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Unfortunately I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with your sitemap changes.

Seeing as how Google released a major Penguin update Friday, the fact that your rankings were lost Saturday morning seems to fit that timeline perfectly. It would be a pretty crazy coincidence otherwise, and sitemap changes truly should not affect rankings like that.

A quick look at ahrefs to peep your backlink profile and it does smell a little fishy. The growth in linking root domains you've had over the past few months has been pretty intense.. huge leap from april thru july and that's indicative of some blackhat SEO work.

Your anchor text seems to be keyed to a lot of spammy phrases like "promotional products" and **"corporate gifts."**This could also be triggering the Penguin penalties. I see a lot of links from sites like "freeseodirectory.com" and that's another red flag right there.. directory links, forum spam, etc.

Start digging through those backlinks, check your google webmaster account and watch for notifications of manual action. It still could be an algorithmic penalty even without notification though.. Just check out your SEO practices. You should know what you're doing to gain links and my guess would be it's in violation.

Good luck!

I tried to confirm that example and came up short. Were you able to?

This is so funny to me because I've literally had this exact same argument at executive meetings. I've lived this nightmare!

It doesn't matter that the two brands target different verticals. What matters is the product, as you've pointed out. You can target different verticals from the same domain. But competing domains are a no-no.

I would go back to focusing on how beneficial it would be to combine these. Try the concept of subdomains with them. So have a parent brand let's call it just that, 'parent.'

Then you will have your consumer vertical and your smb vertical, right? so you can go consumer.parent.com and smb.parent.com -- Have them branded differently but not violate Google guidelines while still bettering your SEO situation and improving DA/organic traffic and visibility.

Does that pitch make sense at the high level I threw it? Could you run with that?

I'd track down their examples also as that doesn't sound right to me. My CEO threw me examples and I shot them down on the spot when this happened to me.

Don't give up! You know you're right

You're absolutely right. As I said, I've gone down this exact same road before and that's exactly what was asked of me. My response was that Google has beefed up their penalty policies, reference eBay, BMW, and so on (big brands are not immune), and that you do seem to have a penalty already hitting you.

The site ranking drop in particular: Have you looked at your GWT to see if there are any manual notices? If it's a penalty and you need to submit a reconsideration request, that's your opportunity. Tell them that when you do that they will be going over your site with a fine-tooth comb. (Again this may be stretching the truth but we have to get them to understand what we know to be correct.)

The best course of action in this conversation that will be 100% truth is to explain how merging the brands will benefit your SEO. Explain that you can incorporate different vertical targets within the same domain and create content more finely tuned for each. Come up with a specific site map and present it in a purdy picture. domain.com/vertical-target etc

Show what it will look like and then explain how having all your backlinks pointing to one domain will benefit the domain and company and help you to outrank your competitors rather than spreading it out between two. This should sell them more than the penalty fear.

Good luck!

You need to combine these sites into one authoritative domain. You've spread yourselves thin, not to mention are most likely in violation of Google's guidelines.

Forgetting about the latter for a moment, think about the split domain authorities between your two prominent sites. Wouldn't it be nice to have those combined? (Of course keep in mind 1+1 will not equal 2 here, but you get my point.)

If you look through Google's webmaster guidelines you will see the part about having multiple domains selling/promoting the same product or service. That is what you are doing. There's a good chance one or both of your sites gets banned from SERPs if Google finds out about this.

It is also just going to be so much easier to create content, market, and SEO for one singular domain. You can attack different verticals from it, you can redirect everything (via 301 unless you have penalties that will carry) back to it, and continue your strategy to gain new markets. But competing with yourself isn't doing you any favors. You're absolutely correct to question the logic here.

I've fought this battle before and it's not an easy one. CEOs are not easily convinced that starting multiple brands is a bad idea. They have a funny way of reasoning it. However, you need to assert your knowledge. That is what they hired you for.

Good luck!

Hi again Peter,

That is very interesting and I see your confusion here. I repeated the same test and was given the same results without your brand name in query.. Still when Google is listing the title they are listing your brand name.

It seems to me that they really want your brand name to show in this title. Why? I'm not entirely sure. But that's what they're adding to your title here..

