Please help - My site www.quickmovenow.com is a respected UK based home buying company who has recently seen a sharp drop in its rankings for the phrase "buy my house" on Google.co.uk. Up until 2 weeks ago my site was regularly seeing top 3 positions for that phrase, but one day it just disappeared completely from the rankings. The site is not banned (I have done a search for the "site:..." operator and there are still plenty of pages indexed). Also the site still ranks well for other phrases like "part exchange home". Also bizzarrely if you search for "buy my house" and select the UK only results, it still ranks at number 4!!!. Even more bizzarrely, if you spell the word wrong and type "buy my huose", www.quickmovenow.com ranks at number 4! We have steered clear of black-hat techniques for this site, as you will see if you check the code. Also, we did not make any changes to the site in the few weeks preceding the rank drop. I know there are quite a few of these type of forum post out there (I'm an experinced SEO) and I wouldn't normally post like this but this is our biggest client and I am absolutely stumped! Any input would be appreciated... Cheers:
Have you been keeping tabs on competitor site movement? Could they just be doing much better than you, I'm guessing you probably already checked. Perhaps you have a parasite host? Finally all I can think of is that Google has filtered some of the links you've built. I know that I've overdone my target phrase in anchor text before and saw a massive drop on Yahoo and saw their link count move down, thus presumably they filtered out a whole bunch of my links.
Hi T Media thanks for the input, I have considered that it is just my site's competitors that are moving above me, however I find that hard to believe as I have not just dropped a few places, I have dropped completely out of the rankings (for "buy my house"). Also, some of the sites that have replaced my site are complete rubbish compared to my site; really low on content, spammy link profile, poor site design. Maybe Google just needs to work on its algorithm : ) Question: Whats a parasite host? Could be right on the links, we've worked pretty hard on the link building for that phrase.... Cheers
parasite host - umm, anyone pick me up if I'm wrong, but I believe it's when a hacker has managed to get access to your files and will upload something, usually malicious or something that would benefit the hacker. I once had one of my sites hacked, they uploaded some subtle code to all my pages that would load an invisble iframe which would then go on to install adware on the viewers computer. I wasn't monitoring my rankings at the time, but I've read that Google can detect when a website has malware/adware installed and severely drops your rank. Seems like this is unlikely for you though since you still rank well for some other terms, might be worth checking though. Tbh, it sounds more like you've overdone link building for a particular phrase and perhaps one of Google's filters was triggered causing many of your links to be devalued. If you've been tracking your link count in Yahoo, you may have noticed a sharp drop in the number there; which would provide strong evidence that some or a lot of links have been filtered. (This is assuming Yahoo have also been triggered into filtering links). Unfortunately I don't think you can get a reliable count of how many links have been filtered by Google, their webmaster tool just seems to show all links regardless of whether they have filtered them or not. I track my rankings every 2/3 days and write the rankings down, I don't know how long it has been since the ranking disappeared but if it's only been a day or 2, you might just find it'll popup in the original position again. If not, you've probably shot yourself in the foot a bit and any backlinks you do build from here should concentrate on other phrases, build out a more even link portfolio and then add in a few more of your target phrase links here and there. I've never had to recover a site after something like this (although I'm about to try, with the site on Yahoo I mentioned earlier) so I don't know if it'll work, good luck!
Like I said, you could be right about the links, even though the number of links in Yahoo has remained pretty steady.
Just checked your rankings. Position 22 on Google UK for "buy my house", Yahoo UK 2 and Msn Live 1 That's not too bad, it's not like you dropped a 100 results like I did. A bit more careful link building should get you back up with the crowd.
Not sure where you got that ranking from, my google.co.uk has showed no ranking for my site for a couple of weeks, bar a brief flirtation last week for like, 30 seconds. Good point about Yahoo and MSN, we're doing well there. However, as I'm sure you know, its all about Google these days... You say you dropped 100 results? Did you get you ranking back at all? How long did it take?
Google result is right there on page 3, I can see it with my own eyes, position 23 now, listing points to www.quickmovenow.com/situations.html The site that dropped 100 results dropped on Yahoo and surprisingly stayed put on Google. I'm currently just montioring it's google rank, I decided to cool off a little for a month since I din't want Google to catch on and get triggered too. The site isn't raising on old links anymore in Google now so I think I'l start building more links at the end of this month, but I'm gone mix the anchor text up quite a bit more. I'm not sure how well it'll work out, I think I'll be able to raise the Google rank, but the Yahoo rank is so far down that I honestly think I've had it there and there'd be no point in me building excessively more links to raise Yahoo rank, it's not an important engine for my client anyway.
I get it appearing in position 3 in google.co.uk, but thats for 'pages from the UK', but for 'the web' I dont see the page ranking at all. Will be interesting to find out what happens, any chance of sabotage by your competiton?
I can't see my site anywhere for "buy my house" on google.co.uk. I know you said you were looking at google.co.uk (web search not UK only search) but are you based in the US? I'm in the UK and if you have a US IP it might spit out different results.
"I get it appearing in position 3 in google.co.uk, but thats for 'pages from the UK', but for 'the web' I dont see the page ranking at all. Will be interesting to find out what happens, any chance of sabotage by your competiton?" Hi there, what do you mean by sabotage? Question to everyone - What can a competitor do to bring down my site?
There are lots of reasons why your website could of droppped, it could of been because adding a larg amount of backlinks in a short period of time or it could been because of changes on your site such as template & content
same thing has happened to me recently. Nobody can say for sure what the reason is obviously but I think in my case it could be that I had a lot more unrelated links than related links. The strange thing is this happened to another site of mine a few of months back. And guess what, its now back on the first page?? Very strange.
This question catches my attention. One of my friend website also experiences this kind of experience. He ranked well at position 3 for competitive keyword. Then out of nowhere, his rank dropped. I wonder if competitor can sabotage someone's website by using black hat technique. Can anybody who is experienced with black hat give us some insight?
Yeah any insight from any blackhatters (or anybody else) about sabotage techniques would be greatly appreciated.
I don't have any experience with black hat but I have suffered the same issue recently with one of my sites with a corresponding drop in traffic but I can't work out why. I'd be interested to leasr how you get through the problem. Its only been over the last few days from number 5 to more than 4 pages down, didn't go further to see how far. Paul
If you wanna know more about knocking down competitors and blackhat in general, try syndk8.net blackhat forums, beware of offensive language though. From what I've read, knocking down competitors is really hard. Linking to them with bad neighbourhoods won't make 'em budge unless they link back to them. If it were easy everyone would do it. Things you can try are ranking other sites higher to push your competitors down or maybe do some search engine hijacking.