So weird sudden drop in rankings

[Kennelstore]

Hi All, ok so at the beginning of July we launched our new website, SEVEN weeks later we have dropped completly off all rankings what-so-ever, (except brand) but weirdly if i pan between browsers we dont use (for saved searches/cookies etc) sometimes the rankings show up where they used to be.

Whats strange is we get crawled daily but it took seven weeks for our rankings to drop, ive done all testing i can - no manual actions, no updates when we dropped (15th Aug) no real differences in webmaster tools, no crawl errors, no massive rise in 404s, 500s etc etc, im really a bit stumped!

Any help would be mucho appreciated in diagnosing this stumper!

[Antony_Towle]

Can you give a URL ?

Thanks

James

[Kennelstore]

Hi James its www.kennelstore.co.uk

[Antony_Towle]

Wow really struggling with this one also,

Worth mentioning that you are very much in favor with Bing still and rank very well,

I am struggling to understand why so well but not with Google,

I will keep digging, hopefully a few other mozzers will pick this up and take a look,

James

[masoudfatemi]

Hi

Maybe its a sandbox effect. I suggest you to wait for another week, make contents and update, build brand name and generic links and track the results. I use this strategy when my new site drop like this and it worked.

and another thing, check your content keywords in WMT, if your main keyword is in top 3, you should decrease using it; I had a experience of this, Google thought we are doing keyword stuffing.

[Kennelstore]

Hi James, yep i see we are dong ok on bing its a weird one! Masoud, point taken we have got some new content and good links coming inbound, interesting about WMT we have held those keywords for 3 and a half years!

[CommT]

Have you recently reblaunched a new version of your old website, or is it a completely new site? Only ask because your original post made me think it was a new company, new website, but your response to James suggests otherwise - 'we have held those keywords for 3 and a half years'...

This makes a difference.

If it's all completely new (new company, new domain, new design) then I think your good listings for 7 weeks were the freshness thing (sorry I call it that...) where Google will give a new site a better place in its index than it necessarily deserves based on links etc because it hasn't had a chance to build any links being so new and all.

If it's a rebrand of an old site then you may want to look at your 301 redirects and make sure they are page-to-page rather than sending everything to the homepage (which is so common I just want to bang my head against a brick wall - highly frustrating for a user, stoooopid for a webmaster). If you've changed domains then you can 'tell' Google via webmaster tools using the change of address tool.

Good luck with your problem - I hope it gets sorted out soon.

[Kennelstore]

Hi Amelia, it is 3 year old website, 301s have been done in terms of some pages and others have kept the exact same URL as they did previously, the only thing that havent been 301 is product pages which have a different structure now and never where high value content, 301 products is something i am doing currently - we have a LOT of products so if anyone knows of a tool to simplify this please let me know :DApart from that i am stumped, i hate leaving it to see what effects happen in natural course but it is stumping me!

[Travis_Bailey]

Right off the bat, the www and non-www aren't properly redirected. I'm running a crawl right now. I'll let you know if I see anything else.

[SwimsuitsDirect.com]

Brand new sites typically get lots of traffic at first because Google sees them as completely fresh content. Then once the content gets older the rankings will drop.

[Kennelstore]

Its not a new website (3 and half years) we think its 301s on our product lines (200 URLS) whats the quickest way to deal with 301s - dont want to be writing up a spreadsheet of every url that we stick into htaccess file!