Got a new client whose website dropped, but link profile is clean. Any ideas?

Hey guys, I got a client that had a website in Top 10, but this week the website dropped to 7th page and lost all the other significant keywords. I examined the link profile, but it is clean as a newborn baby - only quality relevant links and URL as an anchor mainly. Moreover, the on-page content is pretty rich and relevant. What would you say could cause this? Im gonna check GWT as soon as I get access, but I'm just wandering. The XML sitemap was created manually for this website, so maybe it was outdated a bit. Other than that they overused the meta keyword tag, but I wouldn't say it was a cause for such a drop. Any guesses from other SEOs?

Did you do the linkbuilding yourself? If not, chances are he might have been caught for being apart of some blog network, or he has some very spammy backlinks which are blocking ahrefs and majestic

No, I just got her today. And even though she has good knowledge of SEO for a non-SEO person, she does now nothing about black hat or blog networks. She mainly focuses on creating on-page content. And external links from her page are just to social networks and the webdesign creator. Seems weird, right?

check backlinks via yahoo

sometimes google doesnt' show all the backlinks.

also, check the content source, i had a similar client, after some time, i found that the site had an encrypted footer pointing to some vi ag ra site.

removed that and the site came back up. in a few days.

so if the url is the anchor, does that mean there's little anchor diversity? that might be the problem right there. what's the keyword density like? sounds like spammy link-building to me.

Something went weird today for me too. I wrote up a press release yesterday and distributed with marketwire. For some bizarre reason the site that I sent the PR to (which is also super clean and untouched) dropped pretty significantly :-/

My site dropped today as well. I have a clean back link profile; learned a lot from being hit from Penquin on another site I own. I can't figure this out either.

Not enough info to know for sure but here are some things to check:

No PR on home page... not PR 0... but rather PR tools say it is blank...
could be google dance if there were lots of large content changes across site
could be indexing confusion if canonical tags are missing or misused

New website... started off good... then went south 2 weeks later
new websites get a bonus for a week or so then go into a sandbox where they get little or no value from inbound links for about 10 months... google figured out long ago that most web spammers will give up before ten months.

Site changed ownership in a way that caused google to treat it as a new website...
see new website effect above

Overly rapid link building has gotten you sandboxed
Trying to get 250,000 new pages indexed has gotten you sandboxed
these aren't necessarily penalties... its that you've thrown a doosey of a math problem to google and it is unfair to everyone else to drop everything and solve it right away... so you have to wait longer... and sometimes much longer.

Slow website? Did you check SERPs from a slow internet connection?
nothing has changed... SERP will go back when you check again from a faster connection. I would see this all the time checking SERPs from a wi-fi on a ferry boat... slow sites get bumped in SERPs for slow connections. Speed up your site and get more organic traffic... slow sites lose slow traffic.

SERPs look great when you are logged into your google account, but suck when you log out and clear cookies?
Google will elevate a frequently used SERP just for you if it can... The only true SERP is a logged out and cleared cookies SERP.


there are probably 100 things it could be... start with the obvious... what changed recently and what could have gotten messed up in the process.

Thank you very much for your inputs, guys. However, most of them do not apply for this website. It has these parametres:

PR 3
75/100 score on tools.pingdom.com
90 external backlinks in Majestic SEO
22 referring domains
30 citation flow
21trust flow

For the main keyword, the homepage does not show up, but the site with contacts does, on 64th position - and the contacts site has the keywords only in H2 tag. Really weird ...

I don't think anything works for google any more. They're in bed with big gov, big corps and so-called 'non profits'. A little guy just trying to keep a roof over his/her head (and who helped make them what they are) - ha! Bugger off, says goooooooooogle. No need for you peons any more!

Had the same crappy-crap-crap happen to me. There just has to be a better way than obsessing over that monster called goooogle.

I wouldn't say this is the case

jstorm said:

I don't think anything works for google any more. They're in bed with big gov, big corps and so-called 'non profits'. A little guy just trying to keep a roof over his/her head (and who helped make them what they are) - ha! Bugger off, says goooooooooogle. No need for you peons any more!

Had the same crappy-crap-crap happen to me. There just has to be a better way than obsessing over that monster called goooogle.

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