Why did my website drop from #1 to 30+?

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 1, 2012 00:35

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...ts-Appreciated

Just wondering if anyone knows why the mentioned website dropped from top ten positions on google to 30-100+ places two seperate times this year. I've read everything about the shuffle, bad links, etc. I'm stumped, can you help?

**ralph.m** · May 1, 2012 01:06

When you say "dropped", in what circumstances? Is this from typing in certain key words, or the site name, or ...?

**amitacs** · May 1, 2012 02:24

Hi,

Might be it is because of Google Algorithm (Penguin) which is changed on 24 April 2012. But don't worry my friend do your work again it gain rank again. Keep it up.........

Regards
Amit

**webnaveen** · May 1, 2012 02:42

Usually it happens if Google find some bad links pointing to your website or duplicate content. Check your content and backlinks carefully and try to update the content on some important pages. Google may reconsider your site quickly!

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 1, 2012 03:18

Thanks everybody. Ralph, specifically I meant when someone searches for TOEFL in KSA or TOEFL in Saudi or TOEFL in Jeddah, etc.

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 1, 2012 03:19

Originally Posted by amitacs

Hi,

Might be it is because of Google Algorithm (Penguin) which is changed on 24 April 2012. But don't worry my friend do your work again it gain rank again. Keep it up.........

Regards
Amit

My positions dropped right around April 24!

**ralph.m** · May 1, 2012 03:38

Hm, amitacs might be on to something there. All the same, if it's any consolation, I tried those three terms you gave and here were the results for me in Australia:

"TOEFL in KSA" - page 3

"TOEFL in Saudi" - page 1 (3rd item)

"TOEFL in Jeddah" - page 1 (6th item)

PS: I wasn't logged in to Google at the time.

**Peter Will** · May 1, 2012 08:40

Penguin may have something to do with this. Just make sure you are posting quality content that is unique and I am sure you will hit the #1 spot again at one point.

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 1, 2012 21:32

Thanks Peter and Ralph. My site is clean, with all original articles, focused on my specific and local topics. It is regularly updated, and the content should keep every visitor who is looking for our type of information very interested.

I have recovered from a previous drop in rankings back up to #1 in many of our targeted keywords. Over the past week (after the latest drop), the site has been slowing creeping back up to higher positions in the results. I really hope I'm just going through a quick penguin recovery.

Is there any service that I could use to check my website that would identify any possible content that could be the reason for a google penalty?

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 1, 2012 21:33

BTW I am not using any sneaky SEO tactics. All I do is provide solid, focused content, with good titling and tagging, the old fashioned way that works long term.

**amitacs** · May 1, 2012 22:59

Hi,

If you use analytics software like Google Analytics, you should check your stats for the past few days. If your traffic has dropped from what it was since last couple of days and has remained consistent, your website might have been penalized.

However, there could be various other reasons sudden traffic drops so make sure to analyze whether you still rank higher for your best keywords and haven’t lost traffic on them.

Also make sure to check that you are still getting traffic for those keywords for past few days or not. Another thing worth checking is to see whether you have lost traffic from referring sites like Facebook and Twitter too.

A thorough check of these things should give you a clear idea on whether or not you have been penalized by Google.

The full article can be found here.

Regards
Amit

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 2, 2012 00:10

Thanks again, Amit!

**GeraldNitram** · May 2, 2012 02:24

Google has always been mentioning stuff about focusing on quality content creation to appeal to the visitors rather than forcing your way up the search result rankings. I know you're not doing anything shady, but there must have been something that you may have not noticed that has caused your site to be penalized. Have you tried checking your backlinks? I really do hope that your site can recover from the Penguin blast from a few days ago. From what I see, I think you're not the only innocent site owner that's been hit by the update. Just keep it up with the content creation, and you'll be back up to where you were.

**ozsubasi** · May 3, 2012 01:58

I think it is important to differentiate between a site being penalized and losing ranking position because of algorithmic changes. I got hit by Penguin to, and after making some changes submitted for reconsideration through GWT. I have had a reply which included the following statement:
"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team."
In other words it has not been given a penalty as such. If anyone is in doubt I would suggest taking the same action, as at least they would find out whether or not they have actually been penalized.

**Elizay Shawn** · May 4, 2012 12:50

Hi SaudiTOEFL! It can be Google Dancing. A mechanism in which Google drops a keywords from its actual position to somewhere and after a couple of days it fetches it back to its normal or somewhere nearer position.

