All rankings lost from page 1 to 5+

[NikitasT]

This happened to my site today. As of friday I was ranked #5 for the keyword term from my industry. I received an email from moz today with all of my keyword rankings. They had drop 40+ spots across the board. I've never experience anything like this and am in complete shock. Literally thinking of how I'm going to lay off my staff this week if this doesn't correct itself.

Anyone else seeing this? Nothing really phases me but this just really scared me.

[ubiquitousinnovation]

This is a very helpful comment.  I'm curious about your recommendation to "simply put it your a disavow file"  regarding questionable things in your backlink profile.  I have avoided doing this because I thought it would be calling attention to my site when it hasn't ever had any kind of penalty.   I'm curious if you or others have been liberal about getting things disavowed and whether this has backfired, or paid off.  Either way I would be interested to know!

[MoosaHemani]

It’s still not official yet but it seems like the Penguin new update actually has rolled out, I was searching for webmaster forums and there were few people who were complaining of the same stuff. If this is the case, my advice is to keep calm and let this thing settle down instead of making strange decision in hurry.

I don’t think having a new domain is a good idea because if you are going to 301 the old website, it’s easier for people to understand your road map and they will penalize your new domain too. If you don’t 301 and use your new domain from the start, you probably have to do everything (including branding) from step one, which I don’t think is a good idea in my opinion.

My advice is to check your link profile and see if penguin really is the problem behind all this, if yes fix your profile by removing all the bad links and get some quality links back to the profile.

In case you did not manage to kill all the bad links from your link profile, update the link disavow file and update Google about this. Although there is no guarantee that your penalty will be fully waved but continuously practicing ethical tactics getting quality links back in your profile will get back your rankings, traffic and branding.

Hope this helps!

[Andy-Halliday]

I can't find the articles at the moment but Google have confirmed doing a disavow file doesn't admit guilt, just shows you don't want certain links counting towards your rankings.

[BruceA]

Disavow is common practise, when all attempts have failed to get rid of unwanted links or you are uncertain about the origins.  This is a short video by Matt Cutts Head of the Google Spam team who explains Googles postions

http://youtu.be/eFJZXpnsRsc

Hope this is useful

Bruce

[TimHolmes]

According to Barry Schwartz over at SEO Roundtable, he has had it confirmed that Penguin rolled out on Sunday Afternoon... official announcement is due to be today.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-3-19313.html Lots of people are apparently taking a hit, so far in my niche it has remained relatively stable, but this maybe due to it still rolling out. Only time will tell, but I am hopeful that I will see some gains.

[cerar]

Can i in worst case made steps below?:

• Register new domain (i already register same name other extension)
• Move all content to new domain
• Write more awesome content
• Create only safe and powerful backlinks
• NO 301 domain redirect, but something like these "Check out our new website" pointing to new domain

I really hate my mistakes.

Thank you for help.

[BruceA]

Appears to me, that you are beating yourself up about milk that hasn't yet been spilt ( to mix my metaphors) (edit, brain thinking faster than fingers type)

Interestingly, another thread was debating about "if you can't beat them, join them" with reference to slighly grey SEO. Penguin goes to show that only bright white outshines the rest.

Please wait a few days or so to see how things settle, worrying about what if will not make a drop of difference to what is real.

301 redirects are 100% fine, but should match as close as possible to the original content pages. but no "Check out our new website", whilst you cannot state this on a 301 redirect, only via anchor text, will not be acceptable in good SEO terms as this is spammy to say the least.

From what you have written and not written, I think you really need to spend some quality time reading and studying SEO and how all aspects work before embarking on your next steps.

Hope this might be somewhat useful

Bruce

[cerar]

I found 5 sub-pages with zero continent on my site, but before 18.10 was all pages with no continent top 3. Is these possible reason for drop too?

[Laurean]

You aren't alone!  I have a client that just lost all of his 1-5 rankings!  About 20 in all.  Taking ubiquitousinnovation 's direction, and creating a disavow file for the spammy links that were created before our firm started working on the site.