Uneducated on SEO and Google, Need Help

[FocusedOnYou]

Hello

I am here to hopefully find some help. Willing to hire a consultant that has experience with my issue.


I own a Company that has 2 locations and until last week we have been #1 or #2 in most search terms we desired.

All of the sudden we have fallen on two different websites from top of page 1 (Google)to at best page 8. This literally happened in a matter of a couple days.

I have asked our SEO consultant to find the problem and he's informed me that something drastic happened to our SEO starting March 11 and continues to get worse. He said he checked things that could be the issue but cannot find the problem.

Now comes my real concern. The Gentleman that developed our page and Host's our page has been hard to work with. About the same time this all started we let him know we would be going in a different direction in the future and asked for codes to host our webpage. He has yet to comply however.

In addition to this Business we also own a third the he host's, we ranked very high on Google for this business as well. We had a different SEO person for this site. However this site also fell off the ranking literally overnight.

I do not want to accuse anyone at this point as I just don't even know if it's possible for this to be done by our Web page designer.

We have worked really hard and spent lots of Money to get our ranking. We have been dominant in our are going on 4 years on Google and this is certainly going to be a hit.

Does anyone know of someone with experience perhaps a consultant that can look at everything?

Thank you for your time.

[lucy24]

Before you spend any money, check Google's Webmaster Tools. You don't mention wmt in your post-- unless I missed it-- so I'm guessing you're not currently signed up. It doesn't cost anything, but you do need physical access to the site in order to upload a verification file. (If you don't have upload access, it's time to get a different developer anyway.)

[Kratos]

The fact that your SEO doesn't have a clue of what has happened during these 12 days is already worrying.

There are 2 main reasons why your site has tanked: off page and on page.

On page:

You had bad links pointing to your site. This is classic of SEO companies. They will point any and all links to the site without regards to the future of the site. You would have to go through your backlinks in Webmaster Tools (WMT) to find what your backlinks are like.

Off page:

Assuming that your content has stayed the same as well as website architecture (e.g. navigation), I'd be worried about something happening at the server level such as the website being down for extended periods of time or the server doing something funky such as a tampered .htaccess file. The fact that whoever hosts your site won't help is even shadier. Be careful as whoever has server access can do whatever he/she wants to a site.

You don't mention WMT, so the first thing that you should be doing is verifying WMT for your site. WMT will tell you what's going on with your site in the eyes of Google and can instantly tell you or hint why you have dropped that badly. I'm baffled that you don't mention WMT as WMT is the first thing to check when a site tanks and that's the first thing your SEO should be doing if you are paying him!

Ask your SEO what kinds of links he has posted to your site and to give you a full report of the links. Go through each link on WMT. Also, go through your impressions and clicks on WMT as doing so will confirm that you have indeed lost rankings.

Try by all means to gain access to your server and take your site to a serious hosting company. Unfortunately, your situation isn't uncommon due to all the crooks and con artists leeching from unsuspecting business people. I hope you get this situation sorted out.