Rankings Dropped Dramatically

[iprosoftware]

Hi All,

I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why.

We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com.

The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella

However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters.  Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs.

In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically.

keyword 1

4th Jan position 22

9th Jan position 90

keyword 2

4th jan position 34

9th jan position 89

keyword 3

4th jan position 12

9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others)

We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings.

I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz.

Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment.

Many thanks

Andy

[DougRoberts]

I'm guessing that you're not getting the benefit of your inbound links that you had pointing to your old domain.

Have you followed these guidelines from google:

Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help

You say you've redirected to the .com domain. How have you set up this redirection?

[dohertyjf]

Hey Andrew -

From what I'm seeing in the OSE index and in my browser, you moved the content over to your new domain but did not forward your old domain. I know you said that you had a lot of links to your homepage on www.myclient.co.uk, and since you did not 301 this page and older pages, you've lost all your links.

Can you explain why you did not 301 your old domain?

[iprosoftware]

I haven't even given you the domain name?  But if I do want to check the OSE index how would I do this to ensure the 301 re-direct is working for google.

I know it works for the human as if you type in the old domain i.e. co.uk it goes to the .com.

Thanks

Andy

[dohertyjf]

Oh I see now. I honestly thought your site was myclient.co.uk. I see my mistake!

If OSE has picked up the 301, when you type in your old domain it will say something like "That URL redirects to (new url). Would you like to see that URL?"

Also, to spot-check server header responses, I use this tool: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/

[iprosoftware]

I believe I have, as webmaster shows all the inbound links to the .com and not the .co.uk.  the domain is www.tangoholidaysolutions.com.  If you or John notice something stupid please don't be afraid to say!

[iprosoftware]

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Content-Length: 160 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Location: http://www.TangoHolidaySolutions.com/ Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:46:04 GMT

looks like that is the right response.

[dohertyjf]

Did you consolidate many domains into the .com, or just move the domain over completely from .co.uk to .com? In which countries have your rankings dropped? I am guessing UK.

The backlinks you have are not on great websites. Have you tried to get listed in places like the UK's version of the Better Business Bureau? Put in some work doing some guest posting and I bet your rankings will go up.

My guess is that if your rankings have dropped mostly in the UK, that it's the loss of the .co.uk ccTLD, which is definitely not an insurmountable hurdle, just might take a bit more work.

[DougRoberts]

A few more thoughts - Did anything else happen apart from just the move to the .com domain? Any content changes or periods where the site was unavailable?

Apart from your rankings changing have you seen any other disruption of the SERPS?

I think I'm right in saying that a redirected link passes less link-juice than the original link. How competitive are the keywords your targetting? Will a small change in domain/page authority cause the changes to the rankings you're seeing?

What keywords are you targeting?

What was the reason for the switch to .com. Looks like both domains were registered at the same time and the domain name is pretty specific so I'm guessing that there are no negative signals associated with the .com domain.

I think John has the right idea. If you've ruled out all the obvious causes, I wouldn't get bogged down trying to work out what happened. I'd put the energy into building more links to compensate.

I don't know when this happened, maybe the drop in rankings isn't a long term thing.

[iprosoftware]

Thanks John & Doug, really appreciate your feedback the site has had a complete overhaul and I think I underestimated the jump from .co.uk.  The site never had many inbound links except from one website so I didn't think I would lose rankings.

I know the new pages are good as they are ranked well, so I will just boost the link building.  But when clients are upset you want to make sure you have covered all bases and you haven't missed something obvious.

Cheers!

[DougRoberts]

If it's had a complete overhaul then there's lots of things that might have affected the rankings. I'd tell your clients that any change is risky and may cause some disruption.

I don't see that there's been a total collapse of the rankings so the last thing you want your clients to do is panic.

Good luck!

[iprosoftware]

Good news, the rankings have re-appeared.  Google decided to remove the homepage listing from its index hence the drop.  However the homepage has now returned and listings have gone from outside 100 to positions between 8 - 20!

[DougRoberts]

Odd that that the home page should disappear but not the other pages! Any ideas why that should have happened?

[iprosoftware]

No nothing had changed on the homepage, the only thing we are trying to do is link build to internal pages so directories / social bookmarks would go to the specific page and not just the homepage.

However looking through the old stats before we worked on the site, he regularly had keywords going from page 1 to page 10, then a month or so later he would regain positions.

On the old site he relied on a search results page to generate different keyword positions, so they were not fixed pages.  I wonder if this had an impact?

[dohertyjf]

Hi Andrew -

If this question has been answer/the issue has been fixed, could you please mark it as Closed?

Thanks!