Trying to pinpoint why 1 keyword moved down 100 positions in 2 weeks. Help me speculate?

[FPD_NYC]

Hi there,

One of my client's sites, a very large and successful ecommerce website with great SEO performance, has seen a significant drop in rankings in the past 2 weeks. The rankings have begun to somewhat stabilize today, except one particular keyword with a search volume of 74k has gone from 1 to 100.

Here is what has taken place in 2 weeks, sitewide:

• I revised and improved upon title tags and meta descriptions to make them more user-friendly and contain more optimized terms. Following all of Google's best practices, as always. Google still appears to be indexing these changes (has anyone seen an initial drop in rankings while this takes place?)
• The site has seen a very significant increase in 404 errors due to one feature of the site breaking. We got a message about it in Webmaster Tools, and this appears to coincide with when overall rankings dropped. The development team is working quickly to get this resolved.
• As of today, I am seeing the highest page-load time than any other day in 2015.

With regard to the particular page/keyword in question:

• The keyword is no longer "exact match" at the beginning of the title tag, but rather broken up throughout the title tag so the whole title sounds better for users. **Have you found that this type of change is sufficient for a keyword rank to move down ~100 positions?? **(Either way, I have asked the client to revise the title to start with the exact match keyword, once again.)
• Google has indexed the page 2 days ago, but is still displaying the old title tag in search results.
• I have not found any instances of internal or external links to this page being removed.

With all this information, does anyone see anything that seems like it could have reasonably caused such a huge tank in rankings? Is this a blip in time? Is there anything I am not considering? Should I just be patient?

[evolvingSEO]

Hello

I don't think any of those factors with the information provided could have had such an impact on the site. Especially not some simple title tag adjustments. It's possible that would happen over time as Google processes the new user signals, but probably not so quickly.

What type of keyword was it? What industry is the eCommerce site in?

Not sure if this came on your radar, but there was an unconfirmed Google update a few weeks ago:

• https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-no-21225.html
• http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/unconfirmed-google-algorithm-updates-2015/

If the changes you see match about November 19th, I'd check out Glenn's suggestions at the bottom of that second article. The site could have been caught in a content quality update.

[FPD_NYC]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your help.

I have a hard time believing it's the result of any of these algorithm updates because this is a very high-quality site with fantastic content. The keyword I am focusing on is a head term in the medical industry with very high volume. We were #1 several weeks ago. The ranking page offers about 750 words of excellent content structured sort of like Wikipedia or Web MD, with helpful internal links and medical sources listed on the bottom.

I did have the client make one or two revisions and update the date associated to the article, as it was 2011, and now it's 2015.

I'm still concerned because today it looks like the page fell even deeper in the index.

Any thoughts?

[evolvingSEO]

Hello

Can you pinpoint a specific date the site dropped in ranking? Maybe check for a drop in Google organic traffic in analytics or a loss of impressions etc in Search Console. Or a date the ranking shifted? That's usually the best way to rule out an algo update. I think 11/19/2015 was the date of this last one.

[FPD_NYC]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your additional thoughts.

So turns out I just checked again today and my client is back at position 6.

I guess Google was just "re-calibrating?"

Very strange...

[evolvingSEO]

Interesting - hopefully it's all fixed, but definitely let us know if it changes again.