Whitehat site suffering from drastic & negative Keyword/Phrase Shifts out of the blue!

[snowflake74]

I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles.

The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course.

Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect...

Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later.

However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions.

My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives?

I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site?

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[GlobeRunner]

I know this is frustrating. There are a few areas that I would look into that could be causing this: duplicate content issues and links. First, look to see if you have any duplicate content issues on the site. There could be a duplicate copy of the site (perhaps a dev version that should not be indexed) or even certain content on your site that's causing issues. You might try Siteliner's crawler to identify if there are any issues you can fix.

Another possible reason is the links to the site. The site could have been hit by negative SEO, and a lot of "low quality" links or off-topic links could be pointing to your site. I've seen this in the past, and the only thing you can do is identify the links and disavow them. Sometimes you can get them removed, but disavowing them should work.

[snowflake74]

Thanks Eric,

There are a few languages of the site but as far as I'm aware no duplicate content in the same language but I will check with Siteliner just to be sure.

For disavowing backlinks - is this just via webmaster tools you are recommending to do that? If so we haven't done that yet but it seems sensible to try. When I last checked back links there were a few random sites that we certainly hadn't submitted to and looked spammy but when I went onto them we couldn't see our links.

Do you have a recommendation for a better backlink testing tool?

[donford]

Hi Snowflake,

You can use the OSE (Open Site Explorer) here on Moz to check the links they found. You can download that report to CSV to easily sort and see if you have a possible negative campaign running against you.

You could also use, Majestic, or SEMRush. to find more links. Just note there is no tool, free or paid that is going to be able to get all the links pointing to your site.

If you don't find a lot of spam links to your site, chances are there isn't somebody trying to target you with a negative campaign.

Hope it helps,

[snowflake74]

Thanks for your input Donford,

I've had a look in OSE again and I can't see any spam links (all the genuine links are rated 0 through to 3) which looks very good. So it doesn't appear to be a negative campaign against me.

I may try Majestic for peace of mind... it makes it even more the stranger that we are being penalised so much

[snowflake74]

Checking Webmaster Tools it looks like Google has unindexed 500 out of our 630 pages in the last 2 weeks.

Is there any reason for why this maybe?

[donford]

Hi,

There are several reasons.

If you have recently changed your url structure. IE (went from using www to not, or https or not, or trailing / or not). In these cases Google could have indexed the pages already under the "other" version.

Google could be having a crawling error, like in a robots.txt or lack there of. Improper canonical tags, blocked access, improper redirects, or a manual penalty.

If you would like to post a link (or pm me) I will take a look and see if I can spot a potential problem for you.

Here are a couple links on Google that should help:
Why Pages Drop From Index
Overview Pages Not Being Crawled

Hope this helps,

Don

[snowflake74]

We did go from http to https about a month ago but we were careful that all the redirects and sitemaps were reflected correctly. I dont think there is an issue with the robots text (it is present and nothing weird blocking).

I'll take a look at those links and send you a pm - many thanks Don

[donford]

So I'm not seeing anything blocking crawling on your site which is good. But I did notice that you have at one time used URL types "http" and "https" which leads me to believe you may have recently switched to HTTPS. In such case you should know that it may take Google sometime to adjust. On a technical level, https and http are 2 different domains.

It is highly likely that Google has index the HTTP version of some of these pages which is why your index count maybe lower then normal for the HTTPS version.

I do see you properly 301 redirected these pages and your sitemaps are reflecting the https as well, if again this was a recent change it just looks like its going to take a bit of time for Google to catch up.

This is worth a quick look, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en (scroll to the bottom) and see the section "Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS".

I sent you additional info in PM.

Hope this helps,

Don

[donford]

Also a quick point, if you still have your Google search console setup for HTTP, even though you use HTTPS now, I'd suggest looking at what is being reported as indexed in there. That maybe the missing link.

Cordialement,

Don

[snowflake74]

Thanks Don,

I had read that article initially actually which is why I thought a few weeks was enough for it all to have settled back out but maybe I'm expecting a bit much for a 600 page site.

Many thanks for your help I'll maybe just be patient if there is nothing glaringly wrong

[snowflake74]

That is a very good shout!

[HSawhney]

Snowflake,

When you migrate to HTTP's i believe you have to add the new protocol to Search Console. Google looks at HTTP and HTTPs as 2 different sites, which is why you might be seeing your index count going down under your HTTP account in SC. If you add the HTTPs version of your website to search console, you may see that those pages have been indexed under the HTTPs protocol. Check it out, wait a few weeks and see what happens.

Secure Your Site With HTTPS - Search Console Help
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en