Profound Rankings Drop - But only on Branded query

[gcat333]

Hi all. I apologize for any redundancy in advance.  I've seen similar queries about branded search but nothing that quite resembles mine.

First of all, my site is Withdrawal-ease.com

In the last few weeks, I've seen a significant drop in ranking for specific pages on my site that normally rank well in a brand search. I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on. So I looked at a bunch of queries for branded terms and it looks like I've been penalized...but I haven't

For instance, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I would typically see my home page first and then 3-4 of my most popular pages/posts directly underneath in the organic listings. Some of those popular pages include:

http://withdrawal-ease.com/proven-home-remedies-for-opiate-withdrawal/

http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-opiates-at-home/

http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-suboxone-at-home/

Although the titles are similar, the content is all original and comprehensive...it's good content that has always ranked very well...and still does. But as of Late March they don't show up for branded searches.

Now, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I only get my home page listed and the other pages have all fallen to #60 according to Moz, WMT etc.

What is strange is the fact that these popular pages still rank highly for my key terms and relevant searches. I have not noticed any significant drops other than when I do a branded search. I have added a picture from WMT as an example. The image displays a search from my brand name and my most popular page that would typically have ranked #2 below my homepage. As you can see. the impressions and clicks fall, then jump and then totally disappear for my branded query.

Looking at the chart, one might observe that the mobile update seems to roughly correspond to the rankings drop but we've been very diligent about being mobile friendly and all of the checks for mobile friendliness pass with flying colors. I've looked at Robot TXT files and everything is fine there...all of our diagnostic tests have turned up nada as far as I can tell.

Again, I have not been informed of any manual penalty and my backlink profile is not raising any alarms on Moz; I get a 1 on the spam score. We do not actively seek out links because I DID have a manual penalty in 2010 due to a horrible experience with an SEO firm. It took me over a year and 15k to clear out all of the spammy links that this guy got and I was finally cleared of the penalty in 2013.

So I'm totally flummoxed. My organic search is now down significantly across ALL browsers...but again, just for branded searches.

I have also attached an image of my crawl stats just in case this may shed any light. Thank you all so much for any help that you can provide; it's been extremely stressful and frustrating so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Whoa.jpg crawl%20stats.jpg

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi George,

When I search "Withdrawal Ease", I see your site ranked second behind http://www.drugs.com/forum/need-talk/has-anybody-tried-opiate-withdrawal-ease-56163.html (though you do have sitelinks for some of what Google perceived to be your main pages).

Looking into it, the reason for this appears to be that drugs.com is a very powerful domain with a page explicitly about your product. One reason it appeared now may be because the thread recently came alive again with 2 new posts at the end of March, and Google now sees it as timely and important information for users.

Additionally, your screenshot shows that time spent downloading pages has almost doubled in recent weeks, leading to a decrease in kilobytes downloaded and thus pages crawled per day.  I might try to optimize your caching settings to make sure that Googlebot's crawling resources are better spent on your site.

Feel free to message me with any questions,

Mark

[gcat333]

Hi Mark. Thanks so much for taking the time to look into this and helping me find a solution. It does seem odd that a message board (of any kind) would rank ahead of the actual company but who am I to question Google (sarcasm)?

If you take a look at the first image I attached, I still think the drop from hundreds of impressions to basically 0 in a few short period of time indicates some sort of radical shift in how I have been indexed. I'm not sure if it is Google or my site...or both. But I DO know that something is "going on" and I need to figure it out. You mentioned the caching issue and I'm wondering if it has something to do with the mobile usability update.

Whatever it is, the end result is almost a 50% drop in organic traffic over the past month. That seems a bit extreme for even an algorithm change. It seems punitive in nature. Alas, I'm not qualified to determine the origin and your guess is FAR better than mine. Thanks so much again Mark.

-G