Sudden Rankings Drop for Good Keywords.. Did I Do This? Please Help :(

[AliMac26]

Hello,

I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either.

Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada).

My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41).

I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note  that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer)

The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!

[AliMac26]

I should also note that the digital catalogs contain links to products that are on the site

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

This is a very complicated question and without taking a look into the site it's quite hard to diagnose whether you've made a mistake or not.  Maybe someone else can help with that aspect.

But what I can tell you is that there have been two recent and ground-shaking updates to the google core algorithm at the end of March.  Perhaps the first thing I might do is to rule out any connection to these.  Remember not everything you are doing is affecting your traffic.  Google and many other factors are constantly at play.  It's easy to get overly concerned that you've made a mistake when rankings fluctuate but oftentimes it can be nothing to do with you but to do with an external factor.

I would go and look around Barry Schwartz' site and also get some dates for the algo updates and see whether these correlate with the rankings to rule that out first.  It seems the recent updates were not penalties but helping quality sites rank so a sudden drop of the magnitude you're reporting would seem unlikely, but I would make sure that it's got nothing to do with the March Updates, read around them and rule that out first as a cause.

Sorry I can't be more specific/helpful.  Small fluctuations are normal but I've been seeing some BIG ones in March both positive and negative.  Take the stuff on SEO Roundtable with a pinch of salt.  Like the comments.  They are often from poor quality spammy sites and are all whining about rankings drops whenever google makes an update.  But what Barry says is usually spot on and I keep my ear to the ground to try to link big drops or bumps to what's happening over at Google.

[AliMac26]

The timing of this correlates with the slight traffic drop (our traffic did not drastically drop but I did see a drop for a few good keywords like I said).
Thanks so much for this!

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Be more specific about the keywords in each level and layer of the navigation and perhaps I'll be able to provide you with some more detailed insight.

[Andrew-SEO]

You mentioned the keywords took the client to the homepage.

Was the homepage targeting these keywords? Where they in the title for example.

If not then you've had a good run but it's time to start targeting these important keywords with bespoke pages.

[AliMac26]

Hi Andrew... It is in the title, however I don't think it is anywhere else on the page.

[Andrew-SEO]

Ok. Is there space in your H1? Also the first sentence of the first paragraph?