Big hit taken on Google Search in Jan - Any Ideas?

[luwhosjack]

Hello,

I manage a news site that gets new items posted daily. We had had a pretty even keel with Google search and ranking for some time now only on the 9th Jan we took a massive drop and have no recovered except for one big spike on the 29th January.

The only think we had done differently was not post as much over Christmas for about a week as people were on holiday but if this was the reason for it the posting is back to normal now and has been since the 6th Jan and nothing has recovered.

The site is wjlondon.com - any ideas greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[GPainter]

I'm sure the first question anyone will ask is - did you receive a manually action / penalty ?

[artdivision]

I am pretty sure it is not a manual penalty, 2 of my link practise test sites got both hit on the same date losing 8-12 ranking spots (not as massive as yours) and I practises poor link building on both of them (which had them on page one rank one for 3 months) so I am pretty sure it has to do with your incoming links and OBL.

I had a quick look at your link profile and 95% of your referal domains are 0 when it comes to both citiation and trust flow same as with my 2 test sites.

You simply need good quality links as the old ones provide now 0 value.

Hope this helps

[luwhosjack]

No manual action or penalty and I have never used any dodgy back linking companies or anything like that. I have good back links from sites like Metro.com etc - well respected news sites - I know this for a fact so I don't understand how that could be the case.

[GPainter]

Hi,

It's more what Google perceives to be good however its good you don't have any. Whilst it sucks Google rankings tend to fluctuate you could look at your anchor text which are all over the place (don't worry they look natural) but how many of them are linking to your site (e.g site name). It may be you need to focus a little bit on branding ?

Another step is with some minor research the following suggests something happens on the date you mentioned I would dig into that a bit more maybe too.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17935.html

Sorry if I can't help further they were some suggestions from a couple of minutes thinking.

[luwhosjack]

Thank you I will try the things you suggest and see if this helps.

Its just so strange that it just dropped, had a huge spike and then dropped again. I will start thinking more carefully about our link structure

KSF0lIQ