Has anyone dropped out of the SERP's during this algo change?

[canuckjgc]

Hi all,

My site has ranked very well for quite some time for a couple of keywords. It is 8 years old. Just yesterday the main site has dropped out of the SERPs. The blog page is there but is bouncing around. I have a good link profile, all original content, videos, etc. No messages from Google.

Is this typical for an algo change to drop right out? Any thoughts appreciated.

[joshz]

What work have you done recently? Have you built links? Made any design change,etc?

[canuckjgc]

Just adding content as usual. No design changes, no link building other than adding to a few related directories. But I have government links, huffington post links, and other high trust links, so I don't think a few added links would have such a drastic effect.

[Test-ok]

Very hard to say without looking at it in depth. However I'm seeing a lot of sites dropping lately...My guess would be it's from the disavow tool, many are using it and shouldn't be which could be clobbering good links or making bad links worthless that were good until a bunch of people disavowed them, which told google to cut the juice on that domain and that domain and so on. They should have named it the tattle tail tool. It's getting John Q Public to give google information on links they purchased to gain ranking, and much of it is guess work if they purchased a link building program in the past... what else would google do with those nice little list of disavow links.
But that's just a guess.

[canuckjgc]

I haven't used the disavow tool at all. I'm wondering if this is temporary or permanent? If permanent that's a big problem for me.

One guess I have is that Google has changed the way it interprets searches. In other words, it is returning different results for keywords based on a new set of criteria of what Google thinks the user wants. I say that because nearly all the sites in my niche are nowhere to be found, and completely new and different sites are in the first couple of pages.

Still hoping it is a temporary flux though.

[Test-ok]

I didn't say you used the disavow tool...Lets say 30 other sites used it and on their list of sites to disavow were a few sites that also linked to you. Then Google disavows these sites because they've had it on so many different disavow lists. Google turns off the juice on these sites which in turn turns off the juice to any other sites they were linking to...like maybe yours.
Again that's just a guess.

[MrCat]

I think it would be good to give us the URL of your site. Google has been crazy lately updating and upgrading their algo. The last EMD (exact match domain) update has hit some of my client's site recently. Any chance this was the case with your site?

[apnavaru]

I also lost about 50% of my traffic since yesterday, Its very frustrating to get very few pageview and I am in depression :-(

[canuckjgc]

Thanks for the disavow theory, sounds reasonable.

I'll post the link if things don't get any better. I'm happy to PM the link to anyone who is interested.

[KrystianSzastok]

I also lost about 50% of my traffic since yesterday, Its very frustrating to get very few pageview and I am in depression :-(

Have you analysed which keywords you lost traffic by looking at analytics?
Did you see if the rankings for these keywords dropped?
have you excessively built links for these keywords/pages that lost rankings?

That's sort of the start of the analysis, next steps depend on the answers to the above.

[imexperttools]

Some of my keywords dropped a few ranks from when the new changes kicked in however, i still proceed with my link building and after a few days, the positions improved.

[RNBResearch]

Hello,
My site aslo droped in SERP's . my site(rnbresearch.com) is coming on the first page in google.com at "market research companies". last two week its not showing in SERP's. so please could you suggest me that how to recover it.

[gazzahk]

One guess I have is that Google has changed the way it interprets searches. In other words, it is returning different results for keywords based on a new set of criteria of what Google thinks the user wants. I say that because nearly all the sites in my niche are nowhere to be found, and completely new and different sites are in the first couple of pages.

I believe Google has basically doing this a lot lately. Google is interpreting quality/relevance/trust differently now as compared to what they were doing pre panda/penguin updates. These algo changes are still being tweaked so you may have been hit by a tweak.

Still wait a few days before doing anything it may be just a glitch.

[grgmathew]

In one of the thread I posted a reply, here it is. It was mainly concerned with sudden drop of ranking and gaining it back in few days of time. Even I was perturbed with this kind of SERP behavior. But I thought to analyze this situation in-depth.

I gathered the list of keywords which were ranking variably in terms of positions in SERP. I went on to look for other sites which were having top 20 positions for the same keywords. Over the period of one month, I observed that about 50% of the sites had variable ranking and other 50% always stood in the serp. Obviously the sites I am talking about which stood with your positions are most trusted sites. Whereas other percenrtage of sites were doing the bungy jumping around with the serp.

It gave the sense after analyzing the keyword I was ranking for and the sites which were moving up and down in the SERP:

1) Sites were quite new or had recent change in their ownership.
2) the keyword had medium competition with 200,000 search above a month
3) Some fresh content from other sites pushes back the other sites for certain period.

Untill now I am having the above thoughts on why this change in SERP happening very frequently. I would like if some people can add their thoughts on this.

Its totally my opinion and observation. If I am taking wrong steps in analyzing the way I am doing, please suggest.

[Dr.Marie]

You mentioned your site dropped Jan 28th. There was no known Panda/Penguin update on that day. There was a Panda update on Jan 22 so have another look and see if an obvious decline in organic traffic happened that day.

As others have mentioned, the first thing I would do is nothing...just sit and wait for a few days to see if it is a glitch. The exception would be if you had recently made a change. For example, if you just changed your design, be sure that you haven't accidentally left noindex on. A lot of Wordpress themes will come with privacy settings set on noindex as default.

There are many other possible reasons though including malware problems, robots.txt issues, canonical issues, etc. It's also possible that you've lost some good links although this shouldn't take you out into oblivion in the SERPS. Is your homepage completely deindexed? i.e. if you search for your url in quotes, is it there?