Website Suddenly dropping rank

[popcreativeltd]

Morning Moz Fans:

My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj

According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one.

Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running.

We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH

So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help

[Beckistar]

Hi there, thanks for posting this.

Some questions, before I can help you properly:

Have you redirected all of the old URLs across to any new ones using the 301 directive?

That duplicate content in the subdomain, is it still live somewhere or have you removed this now?

Do you know which landing pages in particular have seen the biggest loss of traffic?

Usually, a site that drops rankings when it moves to another platform is having duplicate content or redirection issues in my experience.

I really would like to help, so please let me know the answers to the above when I can.

[popcreativeltd]

Hello, there! yeah everything has 301 redirects, no duplicate content is live now. They used to come top for "dental implants luton" http://goo.gl/fO74zy

Thanks

[Mark_Ginsberg]

In addition to what Becki said (all correct), I feel like it's important to note 2 other things:

1. Even websites that are appropriately redirected, lose some link equity in the process.  See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links.

2. With regard to the blog problems, I'm wondering if perhaps the blog being down for 4-5 weeks had something to do with it.  If there were historically some links pointing to the blog that were boosting the site, those pages 404ing would effectively remove the links from the link graph.

Still, it seems there's some sort of penalty here because you mentioned them not even ranking for the brand name anymore.  I've never seen that unless there was a penalty.  Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools' manual action viewer?

[popcreativeltd]

Hi Mark, thanks for that. As it happens the brand name seems to be appearing again today and google webmaster tools also suggests this in WMT with in the ranking section. We've been checking the manual action section for a few weeks now but it just says "No manual webspam actions found"

Thanks

[popcreativeltd]

Sorry a quick update. If you search in google.co.uk and search with your location being in certain areas of the UK they come up top for the brand name, but if you search for the brand name in say "Manchester" they show at the bottom of the page.

Weird

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I'm actually not totally shocked by that.  Google's results are getting more personalized by the day.  It looks like Perfect Profiles' two office locations are both quite far from Manchester.  It makes sense to me that they rank lower in locations that are further away.

[popcreativeltd]

No true, but if thats the case does it say "penalty" or just re-indexing

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I tend to think something bad must be happening here since it's been almost two months.  If it's just re-indexing, it should have been over long ago.

[DirkC]

Hi,

Did you see an increase in the load time of your pages in Analytics (pre/post launch). For a site which is not very complex in terms of structure, your load times are not really great. See http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150330_ZF_X41/1/details/ & http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150330_A8_WR6/1/details/

Page speed analysis by Google gives pretty low scores as well - for mobile 47/100 - desktop 63/100

In pagespeed - you can see the content breakdown - on your homepage 66% of the downloaded content is css/js - most of it is not used on page: https://unused-css.com/detect-unused-css?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.perfectdental.eu.com%2F (a disadvantage of most frameworks like bootstrap / foundation)

I would try to work on improving the speed -a similar case with low page speed scores noticed immediate improvement after reducing load times: http://moz.com/community/q/problem-with-getting-a-site-to-rank-at-all

rgds,

Dirk

[popcreativeltd]

Hi Dirk, thanks for this. No we hadn't noticed a difference. Its important to point out that the page rank dropped before the new framework went live though. Although we have been looking at this and have made some improvements this afternoon. Google speed test now says 74 for the desktop so we will work some more on it tomorrow.

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Adrian

I think there's a mixture of things going on here. I'll just spell out the top ones I see after a quick look:

• On the old domain, URLs returning a 404 code need to also LOOK like 404 pages, right now they just look like the homepage: http://www.perfectprofiles.eu.com/kjhgjkhg

• On the current domain the alt text on the logo is "dental implants luton - logo" - just make that the company name "perfect profiles".

• In fact there's only one plain text of "perfect profiles" on the entire homepage, which is in the footer.

• And the current domain is not the company name (?) which is why it might not be ranking as well for "perfect profiles" which is kind of a vague name to begin with.

• Also, why not just redirect the old domain homepage to the new? I think that would be considered the best user experience since there's not really any useful content on the old domain - Google's cache shows no content really since the page is an image

• The old homepage has a few good links as well

• There's also three Google Plus pages and only one has a verified link to the website - it looks like there are two physical locations and one corporate? You can have three pages, but just really beef them up with as much info as possible.

• Make sure the corporate G+ page is in fact verified and then Customize your knowledge graph listing

• Consider having separate pages for each location only if you fill them with helpful unique info on each, like office pictures, staff names/pictures, hours, directions, etc.

I think it's a mix of a) Google not being 100% on the brand/company name - and then b) doing more local optimization for each location.

[popcreativeltd]

Great, thanks for that. Just one question, my client says that if we feel it's better he's happy to use the old domain as the main and switch the site, which makes more sense as it's the name of the company, in light of the fact we seem to have lost most keyword ranking, will this have any improvements or disadvantages?

thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Adrian

It's always tricky! It's a longterm solution. Things will need to get sorted out by Google and the dust needs to settle.

You can really ensure this happens faster by taking all appropriate measures - like redirects, notifying webmaster tools, updating internal/external links where possible (social, local listing, etc).

The fact that rankings were lost, means you have less to lose right now - so it might be a good time to take a step back and "do it right"

[popcreativeltd]

Ok thanks Dan