Rankings Drop Today

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24
I wake up this morning to see that one of my sites has dropped majorly in rankings for a lot of the keywords it was ranking #1-#5 for.

They have been ranking 1-5 for about a year now, and they have seemed to drop from 1-5 to 60-80 according to my keyword tracker. However when I search in google I cannot find the pages at those spots....

I have recently built 3 links from a PBN to the site (which I have done here and there in the past) and had a high quality guest post land on the 21st.

Other than that all I have used are mainly high quality guest posts.

Could my site bounce like that from new links and will come back? Even though it had been ranking steadily for a while now?

It appears this drop is site wide for all pages and all terms....

Anyone else seeing drops, or have any changes been made in google?

Any ideas at all?
#search engine optimization #drop #rankings #today
  • I'd wait a bit before taking any action. Well, unless there's something obvious like warning in Google Webmaster Tools... Sometimes the rankings do fluctuate.
  • No warnings in webmaster tools, that is the first thing I checked
  • Wait for 2 or 3 days and then check that weather your website is penalized by google
    • [1] reply
    • A few things I would check...

      First is it indexed? If it is no longer indexed, then yeah you are SOL.

      Do any of your pages still rank? Pick a page that has a fairly long and unique title. Search for the page title in quotes. If it does not show up in the top 50-100 try a few more pages. If it is the same result, you probably have been hit by an algorithmic penalty.

      It's doubtful that a few links from one site caused it though. And if it did, name your price. I would like to buy the network site. I have a few hundred competitors I would like to remove from the SERPs.
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • I did a site operator search and my site is still indexed, however some things are weird. After I click show omitted results, my home page shows up 1st. Then the 3rd result says proudly powered by wordpress and that url is my homepage but says A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt. And the 7th result is my site name/mobile, the 8th result is my site name/m, which I have no idea what they are or if that is affecting this? Both of those say A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt as well.

    When I click on those 3 results it comes up with a 404 error.

    I forgot to mention a few other things I have done recently... here is everything that has been done in the past month

    I made a child theme and rearranged the content on the front page about 2 weeks ago.

    Other than that I have recently built 3 links from a PBN to the site (which I have done here and there in the past), and also a high quality guest post just landed on the 21st.
  • DA 30 is meaningless.

    Anyhow, a single guest post is not going to tank your rankings either.

    Rearranging your home page content though... yeah that could seriously make everything FUBAR. You just changed your whole internal linking structure. It might make things better eventually, but Google probably has not crawled all the changes yet. The drop is not surprising. It may not come back though depending if the changes were for the better or for the worse.

    Did you change URLs also with the child theme?
    • [1] reply
    • By changing the content I mean I just rearranged the front page post. Bringing the content that was at the bottom of the post up to the top, and the content that was at the top of the post then down to the bottom.

      I did not change any urls with the child theme. I created the child theme to make changes to things like the footer and header so that when wordpress updates it does not erase the changes.
      • [1] reply
  • Wait until google crawls your new changes. Also keep an eye on your webmaster tools.
  • would you recommend switching the content back and eliminating the child theme?

    I knew I should not have messed with it...

    Would adding a child theme and rearranging the content on just my homepage really throw all pages/terms off?
    • [1] reply
    • I would not. You've already "messed" it up once, and doing it again would probably not help. You'd be doing the same thing twice in a row.

      I'd just see that the current link structure makes sense, and wait a little to see how it goes. It seems to me that sites with changes need to be sort of "re-evaluated" by Google before they rank again. Unfortunately it's impossible to say wether the rankings recover.

      I'm not Google's algorithm, but just adding a (WordPress) child theme should not be a big deal in my opinion. Switching themes, however, does major changes to the HTML code. Even if the site looks the same, you're showing completely different site to Google.

      Rearranging homepage should not affect sub pages that much, but link structure obviously has an effect on everything.
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • Google ranking fluctuate up and down, wait a month or so before you do anything.
  • It would be due to bouncing of your site in the search engine, but it should show the pages you have mentioned. See manual actions in your webmaster tools if ti shows any message. Also read 'help' in your webmaster tools and try to resubmit is after waiting for few days if it shows no any positive sign.
  • well today I do a site operator and it appears none of the pages on my site are indexed....

    Could this be because it is in the sandbox and being re-evaluated?
    • [1] reply
    • No. That means there is something Google really does not like about your site. Some examples:

      1) It is hacked and providing malicious content.
      2) It is using something sneaky like cloaking.
      3) Your backlinks are a bit more trashy than you shared. For example, you are using a public blog network that got discovered and deindexed by Google.

      Without anyone seeing the site, these are just guesses.
      • [1] reply
  • Thanks, I have sent a PM
  • Mike I thought I sent a PM, but it is not in my sent box. Have you received it?
  • Mike I am trying to send you a PM, but it is not showing up in my sent box. Is your PM box full?
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    Rankings Drop Today

    I wake up this morning to see that one of my sites has dropped majorly in rankings for a lot of the keywords it was ranking #1-#5 for. They have been ranking 1-5 for about a year now, and they have seemed to drop from 1-5 to 60-80 according to my keyword tracker. However when I search in google I cannot find the pages at those spots....