Try shortening your title on that page by a word or two and adding a pipe (|) and "Mobify." Make that your test page for this issue and see what Google does with it when the change populates. I have a funny feeling it might pull your full title at that point.

Most sites out there try to drag their domain/brand into each page title anyway. You can call it "best practice" or just a "funny habit" but I feel like this is what Google is looking for with your site.

I'm incredibly curious, so if you don't mind trying this out and reporting back I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks and good luck!

This was intriguing to me so I dug in a little and I have an initial theory here:

In the example you provided you seem to be searching with your brand name only. "Mobify" is bolded telling me that was a searched keyword.

The title tag for the page in question reads: "25 Top Design Upgrades to Make Your Mobile Revenue Skyrocket [SlideShare]"

My bet is that because you do not have the brand name in your title tag, Google is looking to display something that does carry this particular keyword. In this case it is looking for something with the word "Mobify" in it and finding it in the URL. If you take out the SlideShare portion of your title and replace it with "| Mobify" my guess is this problem will go away.

Look at the other URLs you are having this problem with and tell me if the brand name is missing from it but present in the searched query.

Let me know if this works!

Interesting, we are actually talking about this in another thread at the moment. Check out the comments here:

http://moz.com/community/q/any-research-on-how-much-better-display-advertising-works-when-targeting-an-audience-graph

I think it's best used as a drive for branding as opposed to conversions. Conversions are great if you get them, but it's a low spend to get your name out there. Much like a radio commercial for Burger King while you're sitting in the drive through, it's still worth the low spend per impression for your logo to hit some eyeballs and be further imprinted in your target's cranium

Do read that thread though!

Build some links! You have a grand total of zero links pointing to this domain from zero sources with a domain authority of 1 (the minimum, basically zero).

I'm not sure why you're worried about your home page showing up when your domain/company is googled right now. I think you have bigger fish to fry. Those types of things will work themselves out as your SEO campaign takes off (ORGANICALLY!)

Googling "docslinc" at least brings your domain to the first results. It's an FAQ page, sure, but it's you. Google is in fact indexing your entire site but that may not last long either as you do have some pretty major duplicate content issues approaching... Go to google and search this query - site:docslinc.com

You'll see something like 1700 pages indexed and the VAST majority of them are duplicates of sign up and login pages. Examples:

https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mjg=&prid=NTI=&tim=MTQ6MDA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0yMg==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1

https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mjg=&prid=NTI=&tim=MTQ6MDA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0yMg==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1

https://www.docslinc.com/login.php?dctid=Mzg=&prid=NTY=&tim=MDk6MzA=&dt=MjAxNC0wNy0xMQ==&bkap=inst&brkt=MzA=&apptid=&ins_plan=&spl=1

(Yes folks, those URLs are slightly different)

They are all being indexed separately and that's a Panda Penalty waiting to happen. You need to get rel canonical tags on those pages and point them all to one or no crawl them altogether ASAP.

That dupe content issue will not solve your original question, but is very important nonetheless. To be honest I don't think your original concern matters all that much. Just get to building your marketing campaign and the rest will follow.

Good luck!

"Over exposure of PPC" is not a thing.. Google will never penalize you for spending too much

So that's not your problem. You have a lot of bots disallowed in your robots but I don't see google bot out.. Ahrefs is out but they're still reporting you have the vast majority of anchor text phrases being the exact term you're looking to rank for... That's dangerous, and just the type of thing the Penguin algorithm looks for. I'd work on a wider array of branded anchor phrases and less keyword-rich like that one.

You might just be in tough competition also. But since you so suddenly disappeared something tells me there's more to the story.

If it were me, I'd start picking away at that anchor phrase issue but focus on getting some content created. Put a blog on your domain and start coming up with awesome articles and insight... Something people will find interesting and want to share.

Sorry my advice is non-specific.. Full-disclosure I'm totally distracted by the World Cup Final at the moment

Yes we'd really need to see the site to give you a good idea of the issues but it does sound like a penalty of some sort. If you were on page 1 and then dropped off the face of the Google there's a good chance you were hit.

As Keri said, check webmaster tools for notices. Also share with us your link building strategy. Do you handle it yourself? Do you sub your SEO out?

Most of all the domain will help.

