I’ve read through many of the previous posts regarding dropping in Google position but it still doesn’t really answer my question so I’m going to ask my question here. My company has a web site that is over 5 years old. About 2 years ago (working with an SEO company), we were able to achieve #1-3 Google position for many of our major keywords and we’ve been happily sitting on top of the results page these last 2 years. But in the last week or so, our position went from #1-3 all the way to #61, #84 and for some keywords, we’ve disappeared entirely. How can a web site that was ranked so well get dropped so far down? I can think of a few factors that could have affected us: - We had purchased paid links over the last 2 years but it never seemed to affect us negatively before. - Last week, I changed the domain registrant information completely. - Last week, I transferred the domain from my GoDaddy account to another GoDaddy account. The content of the page has not changed. The IP address of the site has not changed. I read Google did some update to their algorithm on New Year’s Eve. Could that have done something to the site? Can someone help shed some light on my situation? I’ve got to say that it’s a major morale killer for something like this to happen…
Hi there and welcome to the forums.. .. Sorry to hear about your 60 point penalty or "google 60 penalty" (that is what the nomenclature is for this drop) It is normally down to unusual link building activity: especially on an old/dormant/steady domain. Ie: a domain that has had no changes in a few years suddenly gets a change in registered owner and a load of new links, it seems fishy to google and wham, penalty applied. It is a situation you can resolve though, find the offending links, and then ask their webmasters to remove them, and sugmit your site to google for reconsideration. Here is some further reading for you: http://www.pagetrafficblog.com/matt-cutts-on-google-60-penalties-and-bad-linking-practices/4261/ If you want to PM me the site I can take a look at your backlinks best regards MOG
since the new google algo update many sites have had this happen even my sites, what i have noticed is that by just having more than 1 H1 tag this can now have a really bad effect on seo, or if your keywords are repeated too many time on the same page this also can have a bad effect. now google is trying to detect seo pages and are punishing you for it.
There are a couple of reasons that you have receive the drop. First you bought links and your vendor's site lost it's page rank and your links have been devalued. Changing the registrant information and hosting should not have harmed you at all. PM me with the url and lets see if we can help you out. Also, if your old SEO firm was using Blogs, Forums, etc to obtain your other links, they just screwed you by changing the links back to someone else. This is the current major ripoff by SEO firms taking place today.
you are lucky that you kept the position for 2 years with no further link building activity. link building is a continuous process and once you stop doing that, over time your ranking drops. while you are resting in peace enjoying your ranking, your competitor is working hard building links trying to beat you. so if you dont do any marketing/link building for a long time, your ranking is supposed to drop. however, you dont need to go thru the extensive link building all over again, just some activities will get your site ranking back up. really! can you explain how the site is found on #60 result if the site is in sandbox?
Is this really ripping off someone. Maybe if it was explained clearly that the links would be permanent and this was in the contract, then I would consider this to be a ripoff to change the links. Otherwise, you should be free to change them if your client leaves shouldn't you?
If you are working for an SEO company years ago then you should have known that this is just the SERP game. You aren't alone in the world and many webmasters wants to top for a certain keyword.
let it rest for a while, don't make changes for the moment. Sometimes the position in the serps just comes back. Hosting change and stuff needs to be "understanded" by Google, that could take a while. (after 1.5 month without improvement you could start worrying).
this happened to me within the last week or two as well, my site had nowhere near the age but i was #2 now i'm #59 or so
OK.... the plot thickens. Now my site is BACK to #1 on all of the keywords that I was previously #1 at. It's like the last 7 or so days didn't even happen at all. So I guess the problem is solved but unfortunately I never figured out what exactly the problem was so if this was to happen again, I wouldn't know what to do. Oh well... at least I'm back up (for now anyways). The ONLY thing I did to attempt to fix the problem of getting dropped down in Google's index was that I updated my local Google listing. As I mentioned in my initial post, I changed the domain registrant information to a different company name and a diffferent address. Then soon after, my site lost its #1 position. Then one day after I changed my local Google listing to match the information on the domain registration, I'm back up. Coincidence? Thanks everybody for all your help.