Drastic rankings drop
-
SOS SEOMozzers
hello all. I woke up this morning to find out our rankings for two main keywords:
1. internet marketing firm
2. marketing firmdropped from being #8 on google to not being invthe top 50.
last week we upgraded the site to HTML5 . We checked the on page via pro tools and everthing seemed fine.
We checked Google analytics ( traffic was beginning to fall) and we checked webmaster tools - ( there were not critical issues etc)
So now i am bewildered as to what possible happened to wipe us of the search.
Please can you help - the site is www.gunshotdigital.com
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me Keri - i really appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me i appreciate it Omarzee
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me and helping Robert. I appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
pl could you tell me who you are talking abut? Thank you.
Also it turns out the domain name servers etc were messed about with when we upgraded to HTML5 for some reason. We fixed it now and its all good but taking time for the change over obviously.
Thank you for connectin with me Journey man.
Best wishes,
Vijay
-
Vijay
First and most importantly is you have a huge problem with page load times. Huge.
In YSlow you are grading out at a D. I have attached an image as the problems are too numerous to list. Your issue is because on home page you are close to timing out and on others you are not resolving at all. As I ran test, it was taking your Vimeo feed a loooonnnngggg time in the test. Don't know if that is part of problem or not.
Given the issues and the title tags, etc. I don't see how you were ranking that highly. With a page load time of at least 10 seconds, you are not going to rank.You need to add expires headers, need to move java script to the bottom of page, need a CDN, need to get rid of all the cookies, etc.
Even after the site was cached on my machine (new macpro 17 with solid state drive, 16 gigs of sdram, etc) it took over 8 seconds to load. This is the problem.
Keri had a great suggestion with checking in the main browsers for compatibility. I noticed in Chrome the video got to where it was hesitating a lot but not in firefox.
Another thought is since this in on a WP platform, did you by any chance change anything in the coding on the theme? Can't think of other reasons for page load problem and the absence of pages all together. I know that the only url I got to resolve was the home page.
Hope it helps.
-
By the way, it looks like you have an SEO consultant on staff. I just clicked on the gal who talks about SEO at your firm. How about asking her?
-
I'd have to agree with Keri on the feel of where I'm landing when going to the site. I thought it was a commercial for givenchy as well.
It's a beautiful site though. I was considering revamping my personal site to be something like this.
If there's any manual raters who got a hold of it, maybe that's why they de-ranked you if they got the same feel as Keri and I did.
When I do a source check on the meta description, I see:
name="description" content="" />
i.e., nothing. I'm a little surprised you were #8 with this and a title of:
<title></span><span>Gunshot Digital | Gunshot Digital</title>
I looked at your backlinks and it makes sense why you were ranking now. But maybe a bunch of your on page got screwed up from your new site? Take some time going through all of the on page factors and make sure they're all o.k.
I thought the recent change in the algo was about ads showing up towards the top and the stuff above the fold not matching search queries were punishing 1% of the sites. This just seems like a) not matching search intent at first glance and b) on page elements getting screwed up, but I only spent a few minutes looking.
-
Hi Vjay,
You might do a site:gunshotdigital.com in Google. There's a bunch of pages that are indexed and not resolving / timing out. If I go to the blog page, then try to go to About, I get a page not found. I'm having a hard time finding any content on your site when I go in through the main page, and the site is slow to load. Have you crawled the page as Googlebot (via Google Webmaster Tools) to make sure the site is crawlable?
The meta description that Google shows when I do the site: command includes Very Irresistible Givenchy. I don't get the sense that I've landed on a page that has anything to do with an internet marketing firm, I get the sense that I've landed on a movie trailer or something, then I figure out it's a perfume ad.
In the source code I'm seeing some text for the search engines, but I'm not seeing anything as a user. Have you checked your site in a variety of browsers to make sure it acts as expected? Have you put in redirects from the old site? Have you made sure the title tags and meta descriptions are correct? Have you reviewed your robots.txt for the platform you're using?
-
I've noticed a significant drop in some of my sites as well. I think it's because of a recent Google algo update (has happened in the last week to week and a half) and a even more recent data refresh. It's affected a lot of webmasters I know, some positive, more negative.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does adding new pages, new slugs, new URLS in a site affects rankings and visibility?
hi reader, i have decided to add new pages to my site. if i add new urls, i feel like i have to submit the sitemap again. my question is, does submitting sitemap again with new slugs or urls affects visibility is serps, if yes, how do i minimize the impact?
Web Design | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Ranking
Our new website has been live since April - it's an old domain but we've had a new website built on Magento 2, however, it's not ranking for most of our main keywords. Can anyone offer any advice?
Web Design | | RayflexGroup0 -
Flickr Gallery Effect on Page Ranking
Hello there We are working on a redesign for our site, and our business is very image intensive (sign company) On a typical product page, we have 5 images we are placing directly in the site optimized to try to rank the images in image search We also have about 30-50 sets of images, with 3-5 images each - hosted on flickr, that we are displaying as galleries on the page (user clicks, opens a light box to view the set, etc) Here is the page - http://impactsigns.ugmade.com/sample-page/ If you look at the page code, you will see that the flickr gallery (additional examples) section - adds ALOT of code to the page (lines 498 to 837) My question is : Does adding that flick gallery block negatively impact the page SEO, all else being equal? It seems like a lot of lines of code. And dont want it to seem spammy to the search engines. Thanks for your help and advice
Web Design | | Jumman0 -
Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)
Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
Web Design | | cpawsgo
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents? Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page. The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside. However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen. The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied. Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper? Thank you!0 -
Server performance and loss of rankings
Hi all Wondering if anyone knows how much poor server performance is needed to affect your Google rankings. A few sites of mine were performing fine until about 11am today, since then the site traffic is down about 99% (eeek) at the same time the server was playing up with a server load about 40 - it's 12core, 64ram. I was having database issues at the time too. Surely Google doesn't work that fast in demoting sites for poor performance does it? If not need I need to ponder other reasons why i have no traffic anymore. Thanks, Carl
Web Design | | carl_daedricdigital0 -
Does a loading homepage animation effect rankings?
Our website ( panphoenix dot com) has a Javascript animation when you load it for the first time which takes just over 2 seconds to load. Does having this animation effect rankings negatively? Would appreciate your thoughts!Thanks Rob
Web Design | | roberthseo0 -
Build New Site Without Losing Rankings
Good morning SEOmoz community. I have a question which I am pretty sure I already know the answer to, however i thought I would reach out to my fellow experts to see if anyone had some great advice. I would really like to give my website a makeover. i have two thoughts on this, one is to scrap the site completely and start fresh, the other would be to only change it visually, but keep all the content and on-page optimization. I am terrified of losing my rankings. I am ranked position 1 and 2 for highly competitive terms and have another 15 - 20 keywords on page 1. Any advice would be tremendously appreciated!!!
Web Design | | WebbyNabler0 -
Will Switching To a CMS System Help Rankings
I would like to transform our 400 page website to a CMS system. We rank failrly well for most of our keywords and not so much for others. Our website is currently optimized with lots of unique content, but we need to transform to a more professional website with lots of options. Will doing this transformation affect our rankings if Redirects are correct ? Any recommedations for a Easy CMS that is very SEO Friendly?
Web Design | | hfranz0