Hi guys, I work for an online marketing agency and recently, after doing well for over a year, ranks in SERPs started dropping for ALL clients (by "all" I mean more than 20 clients in total). We're very careful to not use any blackhat techniques and follow the guidelines. We can't figure out for the life of us why clients have suddenly started dropping. Clients range between multiple industries and hosting providers, most target Australia. We do work with a web design company and many clients are hosted by them, but the ranking drops are not limited to these clients. We perform ongoing SEO maintenance (including on page and off page optimisation, link building, etc.) for clients and rankings have been fine until they started dropping off in the past 2 months. What could possibly be causing this? I've tried seeing if there may have been an algorithm change in Google, but I can't find anything AND rankings in SERPs are dropping over all major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!), Not just Google. Can anyone provide any insight into this? Has this happened to you before?
They are changing the algorithm, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/caffeine-update/ you can test the sandbox here http://www2.sandbox.google.com/
Farngkwaiyai, I've read about the caffeine update, but: 1) Rankings are already dropping now, not in the sandbox but the actual live search engine. 2) Rankings aren't just dropping in Google, but Bing and Yahoo! as well.
Check if its a temporary change or not. Just wait for couple of days & watch. Sometime its a temporary change and people start changing their website contents which sometimes push them further back in SERPs.
Thanks, Webdev, though I don't really see how waiting 2 more days could suddenly revert over a month of drops. As I said, this has been happening for a while and as it's happening for ALL of our clients, I don't think that on-page changes are the key here, although I don't rule out this option completely as right now we don't really have any idea of what might cause over 20 unrelated websites to drop over all major search engines all at the same time.
According to Matt (the caffeine video) if your SEO fundamentals are strong and are all white hat then caffeine should not affect you that much. Well, if we believe in that then something else is affecting your rankings. I have blogs at #1 which are there even without any promotions since last 3 months. I strongly believe something else is affecting it. Since you are providing a service to your clients I think you probably have a process to implement different strategies. Is it possible you recently implemented some promotional methods on all your client sites that is back firing. Just a thought.
its really hard to say why all 20 sites would go down in ranking at the same time. whatever was working for you before is not norking anymore, that what it seems like. you can experiment wiht one site and utilize some link building method that you have not used before to see if that makes any change. other than that, you just need to do some trouble shooting yourself to find out the cause
They are simply incorporating more changes to their algorithms. Google wants to start optimizing their image section, so changes are being made.
Is there anything in common with the designs, such as a footer link back to the web dev firm? This is unlikely but, a botched robots.txt or meta elements? Considering it's not limited to this design firm, and it's "all" your customers specifically then.. Something that people don't talk about a lot, but i've seen it first hand is Google profiling you as a company and wiping out everything you are involved in regardless if it doesn't breech the guidelines. Yes it happens, i have ample evidence. Nothing would explain that besides a technical fault making the sites inaccessible or partially inaccessible to crawlers. Google has link bias, Yahoo has content/density bias and Bing has exact domain and keyword bias so to bomb in all three takes some effort lol. I would need to see at least 2 sites (to check for similarities) to say for any certainty.
If you build backlinks from same websites again and again, G may reduce your serp... Check the backlinks of all your clients and the common ones may be troubling.
I agree with sultanofseo that, "whatever was working for you before is not norking anymore". The reason you are likely seeing it across ALL clients is that your agency likely has a particular "formula" or "method" for promoting sites so that they rank. They probably use very similar link building techniques across all sites they do SEO for since most people "use what they know" or "use what works at the time". Google made over 400 algo changes last year I think I read in a Cutts blog post. Most are likely tiny tweeks, but an occasional change can have big affects on sites with a specific backlink profile. Since the link building for most of your client sites probably use the same basic techniques, they likely have similar backlink profiles. It doesn't matter that their industries are totally different. If say you use blog comments, directory submissions, article submissions, forum posting, social bookmarking, hub sites, or some other "unnatural" link building method where you "plant" links on other sites pointing to your client sites with a particular keyword phrase you want them to rank for then you are at big risk of eventually having this happen. Links built using "unnatural" link building techniques have been, are, and always will be the biggest target of anti-spam algorithm changes at Google (as well as other engines now that are finally catching on to the importance of having SERPs free or almost free of spam). "Natural" links are almost NEVER affected by algo changes. This is why it is SO important to diversify your backlink profile if you're using unnatural link building techniques. You should not limit your link building techiniques to 1, 2, or even 3 different ones. You want to use as many as possible so that if an algo change goes in to combat the use of one technique, only a small percentage of your backlinks will be affected and you minimize the affects overall to your rankings. I would totally expect that if one of an SEO agency's clients saw a huge drop in rankings that ALL of the agency's clients would see similar drops.