Huge drop for main branded keyword

[Tedred]

The past week the main branded keyword for a site i am working on has dropped from the top three on Google US to page 7! It is still ranking in the top three on Google in other areas. I recently redirected /index.php to / using .htaccess. Could this have caused a problem?

If not, what else could have caused such a huge drop?

[SanketPatel]

Hi

Can you provide me your keyword which dropped and URL of your site?

I think if index.php contains backlinks and you have 301 redirected then some % of link-juice may be loss but it does not have huge affect as you said. Have you contain EMD?? After EMD algorithm updates by Google it may be possible your domain was affected by this update.

[AdamThompson]

I doubt a 301 redirect from index.php to / would have done that.

An EMD issue could be the reason, as could an automated penalty (Penguin, Panda, anchor text over-optimization, etc.). If we had your URL and keyword, it would be easier to make specific suggestions.

[Tedred]

This post is deleted!

[AdamThompson]

Sounds like you got hit by the EMD update: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change

[cbielich]

I was thinking the same thing, you got hit with the EMD update recently especially if it happened this week.

[Tedred]

Before i took over the site the owners had taken on the service of some link building company. The links the company added where just added in to any wiki type site they could find. it seems that they only used four different types of key words when they were doing it. I have managed to remove over 600 of these links and the site was just starting to rank well for a variety of keywords, then all of a sudden this week the site has dropped back for its main keyword.

Do you think the best strategy is to keep removing the bad links? Apparently the site ranked better before these links were built.

[AdamThompson]

Generally speaking, you want to remove bad links while building good, new ones.

[Tedred]

Thanks for your help. It looks like I'll just have to keep doing what i am doing and hope it bounces back quite quickly.

[MattAntonino]

I don't think anyone has mentioned this but your number of internal links is borderline nuts.  I found about 190,000 internal pages.

If you remove those internal links and Google this:

"www.phuketproperty.com" -site:www.phuketproperty.com

You'll see that your site has 13,000-ish backlinks.  Take a look at the highest ranked ones.  They're mostly all cheap/low quality inbound links.  You don't have a huge backlink profile based on the tremendous size of your site.

To put it in perspective

www.microsoft.com has 688,000 internal links and  28 million incoming links.

www.century21.com has 11 million internal links and almost 50 million incoming links.

www.phuket.com has 5530 internal links and 287,000 incoming links.

Internal links are not usually 10x incoming links.  That could be part of it.  You have 13,000 not-quality inbound links.  And 200k indexed pages.

[AdamThompson]

Good point. All those sub-pages (listing pages) have content that is duplicated across multiple other sites, too.

[Tedred]

Thanks for this.

What is the best way to find where all of these links are coming from? The only place i can see is the search results page. I have set this 'noindex, follow'. Should i set it to 'noindex, nofollow"?

[Tedred]

The duplicate content is a problem as a lot of teh listings are pulled in via XML from agent sites. I've been trying to find a way to make it all more unique without editing each listing manually.

[AdamThompson]

If most of your organic search traffic lands on your homepage, you might want to consider setting all the listing pages to noindex. That'll get the duplicate content out of Google's index.

[Tedred]

Quite a lot of traffic lands on the listings pages so im reluctant to set them to noindex. There are only approx. 4,000 listings pages. I'm trying to find where these other pages that are being indexed are coming from.

[Quime]

Can an EMD update remove SERPS for all keywords, or just the exact matches? We recently lost all our foreign language domain serps, roughly on the 4/5th