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significant rank drop overnight

by MP9
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi everyone,

A few days ago I experienced the scariest moment of my life. My site which was ranking the first position for 10 most important keywords just went to rank 80 and 35. My whole site is dropped. My own brand name comes at position of 6. I have been slowly building links for the past 6 months and everything was just fine. 3 weeks ago I ordered 800 facebook shares for my naked url only. What could be the problem? Also I changed my http to https 4 weeks ago after which I saw improvement in all keyword rankings. There is one thing:
when I ordered https I installed it on the subdomain because my main site is on the subdomain. Since I use Directadmin panel I had to create seperate add on domain for the subdomain and copied the site from subdomain folder to the addon domain which is actually that subdomain and both site data are on the host. Could that cause duplicate content problem? My site is full of original and good content and I really deserve to be 1st position.
P.S: There is no message in Webmastertool for penalty of any kind. What is the problem? Thank you very much.

P.S.1: When I moved to https I 301 redirected only the important page which were receiving traffic.(7 out of 210)

PS.2: In webmaster tools the number indexed pages for my https version has been 0 since I moved to https
#drop #overnight #rank #significant
  • Profile picture of the author Marc Lawrence
    First off I want to say that everything will be ok

    When you make any of the changes you are talking about, it takes a certain amount of in terms of cause and effect. I have a feeling your rankings will be back to where they were within the next 48hrs or so.

    I remember dealing with Google's Panda/Penguin updates a few years back and the one thing I took out of that whole experience is to take appropriate action, but remain calm while you do it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    My site which was ranking the first position for 10 most important keywords
    If you are already ranking number one for your most important keywords stop messing and tinkering around with your site dude. concentrate on building more qualty links (not 800 facebook naked url garbage) and retaining viewers
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    • Profile picture of the author MP9
      Originally Posted by Mike Anthony View Post

      If you are already ranking number one for your most important keywords stop messing and tinkering around with your site dude. concentrate on building more qualty links (not 800 facebook naked url garbage) and retaining viewers
      Now what should I do?
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by MP9 View Post

    P.S.1: When I moved to https I 301 redirected only the important page which were receiving traffic.(7 out of 210)
    Along with the silly fake Facebook likes, this was a really bad move. You should 301 redirect them all to the HTTPS version.

    Those other URLS probably had links coming in to them and unless you were doing some sort of funky site design, they definitely played a part in your site's internal link structure.

    I bet you are seeing the HTTP versions ranking (albeit lower) and not the HTTPS or some of both.

    And honestly, if you do not have a security reason for using HTTPS, I would probably dump it. Yes, Google has said it is a ranking signal, but it is a weak ranking signal at best. Very weak. Every credible test I have seen done migrating to HTTPS has seen either no change in rankings or a drop in rankings (probably because they did not 301 everything correctly).
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