A.K.A., “Why has my site’s ranking in Google dropped dramatically?”
A friend came to me recently with a problem. According to a client of his, their Web site seems to have dropped out of Google. As recently as a month ago, they were on the front page for a number of queries that drive a lot of business for them, but now they’re way down on the 3rd or 4th page.
Yikes! That can have serious consequences for your business!
So today, I’d like to walk you through my thought process for
- Figuring out if they were indeed hit with a penalty, and
- Figuring out what they can do to correct it.
(Note that I’m going to take you through the actual steps, in the actual order, that I used to diagnose the problem. This story has a surprise ending, so the steps I took wound up not being the most efficient way to solve the problem, but I think it’s instructive to show you my mistakes. Think of this like you’re just looking over my shoulder…)
Idea 1: Has Google manually penalized the site?
The first thing I want to check is whether a Google employee (or contractor) has reported the site for “black hat” SEO—shady linkbuilding, thin content, etc.
So, I log into Google Webmaster Tools, go to Search Traffic, and click on Manual Actions.
…And find nothing. Google hasn’t manually penalized the site.
Idea 2: Have they accidentally de-listed their site?
Okay, so no deliberate penalties. Maybe they (or their Web team) accidentally marked the site as “noindex,” signaling to Google that they didn’t want to be listed.
(Sound crazy? You’d be surprised at how many sites I’ve seen where someone set a site-wide noindex and forgot about it!)
So, I pull up the site, check the page source for a “robots” directive, and find nada.
Same goes for checking the site’s robots.txt file.
Idea 3: Did a recent Google algorithm update change how they were ranked?
Next idea: Maybe Google recently changed something that drastically changed how the site is ranked. I tend not to keep up with the latest algorithm updates, because as a rule, if you’re creating quality content that humans like, the algorithmic changes will only benefit you—after all, Google is constantly getting better at preferring the content that real people like.
So, I pull up the Moz guide to Google changes and read up on the only update that would fall in the right time frame (since they noticed the problem within the last couple weeks).
No joy… nothing in this update would seem to suddenly hit their site. That gives me a new idea, though…
Idea 4: Do they have lots of duplicate (or semi-duplicate) content?
I start browsing through their Web site, and find some troubling stuff… They have a large number of pages (nearly 50!) that are almost identical to each other—swap out the name of the location, and it’s the same 2-paragraph-long page.
Google loathes this so-called “thin” content, so they need to take care of this ASAP.
Buuuuut… that doesn’t really explain the sudden drop—Google’s been penalizing that stuff for a long time now.
Now I’m really stretching. Maybe a bunch of sites that previously linked to them disappeared, causing the site to lose authority in Google’s eyes.
(Hey, I said I’m stretching!)
So, I check Open Site Explorer. The site has a domain authority of 22—nothing to brag about, but it’s in line with their competitors. (Hell, the #2 listing for one of their most relevant search phrases has an authority of 16!)
While browsing the OSE report, though, I find something else troubling. Check out their anchor text in the Open Site Explorer report (in the video above)—it’s a bunch of variations on “DUI attorney.” That smells pretty artificial (a nice way of saying “spammy”!), and you can be sure that Google notices. They definitely need to kill this artificial linkbuilding. (…Or at least be a little more nuanced about it.)
Again, though… that doesn’t explain a sudden, recent drop. Google has probably been penalizing them for months for this.
Exasperation: How bad is it?
At this point, I’m out of ideas. My question now is: is it really as bad as they believe?
So, I pull up the Search Engine Results Page Checker to see where they actually show up for some of their key searches.
The answer: #37. That’s definitely not first page (like they said they used to be), so I’m inclined to believe there really is an issue here. But damned if I can figure out what it is!
One last idea: Can we see exactly when the drop occurred?
At this point, I’m about out of ideas. But maybe, just maybe, if I can pinpoint when the change took place, I’ll be able to pinpoint some cause.
So, I pull up their Analytics report. Let’s just get a traffic report over the last few months.
Uh… What? The traffic report is basically flat (give or take 10% between months). Even when I drill down into just organic traffic from Google, there doesn’t appear to be any significant change.
Just to be sure, I pull up the Search Engine Optimization report and compare the last 2 weeks to the 2 week period before it. There’s not a lot of data to work with, but the Average Position has actually improved by about 10%.
(Note that the Clicks in the video above claim to have dropped by 100%. That seems catastrophic, but it’s only based on 10 clicks, and Google only reports in 5 click increments. It could literally be a difference of 2 clicks that cause the report to go from 0 to 10.)
The conclusion: No change?
At this point, I’m racking my brain—why would they think they had dropped so much?
Then it hits me: they’ve been using AdWords to advertise for the same terms they say they ranked organically for. My hypothesis is that whoever reported this problem was looking at the search engine results on a crummy monitor—where Google’s yellow background (indicating paid ads) just looked white. That would make their ad look like an organic, first-page result. Then, if their ads stopped showing in those top 3 slots (for instance, because a new competitor started bidding higher than them), it would look like they had dropped all the way from #3 to #37.
That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why they would believe they had all but dropped out of the search results without showing any signs of:
- manual penalties,
- technical issues (like a noindex setting across the site),
- content or practices targeted by a recent Google algorithm change, or
- significant changes in their traffic reports in Google Analytics.
If you liked this “investigative report,” you might also like watching the Analytics seminar I recently hosted.
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