No way. Not at all. Not only that, but it would definitely get you less clicks even if you did get better rankings.

Always remember: Your page's title is the thing your potential customer/user/client will be clicking on to first visit your page. This is a very important point of first contact in the digital marketing world. Think about the way you search and what gets you to click on links from Google. I bet it's somewhere around 95% based on the title present.

If you were Googling "Xbox One Games" and saw:

• Xbox+One+Games+Review+PS4+Games
• Xbox One Games Reviewed and Uncovered

Which one would you click?

That's fine, if that's your branding. Not sure why you need the ".com" part unless you're like expedia or somebody who often emphasizes their dot-comness. But guess what.. they don't even include the .com in their title tags.

You're skipping the most important part here though. The branding you stick on at the end doesn't matter NEARLY as much as what you're doing with the rest of the title tag. This is where you get to pitch your page to your potential customer. It is quite possibly the single most important point of messaging on your entire site. Take great care with your Title tags and you'll see positive results.

You need to pick one and 301 everything to it. It really doesn't matter if you go with the www version or the non-www version. That can be up to you or the client. But you need to explain to these web developers that they are absolutely incorrect and that it very much IS an SEO issue. A huge one in fact.

Explain to them that even though all of the listed URL variations are indeed drawing from the same source HTML file, Google doesn't know or care about that and will see each and every one of those variants as a duplicate site indexed separately. This leads to penalties.

Furthermore, your link juice gets spread between them all. So if you have a link built to domain.com and another link to www.domain.com, the authority is split between them and you're basically competing with yourself 4+ times.

301 redirects solve this and every single website in the history of ever does (or should be) doing this. Ask your web developers to pick a major/semi-major brand and try accessing the different versions of said brand. try www.nike.com and http://nike.com - ask them how that resolves...

Silly that they would say that, but this should give you the reasoning to convince them otherwise. And if they still say no... They should be doing what you ask seeing as how your client is paying them and all...

Good luck!

Uhh... Good luck with that.

Isn't that what Moz Pro is for?

Yeah Mike is right on as usual here.

I just want to point out a quick way to find out how many actual links are sitting on any given page (keep in mind this won't be exact but it'll be close.)

USING CHROME:

1. Right click the page and select "View Source"
2. Hit CTRL+F
3. Type in<a href <="" span=""></a>
   <a href <="" span=""></a>

<a href <="" span="">Boom. You'll have yourself a number of results and that's how many links you have, cloaked or not cloaked, give or take.

This is easier to look at I feel like and a fun little (maybe obvious, sorry if so) tip.

Good luck!</a>

Your homepage has this tag in your header:

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

That's your problem. Remove that.

Not for link building, only if you think readers of the blogs might find your site relevant and click said link. In this case it would definitely be worth your time as you are getting true traffic to your site from people interested, which after all is the ultimate goal. But from an SEO standpoint, it will do nothing to increase your keyword ranking in search engines.

In other words, yes and no.

You dropped just 2 positions?? Consider yourself lucky and go build some organic, natural links!

Well that's too bad. First off I find that very odd he would keep the old site live. I would yank that immediately after I 301'd my link profiles. If you have ANY incoming links that you find relevant or worthwhile you need to have those redirected to the appropriate pages on your new site. Yoast can do that.

Drop that subdomain. The Way-back machine is always there if you need to reference it, but also you should have it backed up locally just in case.

The sitemap isn't a huge issue, Google will crawl your site assuming there are a few links incoming. As for why your SERPs dropped, that could be due to any number of things. You've got some decent links coming in, but of course we could all use more so get to content building and promoting for sure.

You might want to look at what your old sites did differently in terms of keyword placement. Titles, Headers, Ratio, etc are all important. Just keep in mind it needs to stay natural while clearly being about your targeted keyword. This should be easy enough to do. If I'm writing about bankruptcy that word is going to pop up organically plenty of times. Just make sure it's in your URLs, H1s, Titles, etc. The Moz on-page reports can help with this.

This is all I got right now.. Hope it's at least a tiny help.

You got Penguined my friend. In case you've somehow missed it, the 2.0 update rolled out last night, at the exact same time your SERP dropped. Not a coincidence, I'm afraid.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/