Enormous 7 page drop after switching servers and adding load balancers. Thoughts?

[PatchofLand]

Hello Everyone,

I'm a longtime Moz user but I had to switch accounts after switching jobs. I was hoping someone might be able to give me some insight on whats going on if possible. Our startup had first page position for our most valuable keyword: "Crowdfunding real estate" for about 6 or 7 months. Once we launched and switched to a production server behind load balancers, we dropped almost overnight to 7th page and we've been there for about a month.  We don't have many links yet and some of the ones we DO have are kind of spammy (no idea where they came from and in process of trying to get them removed) but we thought it'd be strange to see that massive drop. We are even pages below a competitor who has NO links and basically zero content on the page.  We don't have any notifications in WMT about a manual penalty or anything.  I'd really, really appreciate any advice and If anyone has any ideas, the page is at: PatchofLand.com

Thanks,

Jason

[JacobEdward]

Are your servers based in the same country as the last?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Jason,

Might be the server setup change is a red herring, such a drastic change so quickly sounds odd. Have you checked the dates against known google updates? NOV 14 comes to mind given the time frame you mentioned. A look at ahrefs shows some swings in linking domains in the last 2-3 months and a chunk of them look a somewhat iffy...

[PatchofLand]

Hi Jacob and Lynn,

Thank you for the responses. The servers are based in the same country, and Lynn I think I agree with you that it might be a red herring.  One thing I noticed just yesterday (while using MOZ's crawl results btw) is that each new property / product we launch has two pages. Our system creates a page using the identical content and identical page title under the root domain and under /investments.  For example:

http://patchofland.com/investments/single-family-rehab-in-new-jersey.html

and

http://patchofland.com/single-family-rehab-in-new-jersey.html

Could it be that we are such a new site, with such few links, that a duplicate content penalty like that on a significant percentage of our pages could cause us to drop that far?

Thank you again!

Jason

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Jason

I wouldnt think the duplicate content is the issue, especially assuming the main keyphrase you are after had the homepage ranking for it (which doesnt have the dup issue) right? Moz is not showing you anywhere near as many links to the domain as ahrefs is, I would look at GWT also and have a good look through all your backlinks, at first glance there seems to be a chunk of obvious spam/seo type links in your profile that might be a more likely cause of the trouble. If you are not getting any more of those and have a marketing plan in place then it might just be a matter of keep doing what you are doing and you will start ranking again. But you will want to make sure you know where those dodgy links came from and that you are not going to be getting many more.