rankings until your site settles where it truly rates with Google.

    Remember only build links to sites with related content and good organized data.

    Do not violate any of Google's rules as this can hurt your rankings also.
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  • Profile picture of the author CCarter
    What if the answer is simpler? A new major competitors may have moved in your niche, and scraped your keywords and started outranking you. This would result in you being pushed down to page 2, 3, 4, 10 even.

    I doubt that's the case in this scenario. It looks like you got either a penalty, or the "link juice" of your backlinks have been devalued. When your backlinks become devalued, you're authority and trust drop, resulting in dropped rankings.
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  • Profile picture of the author Backlinko
    That's a huge slap.

    I thought at first you were talking about a dip...but that screenshot from GWT is most definitely a slap.

    The thing is, listing the places you got links from doesn't actually determine very much (unless they're from Harvard.edu or something like that).

    You have to look at your link profile as a whole and ask yourself: does it look natural or not?

    I can take a look and maybe ID what went wrong. You can PM me the URL if you want.
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