Substantial position drop? - Urgent

[seoman10]

Have been looking at WMT and discovered that on 10 October there was substantial average position drop, from around 14 to 20.  
Does anyone have any ideas why this may have happened?

As far as I know there's nothing that we have done could have impacted.

[Ria_]

Have you double-checked the accuracy of this?

I would first look to see whether traffic has been impacted by the drop, and then go on to check my main keyword rankings. Then I would try to figure out which search queries and pages I've dropped position for, and see if I can spot any patterns.

[seoman10]

There does seem to have been a traffic drop, or more specifically a drop in orders which would tie up nearly directly to that date.

How is the best way of comparing positions between two dates?

[Ria_]

Difficult really unless you already use something to track your keyword positions, such as Moz Pro or SEMrush.

[seoman10]

I do have Moz Pro, however I won't necessarily be tracking the keywords/pages that is dropped off. At this stage I don't know which they are.

According to the last crawl there had been several substantial increases, I just don't know who to believe!

I've just had an idea I should be able to use a export from WMT and Excel with a few formulas.

[KateWaite]

I'd take a look at Analytics and compare the periods before and after the drops, looking at landing pages filtered by traffic medium organic. This should show you which pages have seen the biggest loss, which in turn should give you an idea of what keywords have been effected.

If there are just a few pages then run through a technical audit checklist on these pages to make sure no errors have been introduced - for example a page hasn't accidentally been set to "no index" (I've seen it happen).

You could also compare average position of keywords between two periods in WMT to see where the biggest drops are.

doVpwi3

[ZoeRigley]

Hi,

Do you have both http and https active on the site? You can use something like siteliner.com to check this. I've noticed rankings, clicks and impressions drop off in Webmaster tools on a client site before, and it was actually just registering on the http webmaster tools property instead of https, due to a change made by the developers. Has your traffic also dropped off in Google Analytics on the same day? Or has it remained the same? I notice you say that orders dropped off also, but if traffic hasn't, I'd investigate any dev changes which might have occurred and test through your order process in different browsers/setups. You could also segment your Google Analytics data by browser/OS and check conversions, compared with the previous period, to see if any particular browser has stopped placing orders.

Is your website fairly new? I definitely notice more fluctuation in newer websites, and websites with less traffic.

Hope this helps,
Zoe

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