Sudden drop in rankings. Please help.

[ujjwalk308]

Hi guys

I am Ujjwal.

I am no SEO guru or anything I am just a blogger with basic knowledge of SEO. Yesterday on 6th August 2013 my rankings for many keywords suddenly dropped and I don't know why.

Can someone please tell me why it happened and how I can fix it? I really need help

Site url: http://www.droidextra.org/

Thanks

[asmedia]

Your are lacking page speed , it took me over 5 sec to load the page, don't place ads in the banner of the website, if you are to reblog articles do them through your social accounts, try having only unique content on your website.

This where just as first impression on navigation on your website, you may want to think and improve the problems above .

As for your question, you where penalized, most of your anchor text from links is "Ujjwal Kumar" which you got by commenting on others blogs, don't do that , if you are to comment just add value but don't add any links, as Google sees that mostly as spam.

It will probably take about 3 mouth to recover ( if you do this properly), try removing all the bad links and file a reconsideration request to Google

[ujjwalk308]

Hi

Thanks for responding. I think pagespeed can be one of the issues and I will try my best to fix it.

Can you please elaborate "don't place ads in the banner of the website" I didn't get that part.

I will correct those comments fault. I have also cleaned up some URLs that might be creating duplicate content issue and also filed a reconsideration request.

[vagish]

Placing an advert in your banner especially when it is javascript can slow down the loading of your page. You can try async:

Source: W3Schools

It will then asynchronously execute while the rest of the page is being parsed. I think currently it is waiting for the JavaScript before loading. You can monitor page speed in Google Analytics and that might help you identify, look back at the page speeds before you put the adverts in. You can actually make Google generate asynchronous Adsense code for you to put on your website. Read the Google help section here.

[ujjwalk308]

Thank you!

I will do the changes.

[BedeFahey]

I'm not sure that this can be pinned on site speed or your backlink profile.

The site looks fairly well established, so I would be surprised if page speed was the issue. If it were, you probably would have seen a drop before now.

Taking a quick look at your backlink profile, your anchor text is fairly varied and you don't have a massive number of links. Google is pretty solid at sorting out blog comments (which are mainly going to be nofollowed anyway) from general links. Have you received any unnatural link warnings in Webmaster Tools?  <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="ujjwal kumar" data-id="66337178810"></a>

Can you provide more information on where you saw the rankings drops, and how this impacted your search traffic? There's a lot of chatter going on about people experiencing changes in rankings this week.

Any other major changes to the site recently? e.g. did you place the advertisements and see the drop?

Edit: Obviously, faster load times are always better, so I'm not suggesting that the above information isn't good advice in general. I simply think there's more to it.

[asmedia]

The first part was advice on improving the website

The actual answer to the question was "you where penalized, most of your anchor text from links is "Ujjwal Kumar" which you got by commenting on others blogs, don't do that , if you are to comment just add value but don't add any links, as Google sees that mostly as spam."

[ujjwalk308]

Hello

Thanks for responding. I will try to answer all your questions properly.

There were no drops before on this blog in fact it survived all the algo updates and every time the algorithm updated the site used to get some boost.

The last update on July 18 gave it a huge boost and doubled the search engine traffic.

I have never received any unnatural link warnings in WMT.

My main source of traffic was Google and I used to rank on first page for all the keywords I have written posts on. Just suddenly yesterday I saw the rankings drop after about 1 PM IST.

I haven't done any changes to the blog recently.

[ujjwalk308]

Hi

Thank you for responding!

Can you please tell me how to fix it? I can do anything to fix the issues that are causing this.

Thanks

[BedeFahey]

That makes sense... sorry if I misinterpreted the first suggestion as part of the answer, rather than general advice.

That said, I'm not sure I agree on this being a clear case of a penalty due to the anchor text (I'm not ruling it out, either). The majority of those links are nofollows from blog comments, and the anchor text is there because he's using his name in the name box. In my opinion, Google is smart enough to recognize that those kind of comments aren't spam. There aren't that many of those links, either: 18 root domains and 86 links.

A few other things to consider:

Many of the blog posts are fairly short. It's possible they're being seen as thin content, even though they may be useful. This, combined with the large number of ads, might be a problem.

The content is being syndicated to weak sites, or possibly scraped. I'd suggest running some of your stuff through copyscape and see if Google has some confusion as to who the original author of the article was. (Some kind of canonicalization might help here if this is an issue).

[BedeFahey]

This might seem like a silly question, but, have you seen a substantial traffic drop from search engines alongside the rankings drop?

[ujjwalk308]

Yes!

As I mentioned in my response above my main source of traffic was Google and the traffic has come down significantly after this.