Advice for rapidly declining ranking-- can an old indexed sitemap cause this?

[dynedge]

Hi Everyone,

Today, I woke up to a dramatic page rank decline (nearly 20 positions) for a client's website (eacoe.org). When I looked in Webmaster tools, I noticed that the site was just indexed yesterday by Google (a request that the webmaster had submitted back in April of this year). Would this re-indexing event have caused the sharp decline?

In Webmaster Tools, I don't see many errors (one 404 error that we are planning on fixing).  I likewise see no Manual Actions/ penalties brought up by Google about our site. My first concern is that the re-indexing led to rank decline, but I'm not entirely sure if I should be focusing on something else. And if it is the re-indexing, what are there any recommended steps of attack?

Thanks for your help!

-Bruce

[becole]

Bruce, whenever you lose rankings, there are a few things that you should check. First, I would crawl your own website using Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl, or another crawler to see if you can identify any issues. I would also look at the links to the site--have you lost links or gained any "shady" or unnatural links recently? Have you done anything related to a disavow file that might have caused this?

There are so many potential issues to deal with that could have been the culprit--but I would first crawl your own website and see if it's can be crawled properly. Then look at the links.

As for the sitemap issue, I don't think that it's going to be a sitemap issue if your pages are being indexed. But, if the sitemap does not have the current pages on your site and is not up to date I would fix it.

[dynedge]

Thanks for your help, Bernadette. I really appreciate your advice.

I had thought to crawl the site-- I see a few 302 redirects and one 404 response. Webmaster Tools does not indicate any errors found by Google.

The link idea is a good idea-- when I took a look at our backlinks detected by OpenSite Explorer, I find that we have increased in the number of links in the last 3 months 120 (we had lost 50 links, but the domains linking to our site overlap completely). Moz does not show any of the links as spammy.

Are there any other link-related tools that I should be considering here?