After fixing duplicate pages problem - keyword rankings have fallen off a cliff!

[Stuart26]

We have recently signed up to SEOMOZ and found that our site had over 2,500 duplicated pages. We reported it the the web designer and they found links on the website to an old prototype version of the website and so they did a SQL run to get rid of them. Doing this got rid of 90% of them.

However, this morning, moz has just done another crawl of our website and our keyword rankings have fallen off a cliff. Particularly, important one that we were at position 1 for. We are now on the fifth page.

Can anyone shed any light on it? Will this be temporary?

Thanks

Stuart

[GManSEO]

Number one question: has your organic traffic also fallen off a cliff?  Go to Google Analytics and answer this question immediately.

Just because the Moz rank tracker shows your rankings slipping doesn't necessarily mean the keywords that you told it to track are the same keywords that drive all the traffic and/or revenue for your site.

Hopefully you'll find that your organic traffic is holding steady and the keywords you thought were important enough to put into the Moz rank tracker aren't the same ones that drive traffic for your site.

HOWEVER....

If you find that your organic traffic has ALSO fallen off a cliff then you've got bigger problems.  Without knowing the site or anything about what you did in the past couple weeks my first gut instinct is that all those duplicate pages you took down had good natural links to them and were therefore the ones ranking for your keywords.

You should have 301 redirected or canonicalized those pages rather than removing them completely.  I honestly don't know what would happen if you just put them back up and pretended like nothing happened, then got to work properly redirecting them to the pages you want to rank.

So I would recommend the following steps:

1. Consult Google Analytics (see above)

2. Plug your site into Open SIte Explorer. Look for links to pages you have since taken down.  If you find lots of them then you know what your problem is.

3. Consult with someone with more technical expertise than me about putting those pages back up and then properly redirecting them

[Stuart26]

Hi GMan,

Thanks for your feedback. I have since checked analytics and organic traffic for that keyword mentioned has not decreased drastically. In fact, it has highlighted that the landing page for that keyword needs quite a lot of attention.

Overall, organic traffic has fallen, but only slightly, andisn't a cause for concern.

Probably a storm in a teacup!

Thanks,

Stuart