Sudden drop in rankings and indexed pages!

[inhouseseo]

Over the past few days I have noticed some apparent major changes. Before I explain, let me say this:

Checking my analytics and WMT:

• There is an increase in traffic (even via google organic)

• There is no drop in impressions or clicks

• There is no drop in indexed pages in GWT

Having said that;

• When I check my indexed pages using site:www.mywebsite.com, I see only 30 results as opposed to the 120K that I was seeing before (it was steadily climbing). The indexed pages have increase 3 fold in the past year, because of the increase in pages, updates, and products on the site.

• I see a sudden drop in rankings for major keywords that had been steadily rising. For example, I had some major keywords that were on page 7-8, not they are on page 20+ or not at all. Also, the page that used to show in the rankings has changed.

I have only done white-hat guest blogging in the past year for link building, on a small scale (maybe 20-30 links in a year).

They only other change recently, is that we are:

• Posting products on Houzz and Pinterest daily

• adding our site to all local directories (white pages, Yelp, citysearch, etc.)

My site got hit by Penguin more than a year ago, but we have done everything right since, and our traffic via organic results has more than doubled since the Penguin release.

What the hell is going on? Should I be concerned?

[TakeshiYoung]

Don't panic, it's a bug related to the recent domain consolidation update:

http://searchengineland.com/site-command-limited-to-30-results-google-says-a-temporary-domain-clustering-bug-160594

[inhouseseo]

Thanks Takeshi!

Any thoughts on the drops in rankings, given all the other metrics?

[TakeshiYoung]

Hi, there are hundreds of reasons why a page can drop in rankings for a keyword, so it's impossible to tell what's going on without knowing more specifics. Some common reasons for drops include:

• Overly optimize anchor text
• Losing links
• Google devaluing previously valued links
• On-site changes
• Technical errors
• Google algorithm updates
• Competitors improving their SEO
• Poor user metrics
• Etc.