Hey Everyone, My website is about two years old now and has been ranking very competitively (position 1 and 2) for some tough keywords in our industry. A couple of weeks ago, our Google traffic dropped overnight from around 500-700 visits per day to maybe 100 a day. A little research showed that all of our inner pages completely fell out of the serps for their chosen keywords, but our homepage stayed the same and in a few cases actually increased in serp position. A site search on Google shows that all of these pages are still indexed and in fact a couple of the main pages are actually shown as sitelinks in the Google results. The other strange thing is that while this has been going on, we have also increased in pagerank. Our homepage went from a pr4 to a pr5, most of our inner pages increased in pr and one of our subdomains went from a pr0 to a pr6. We have over five thousand pages indexed and currently show around 4000 backlinks to the site as a whole. We have not changed how we do anything, we do not employ any blackhat techniques. There have been no hacks or intrusions. No excessive links built recently. It is as if everything got better, but our ranings across the board vanished? Any ideas on what we might do here or what may be the cause? I have filed a reconsideration request a few days ago, though I am not completely convinced that we have incurred some sort of penalty, due to the events leading up to this point. I appreciate any advice or experiences that you can offer. url: http://realestatelicensedirect.com
What is your domain name? I would be happy to evaluate it to see if I can find any notable problems with your website.
Thank you for the responses and my apologies. I always forget to include something, lol. http://realestatelicensedirect.com
Do you have a decent analytics package? If so then I would look at your site's traffic on URL-by-URL and keyword-by-keyword basis both prior to and after the drop in traffic. I would try to determine which pages saw the drop off in traffic and for which keywords. This usually goes a LONG way toward helping you diagnose the problem. It could be that one particular page or one particular keyword phrase was driving the majority of the traffic and for some reason is no longer driving that traffic. It's a lot easier to find a cause and solution once you narrow down where the problem is.
Thanks for the tips Canonical. I had gone through a number of stats and analytics already and it seems to be pretty well distributed across a number of pages. I am using a combination of G. Analytics, Woopra and Sitemeter to check all of this. Do you think that this may be some form of penalty? An algo change? Or maybe even some weird form of sandboxing?
Probably got hit with penalty, make up a list of items that you have have done wrong to offend Google, confess to everything that you or your SEO company did, pray they'd be lenient with your reconsideration. Took me about one month and 4 reconsideration requests to get relisted with Google again after penalty.
Thank you for the advice Jihoy. I was unaware that you could submit that many reconsideration requests within a month span, but will create a list of everything that I can think of and send it off.
Hi patrich, after evaluating and your website I found a few problems. All of the links on your website are being display to search engines as broken. You must have a problem with the way your are rewriting URLS, check your .htaccess file. All of your links are have a 301 HTTP Header. (NOT GOOD) (Below is an snapshot I took of one link as an example of the problem.) I also took a few moments to evaluate the homepage of your website and below are the results. Other than the problems listed above, the homepage your website is optimize very well for important internal SEO factors. I hope this information helps... If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to post them. Kind Regards,