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Rankings Plummet

by Rammin
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Ok, so I've had my site up for about 2 and a half months, in which for the past month I've been consistently building links, which took my rankings from 400+ to the second page for most of my major keywords. Now last night all of my rankings have dropped drastically, with rankings ranging from 634 to 130. So what do I do?

Background information:

  • My site and all of its pages are still indexed.
  • I still rank for my domain name.
  • If I take a snippit of unique text from my site and enter it in brackets in google I rank for it.
  • The only thing I saw in Webmaster tools that might be the problem is "Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace" which I haven't been able to find any info about.
  • No paid links, nothing dodgy, built maybe 2-10 links a day, although none of the sites are all that relevant to my niche.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
#plummet #rankings
  • Profile picture of the author ehicks727
    Was your site ranked well for about two weeks?? If so, you might be experiencing what I call the Google new content "bump". Google gives preference to new content, gives it a nice bump in the rankings for about two weeks, then it dives several pages.

    How to fix?? Some will tell you more links... I say, more content and internal linking... but hey, that's just me.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin Lam
    Well, echicks727, I'll have to agree with you whole-heartedly. More content and more internal linking will help you with the boost. So it's not just you. I'd do the same thing in such a case.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rammin
    Yeah it has been about two weeks...from the 9th of April to be precise. Ok so should I keep building links and write some articles and put them on my site or something?
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    • Profile picture of the author ChrisG
      I would consider learning ppc in your spare time as well. Hopefully your sites will come back up...
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      • Profile picture of the author Rammin
        Weird, my rankings are now right back to where they were before. Google is really messing with my head...yeah I have done a fair bit of PPC (passed the adwords test) but I can't really take the hit to my wallet atm, so I'm forcing myself to go the SEO route. Thanks for all the suggestions, if this happens again I might wait a day or 2 before hitting the forums in a panic.
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  • Profile picture of the author ehicks727
    Google has lots and lots of servers. It takes time for the main index to replicate across the entire server network. You may have just hit one of the servers that hasn't updated the index yet.
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  • Profile picture of the author intelinside
    I guess it was because of the QDF factor.

    Quality Deserve Freshness (QDF) factor which pushes the fresh pages to the top of the SERPs for some time and then gradually that page moves back to its deserved position based on its PR and other 200 factors.

    QDF is an important factor especially for News Sites where you get breaking news and it is important that these pages show up instantly in SERPs so G algo does exactly that.

    So, your site experienced the same.
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    • Profile picture of the author nicalyngroup
      This happened to me too a few weeks ago. My blog was #5 on Google for a particular keyword phrase, then one day it was just gone. I found it somewhere on page 12 or 13. To be fair, I hadn't posted anything for about a week or so but I was surprised at such a steep drop. Steady and consistent posting since then have it fluctuating between #8 and #12 now. I have read that sometimes Google will do an update to their algorithm, which re-evaluates everything and causes big ranking drops like that. But it's supposed to be temporary as you've noticed. Weird how Google works.

      Sean
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