Ranking loss.Possible problems + solutions

[tessmac]

Following a virtual total loss of rankings on G on May the 5th, I initially thought some sort of penalty had been applied ( this could be the case ), but just to be on the safe side I took a look at our site to check for any immediately apparent problems.

Some things seem to stand out.

1. For some reason G has indexed all of our site on the standard http, but there are also duplicate pages indexed for the https equivalent.

2. In some searches for keywords, the https version of the index page is getting shown as the first result found ( not the first result in the listings, but the first reference for our site )No other pages are getting found.

3.In some instances the http version is getting shown for other different keywords.

4. The site has lost no page rank for the index page and some of the product pages ( not that many, only about 4/5) The page rank is the same for both http and https.I dont know if that is normal or not.

5. News articles published under the http are showing as " Current page not ranked by G" but the https pages are showing the page rank...some of these articles are showing in the index as https, others just can be found.

6. All pages from our menu system are showing on http as " Current page not ranked by G", while the https duplicate is attracting the pages rank.

7. As stated previously only our index page and 4/5 product pages are showing page rank for the http ( and also the https )

8 There are also some other issues found with regards to a largish number of spam backlinks which that have been generated via a dynamic url.These backlinks are showing up in WMT..over 100 of them.

mysite.com/?word-word-word ...where every instance of word is the same( word).

Interestingly enough this word is one of our target keywords, but what has happened is that we now have over 100 backlinks pointing to this page, which is now listed as a page in our site by G ( the page shows the index page, but the url is hown as mysite.com/?word-word-word

NOTE there is a seperate thread about this last point below.

[webmasterworld.com ]

Before I start looking into any other problems, would these issues cause such a dramatic fall in rankings.

[tessmac]

Just some new info on this.

I have posted this as a seperate thread, so apologies, but I want to include it here as well as I feel it is relevant.

I have just checked our server response for our site.

Using Dr Watson V5.02 the reports show that all our urls are being redirected to the index page. However when I do a fetch as googlebot in the WMT for various pages, they look correct.

When using Dr Watson, the information that displays shows the usual page info for the page in question including the correct mets tags, but further down the page, none of the content appears from the page in question, only the index page. Further more it is reurning a 200 code

This coincides with our total loss of rankings in G on 5th May.

This is beyond me, could anyone shed some light on this. If this is accurate, it would explain the loss of ranking.

What I dont understand is the 2 conflicting sets of data from G bot and the page in Dr Watson.

This Dr Watson tool is the only one showing this error. However I have tried different sites in my niche, and other sites we own, and it appears to work.

[cien]

I seriously doubt is any of that as many people are having the same sudden, massive page rank dropping and de-indexing problems. I think it's Google's Caffeine. Anyway, I don't want to stop others from offering suggestions to your problem. Let's keep this thread going.

[tessmac]

< note: I've combined the two threads to keep the discussion in one spot. - tedster >

I have just checked our server response for our site.

Using Dr Watson V5.02 the reports show that all our urls are being redirected to the index page. However when I do a fetch as googlebot in the WMT for various pages, they look correct.

When using Dr Watson, the information that displays shows the usual page info for the page in question including the correct mets tags, but further down the page, none of the content appears from the page in question, only the index page. Further more it is reurning a 200 code

This coincides with our total loss of rankings in G on 5th May.

This is beyond me, could anyone shed some light on this. If this is accurate, it would explain the loss of ranking.

What I dont understand is the 2 conflicting sets of data from G bot and the page in Dr Watson.

[edited by: tedster at 6:03 pm (utc) on May 10, 2010]

[tedster]

It could be a hack - although why someone would create that particular result is not clear to me. It does seem like you've located a reason for poor rankings, so that's the first step.

What is clear is that your server responds differently to googlebot than to your normal browser user-agent. Do you use any code that tries to customize server response by user agent?

[tessmac]

Tedster

I am possibly outside of my knowledge zone here. I am using Joomla 1.15. The reason behind the checking was due to a deliberate posting of spam links to our site, which have shown up as a large number of backlinks in GMT using a dynamic url in the form of mysite.com/?sameword-sameword-sameword. Then followed a dramatic loss of rankings on May 5th.

Then followed strange indexing of our site on G, with some https being shown in the results.

I really am at a loss. My knowledge base is nowhere near most on here, but I really need to try to get to the bottom of this.

I dont know if anyone has heard of the checking tool mentioned, but having tested it not just on my site, this seems to be the only error it is throwing up.

BTW the spam links posted were not just to our site but also to some of our competitors, which leads me to think that it is a deliberate act to incur some sort of penalty.