**Dostava** · May 6, 2012 16:36

Originally Posted by ozsubasi

I think it is important to differentiate between a site being penalized and losing ranking position because of algorithmic changes. I got hit by Penguin to, and after making some changes submitted for reconsideration through GWT. I have had a reply which included the following statement:
"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team."
In other words it has not been given a penalty as such. If anyone is in doubt I would suggest taking the same action, as at least they would find out whether or not they have actually been penalized.

4/25/2012 we had massive lost of impressions and get same answer from Google. At this moment we are going higher, but we didn't make any changes, new content and some ads as always.

**bakigames** · May 7, 2012 00:10

My site also drop from first page to fifth page (but only for one keyword

) The reason is that , that I had to many backlinks for that anchor and for Google that was unnatural

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 7, 2012 11:32

Really appreciate the help. Slowly creeping back up now...

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 7, 2012 22:35

Sadly, I'm at #14 for the keyword phrase: TOEFL in Saudi Arabia.

I was #1 for months, rightly so - the whole website is about TOEFL in Saudi Arabia, good original content, visitors get what they're looking for, no ads, no bad links.

The competition for my specific key words and phrases is so low, THIS PAGE comes up #5 in google now, just because it has "TOEFL in Saudi Arabia" in the title! (w/ higher PR of course)

I took a look at incoming links and found that there are at least 30-40 of Russian websites linking to my site, a lot of weird stuff (porn, etc.), but here's the thing - I didn't buy any links from anyone. I am the only admin of the site! Could a competitor have gone so far as to pay for a lot of bad links to my site to get me penalized?!

**Stevie D** · May 8, 2012 04:54

Originally Posted by Saudi-TOEFL

I took a look at incoming links and found that there are at least 30-40 of Russian websites linking to my site, a lot of weird stuff (porn, etc.), but here's the thing - I didn't buy any links from anyone. I am the only admin of the site! Could a competitor have gone so far as to pay for a lot of bad links to my site to get me penalized?!

"Referrer spam" is common. These sites send random robots to your site making it look as though they have followed a link from the pr0n site, in the hope that their URL will pop up on your referrer list and you'll be intrigued enough to click on it. It's highly unlikely there is any actual link there, and even if there was then you don't usually need to worry. Bad inbound links shouldn't affect your rankings (bad outbound links are a different matter), because then – as you say – it would be trivially easy for a competitor to set up loads of bad links pointing to your site and get you hammered. Google is too smart to let that happen.

**Saudi-TOEFL** · May 8, 2012 07:50

Thanks for the helpful insight, Stevie. But if 10,000 Russian sites started linking to me, wouldn't google have to assume that I've paid for that? I mean - What does google use as a proof of someone doing black hat SEO, like paying for thousands of backlinks? Thanks so much for your time.

**Stevie D** · May 8, 2012 10:54

Originally Posted by Saudi-TOEFL

Thanks for the helpful insight, Stevie. But if 10,000 Russian sites started linking to me, wouldn't google have to assume that I've paid for that? I mean - What does google use as a proof of someone doing black hat SEO, like paying for thousands of backlinks? Thanks so much for your time.

If it thinks the links pointing to your site are dodgy, Google will just ignore them when working out your ranking. They won't help you or hurt you. On the other hand, it is likely that the site that is giving the dodgy links to your site will be penalised.

But that isn't the case here. The chances are that there aren't any links on these dodgy sites to your site. They've sent a robot round your site with a forged "referrer" header, but there aren't any actual links there. Google won't know what's showing up on your logs, so it won't know anything about this.

**nickone** · May 10, 2012 00:29

There are many possible reason of drop in ranking but possible reason this time is Google Latest Penguin Update which is very strict to quality. Your website need to have complete unique content which is not to be copy from anywhere or copy on anywhere secondly your website must need to have backlinks that is coming from same theme website and not at all from FFA Pages. So rectify between these issue and send reconsideration request to google.

**Raj07** · May 10, 2012 07:47

I had the same problem with my website. It went down in SERP multiple pages for multiple keywords. Then in 6 month stime all the keywords came to higher positions than before ( stayed there for almost 1 month) and now it has gone down again for what ever keywords the problem had. I think it will take another 6 months to be back and god knows it will repeat this procedure again?

**ralph.m** · May 10, 2012 07:53

There's no rest for the wicked, as they say.

You just have to keep working at SEO. The search engines are laws unto themselves, changing their ranking criteria regularly (which seems fair enough to me). If you want to rely on them to get noticed, you have to keep vigilant and not rest on your laurels. It's just how 'tis.

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