Dramatic Rankings Drop

[Linwright]

We've been slowly working up the rankings for some targeted keywords, and though it's been slow we have recently moved up to pages 1,2 and 3 for some of these kwyrods. Friday I got the rankings report from SEOMOZ and we have completely dropped from all rankings. Everything is gone. We've dropped at many at 40+ positions almost overnight.

I haven't gone into deep research as to why this happened yet, and I have not asked the client if he did anything off-site to hinder our rankings, but I know that I have changed nothing in terms of SEO techniques in the past week...and these techniques have been working and moving us up so I'm at a loss as to why all of a sudden we've lost everything.

If anyone has dealt with this issue before or can take a look at this site I'd appreciate it:

http://www.EraseDisease.com

Thanks

[alsvik]

First make sure nothing technically is causing the drop:

• check if your server-provider changed anything
• check your robots.txt
• check your website using google webmaster tools

And then do a search here on seomoz for "rank dropped"

Regards, Alsvik

[KTaylor]

I took a quick look at your backlink report using opensiteexplorer.org and noticed that a large percentage of your backlinks are coming from www.computerwords.com. www.computerwords.com's site is inactive as of me writing this. I'm not sure how long the site has been down but if it's been a while and Google also noticed that it's been down f, that coor some time, that could have caused your rank to drop. At a glance it appears that 50% of your links were from that site.

[bcarp88]

I had the same problem on this recent update. We've been slowly moving up but on the past update dropped on 42 keywords, some as many as 13 spots on pages that haven't had any changes in a few months??

Any help would also be appreciated:

http://www.coolpooltables.com

[Linwright]

Thanks. I do see that our sitemap is riddled with errors. Any suggestions? I was using the Google XML Sitemap plugin for Wordpress, but in the past month have changed it to Yoast and have had many problems. Perhaps this is causing the issue.

[Linwright]

When did this happen to you guys? Recently?

[Linwright]

Thank you. Yep, this probably has a great deal to do with it. That's a long story and one that should have been rectified long ago...and now apparently it's biting us in the @$$. Thank you very much for your insight and your time!!

[bcarp88]

Yes. On this most recent update. I've noticed slight drops before due to google updates but nothing like this.