HELP: Sudden Drop In Ranking!?

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Hi everyone,

I own a (stable) e-commerce site for about 2 years now and it always had splendid rankings for a broad variety of keywords. A few hours ago I saw that my traffic flow just stopped.... Is there any seo expert that can tell me why this happened???

I can say that the site always had static content but recently (since 1 week or so) I started a wordpress blog which is attached to my main domain name. The last week I have been submitting vast amounts of UNIQUE content to my new blog and I saw immediate traffic from these new blog posts.

WHY did Google slap me? I thought Google loved unique content??
#search engine optimization #drop #ranking #sudden
  • 1. Check your site links with majesticseo & ahrefs for any form of unknown spammy links that you didn't build (negative seo)

    2. Check for any "dead" pages on your site.

    3. Refresh your product descriptions if they are duplicated from anywhere.
  • When you say vast amounts how many? What was the topic of these pages? Your traffic dropped but where Is your ranking? Have you been spamming backlinks?
    • [1] reply
    • None of these blog posts had any links in it. Let's say 20 blog posts per day.

      And my domain has pagerank 4.
  • What about backlinks? Have you been building any? What kind?

    Have you checked your backlink profile to see if anyone did some negative seo to your site?
    • [1] reply
    • I don't build backlinks myself. There are only two seo services I use. All of them popular on this and other forums. That's it.

  • How far back did you drop in the serps?

    Even though you don't build backlinks you still need to check your backlink profile because someone may have done some negative seo to your site. Since google seems to allow that kind of thing now, that should be the first place you start looking when something like this happens.

    Also check your anchor text diversity percentages.
    • [1] reply
    • From the first page (top) to the 5-10 page.



      I can say that I don't like the russian links, they are there for a long time never gave any issues.
  • Lol, the biggest mistake ever. If it's popular and works then you can be sure Google are going to shut it down. I would honestly go for something more unique. It really could just be anything, you need to wait abit to find out.
  • what if it really is the new wordpress blog that causes this drop in ranking... should I delete the entire blog?

    Can this be Google Sandbox at work? How can I find out?
  • Without looking at your site in more detail we can't tell you. I would say you would start to see the affect of major site changes within 2/3 days, such as a major drop - you built this blog over a week ago.

    You have alot of backlinks. It could appear unnatural that you are getting loads of links pumped out onto your index page then suddenly loads of internal pages appear over night with little or no backlinking, could be some form of spam algo.
  • I do admit that in a relatively short time lots of content were created and submitted on my site which has been "static" since it was created. But sure this ranking drop must be only temporary right????
    • [1] reply
    • I can't say mate. Google are doing alot of changes atm, fighting spammy links, deindexing link farms, and hitting sites that are creating doorway pages.

      I think they are also doing alot of manual reviews and cleaning up big time. If you ranked well then you could of undergone a manual review. If your backlinks look fishy to you, then they will more than likely look fishy to Matt Cutts.

      If your site and backlinks are ok then it will bounce back, if it doesn't in 7days then I would start tracing my steps to put it back the way it was, if it doesn't move, then you will have been hit. Could be dancing or a penalty at position 100.
  • For the sites linking to you, are some of them site wide links? Google has been penalizing sites that have a lot of site wide links with unnatural anchor text.
  • It has to do with your frequency. The new algorithm is very sensitive to post and backlinking frequency so make sure you don't "blast out" your content or backlink.

    Hope this helps.
    • [1] reply
    • Yes, I blasted out lots of content the last few days.

      My traffic dropped to almost zero. Is this a Google Dance or the Sandbox Penalty and when will it go away?

      Thanks.
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  • First of all remove broken links from your website and then optimize your wordpress blog.

    Apart from this I have gone through your webmaster screen shot and i have seen updowner bot. you need to disallow it from your robot.txt. After all this steps you need start again promotion for your web pages.
    • [2] replies

    • YES, updowner bot, what is that? Can you please clarify on how I can remove this with robot.txt? I've never edited a robot.txt.


      Thanks!
    • What's this Updowner bot? I've seen it a few times, it looks like a directory site where you need to include some some code in your HTML. I assumed it was a good thing because it's been listed as a backlink on sites which do pretty well. I'm guessing it isn't. It seems to rank pretty well in Alexa.
  • Actually, this is something new by Google. I have seen at least 6 different companies and individuals affected by this. Including a few sites that I consult with, I have a new client that has 56 back links of the natural variety (local businesses linking to him from over 2 years ago) and lost a rank of 1 to position 580. However, Matt Cutts at SMX has said no new Penguin updates were made (save for the one over last weekend). No notification from Google about unnatural linking (which means it was not "manual action"). However, this seems to be some movement from Google in another direction. The cases include a few sites in France which has a different search results than we do. I've been monitoring the situation, but I have found nothing from the major SEO experts.
  • Is your article related to your website? Maybe you do spamming backlinks for your websites.
  • @etvconnect, have you found anything related to the traffic drop. Its not just you. Others seen the same thing, your graph puts it into perspective though. http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...yesterday.html
    • [1] reply
    • Here is the problem, just what I expected, I removed the entire blog from my website.

  • So was your blog content unique and related or what?

    If it was then surely you wouldn't get this warning so I'd be interested in how good you would honestly say this content was.

    Matt
  • No the blog content was not good. Everything accept the blog was hand written unique content. The content on the blog was scraped content from the web and I posted LOTS of these on my blog, then came the drop.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [2] replies
    • Hehe well you kind of had that one coming.

      You said in your original post that the blog content was UNIQUE so I guess you weren't telling the truth there. If you had said it was scraped content (the complete opposite of unique) in your original post then you would have received the answer you were looking for immediately.

      Anyway, you live and learn. Having a blog can be useful but just be sure to actually use UNIQUE content... and I probably wouldn't be so hasty to add so much immediately to a site that has been static for so long.
    • Sorry to hear about that, but thanks for posting this. I sometimes "forget" what they're looking for and what they'll throw you out of the rankings for.
  • May be it's because of the over-optimization you did on some of your keywords. One should always avoid keyword stuffing and other negative SEO techniques while working on your keywords.
    • [1] reply
    • Check your site backlinks for spam backlinks which you not added.
      Check the google analytics for, is there any filter not set.
      Check the broken links and resolve it.
      Check your site content for duplicate content.
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    HELP: Sudden Drop In Ranking!?

    Hi everyone, I own a (stable) e-commerce site for about 2 years now and it always had splendid rankings for a broad variety of keywords. A few hours ago I saw that my traffic flow just stopped.... Is there any seo expert that can tell me why this happened???