Site rank dropped - help to understand the reason

atrust · Nov 22, 2015

Hey guys. Need your help.
On Nov 17, most of the ranks for my keywords just dropped like crazy. Some keywords went from Page 2 to Page 7, some others dropped from Page 5 to Page 12, it all happened within a day. I'm trying to understand what was done wrong and how to recover. See these screenshots:

Things I did during October-November:

Oct 20 - ordered small SpeedRank package on BHW
Nov 3 - ordered small Sherlock package on BHW
Nov 5 - ordered a blog post, published it on my site and cross-posted it on one of the most authoritative publishers in US with a link to my website (Alexa top 100).
Nov 11 - one more blog post, same steps, published on my own website, then the next day cross-published it through authoritative publisher.
Somewhere between Nov 11 and Nov 17 - did some changes to Title, H1 and Meta Description.
Created Google for Business account. Long story short: they sent me a verification postcard and marked the account as a potential spam until I verify my business (probably because I have another account with the same business name/address -- lost access to this account).
Nov 17 - updated Yoast SEO plugin which, apparently, had some bugs in the latest release. Not sure if that's something related, but still.

Any ideas/recommendations?
What should I do?

asap1 · Nov 22, 2015

Hard to tell, give it another 5 days.

monalita · Nov 22, 2015

Check if you lost some links, or it could be demanding more time to stabilize.

kimanierick · Nov 22, 2015

you need to check what might be the cause of the drop. if it was a very sudden and huge drop that could only mean that your site has a lot of problems with google which might cause them to penalize you or they just updated their system. check on all your links and try to update them to see if the rank will raise. all the best

atrust · Nov 22, 2015

Well, I'm going to wait a few more days and see how things are going.
I have three thoughts:

Google decided that the articles I published on a highly-authoritative website were stolen from that web site and then published on my company's blog (not vice verse).
Google dropped my ranks because I created another Google for Business account. Now it says
Your page has been blocked since it has been identified as possible spam. To unblock your page, please verify it.
. But the account was created on Nov 17 (exactly when the drop happened), not sure it would react so fast.
Something to do with the Yoast SEO plugin's release (i'm not sure, but maybe there was a noindex meta tag added by yoast developers by mistake - after an update, plugin was saying that Search Engines cannot index my website, I only noticed it in 3 days, Nov 20, but community says that this particular message contained an error, nothing to do with the noindex -- not sure).

whiteblackseo · Nov 22, 2015

Might wanna verify and resolve those issues that Google has done with you.

drogon · Nov 23, 2015

Did you check WMT, manual action section? Sound slike you were penalised most probably for Sape links.

atrust · Nov 23, 2015

drogon: I did. Checking it every day. Nothing there. "No manual web spam actions found". The "Links to your site" doesn't look like changed a lot. Pretty much the same number there. There is nothing in "HTML Improvements" section - "We didn't detect any content issues with your site". Last update - Nov 19. Crawl Errors section - "No errors detected in the last 90 days. Nice!". "Blocked Resources" section - "No blocked resources detected. " I don't know what else to check.

clevelandslim · Nov 23, 2015

Google didn't take more than one month for ranking. Personally, I feel your site may be penalized.

ePrime · Nov 23, 2015

Wait a few more days, it can just be a Google dance.
BTW, do your links have proper anchor variations and ********-nofollow ratio?

T2tkid · Nov 23, 2015

I have seen people who said the lost their ranking after this; Nov 3 - ordered small Sherlock package on BHW
You might want to give it a few more days to see if your ranking will improve. If it does not recover its initial ranking, then removing bad/spam links will be the best thing to do.

crazy4cs · Nov 23, 2015

Might be sape. Although there are many people who didn't got penalized from using sape, 2 of my sites did got penalized. And know that I used only best in class, manually filtered links on real nice authority sites and still got hit. Some say sape updates are going on these days, especially since October as Google had launched "hacked site" algo update.

atrust · Nov 23, 2015

It does look like penalty, but some weird one.
I don't think it's a Google Dance. Maybe, it's a result of manual ranking team - http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

atrust · Nov 24, 2015

Hi everyone. My update: today, Nov 24, I noticed the GWT to be updated - my website was partially penalized due to suspicious incoming links. Disavowed 170 domains and sent a reconsideration request to Google. It's interesting that the fact of a penalty appeared only 7 days after the actual penalty. We'll see...

drogon · Nov 25, 2015

Did you remove the sape links? Also you will need to show you have put in alot more effort like contacting webmasters and deleting many bad links and disavow the rest...over some time before then sending a recon request...whihc may stil get rejected.

Even if approved your site will me marked and may never rank well again. Unless its abig brand site making good money....you are best to start from scratch and stay away from Sape links (for a while at least if churn and burn).

atrust · Nov 25, 2015

I don't know which are sape links from all of them. I disavowed all of the Russia-based domains for now.

cesarian · Nov 25, 2015

SAPE links are recurring paid links and it does't have to be Russia-based domains. You need to remove them first by stopping payment and ask the provider to remove them immediately. Just disavow are not enough.

bartosimpsonio · Nov 25, 2015

You took a churn n burn approach mate. You're now at the burn phase

Site rank dropped - help to understand the reason

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