Massive SERP crash

[ahyde]

I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords.

Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms.

I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today.

Thanks

[ahyde]

Hi Mike,

I did see that there was an update last week, but as far as I can see we weren't impacted until Sunday/yesterday.

In terms of pages indexed there has been a slight drop, but only 700 out of 19,900. So in line with the variance we get on a week to week basis.

The drop in ranking seems to have only effected non branded keywords. Would a penalty effect both?

[ahyde]

Thanks for the input. I got another site crawl from Moz today (i have campaigns running on the regional subfolders and one on the domain) at domain level. We have 1,292 404 errors at a domain level. All of our links are broken, so every URL in the sitemap is pushing Google to a 404. If you actually browse the site it works but every URL has index.php injected into the middle of it.

I have manually checked every non-branded keyword we were ranked no.1 for in Australia. We were ranked #1 for 23 keywords I was tracking. We are now out of the top ten for 20, ranked #9 for 1 and #1 for two others.

[FrankDawg]

There was allegedly a pretty significant update from Google last week (significant for ecommerce sites anyway).

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ecommerce-update-19832.html

Are you seeing a drop in rank, a drop in pages indexed or both?  I assume you've done this already, but checking Google WMT will tell you some of the basics that will provide some insights (how many pages are being crawled, how many errors Google is encountering during the crawl, whether you have a manual action, etc).

If your site isn't under a penalty, I'd give it a few more days to shake out.  We're still seeing several of our rankings jumping around quite a bit from this last rumored update.

As for the 404's, it depends on who you ask and who you believe.  John Mueller at Google says that 404s will not have a negative impact on your SEO (this has been the official word from Google for years):

https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm

Most believe that high bounce rates can cause a drop in rank and lots of 404s can cause a high bounce rate, so 404s can potentially hurt your rankings.

Mike

[MickEdwards]

It's highly unlikely that a technical issue would drop rankings within a day or so, maybe drop from URLs from the index though.  Check .htaccess, robots.txt and meta robots etc.

Firstly I would double check what is indexed and what header responses you are getting.  Depending on the size of the site I would use http://intavant.com/tools/google-indexed-pages-extractor/.  Compare with what you believe to be indexed and run the list through Screaming Frog to check the header responses for each URL.

Otherwise I would look at exactly what keywords have been hit, check GWT for any messages and do a thorough investigation of onsite content - Panda; and link profile - Penguin.