I have a 10 year old domain that was ranked #1 organically for 5+ years but now for this specific phrase our homepage doesnt come up at all but some of our pages do but we are like 6 pages back in Google. In webmaster tools it doesnt say any foul play or banned etc. We still show up in the engines but again we are 6+ pages back but we show up in Local and PPC, what would you do for a site like this? This domain doesnt expire either until like another 10 years. It is on a couple year old theme as well and we are about to re-design it to be more modern and responsive, but I hear some people say that we should start on a brand new domain??? That doesnt make sense...
If this happened on May 2014 then it will be a panda attack. And you also mentioned that you haven't got any message from web spam team, so it can be happened because of thin pages in your website or updating to much content which is not unique at all. Or This kind of problem also be seen in Penguin attack. Reasons are :- 1) All your links must be with Nofollow website. 2) Focusing only on anchor text in money keyword. 3) Maximum number of backlinks from single website. Hope it will helped you...
check your site from fruition.net google penalty checker tool to know from which update your site has been effected.
tokipost - Since between 2012 & 2013 many updates have seen & Penguin was among such penalty was at its best. The case that you have told me that your ranked in #1 and then suddenly drops to ranks in page 5, such cases were seen from many SEO experts globally.. because of the three following reasons that I have mentioned in above content. Such cases do actually appear because of penguin attack only without any warning from Google if your some backlinks is attached with spam website or Maximum number of backlinks from single website.
There is a good blog post title "Google’s Matt Cutts Explains That Older Sites Won’t Always Keep Their Current Rankings" Source: searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-explains-older-sites-wont-always-keep-current-rankings-182743 what to do? 1. First of all read Google's Design and content guidelines, Technical guidelines, Quality guidelines and apply them on website. 2. Remove unnatural and low quality links. 3. Add quality content on sites. I hope, it will help you.
OP, already told you about GWT: "In webmaster tools it doesnt say any foul play or banned etc"... Don't people read the posts before replying????? try to google your website address and if you don't come up on top for your URL then you have a penalty. If you really don't have a penalty, it means your domain is fine and there's no need to relaunch the site on a new domain as it won't rank.
It does come up if typed in just the domain name here . If you search for a certain phrase then its been on the 5th page (which is a inner page listing and not the homepage url) for over a year now but the local listing in B. Maybe if we re-write our content on homepage. Not sure where the homepage url comes up for certain phrases, dont think it does anymore. :/
There are myriad reasons why your site may not be ranking. The most common is that your content has been hijacked and is hitting duplicate or that the content is just stale. The web is a hotbed for nearly every keyword. Check your competition and do a solid evaluation of what they are doing to beat you. Review their content, (keywords too)their metas, their inbound links and their social media. In many cases if any of those things are wrong on your site, fix them. Just because you didn't get a penalty doesn't mean that you're not down on page five for some infraction. One of my clients was adding links from his friends site. We did not get an unnatural link notice from Google. We did fall to page five. When we removed the multiple links from his friends sites the site magically showed in search again on page 1 and 2. As you say the theme may also be an issue. Technology has changed a lot in the span of time that you're talking about. The theme that was workable with say.. Wordpress 2.9 may not be so with WP 3.9 and more importantly it may be far slower than Google wants to see. Check your bounce rate, too. Evaluate your compliance with webmaster guidelines. Is your site and your business transparent? Does the privacy policy, TOS and contact us information show? All of those things may not, in and of themselves be a massive problem and they may not net you a penalty--- as it were, but together they can absolutely hold you back from doing as well as you'd like to be doing. It's hard to be more precise without knowing the URL but all of those things can be a problem. Generally when you want a very good look at what you're doing wrong, what I advise people do to is go and go over your competition. Do an analysis that is nothing short of a fine tooth comb look at it. When you're not quite sure what you're doing wrong the best thing to do is evaluate someone who is doing it right and see what you should be changing.
This looks strange... So big change in the ranking is somehing... strange... As we know Google Dance could do this, but from #1 to NOWHERE... Something fishy, for example check your backlinks!! You could be a victim of a link bombing for example!
Yeah, maybe you should try to re-write your homepage content but before you do so, make sure you analyse the competitors.