Why Did My Website's Google Rankings Drop ?

[Saurabh Sharma]

Hello everyone,
I have 8 years old e-commerce website. My website was sitting pretty at the top of the rankings in google but last year dropped like a stone by google . I've checked Google webmaster tools for warning and have not received any notifications about unnatural links to the site. My Competitors are getting full advantage of that. My sales are just dropped by 60% due to lack of traffic audience. There was a time when my daily average traffic was 600 visitors per day approx but now i have only 100 visitors per day (excluding ad traffic). With the help of ad campaigns like google, amazon, facebook etc i am getting 200 visitors average per day now. 80% sudden drop in organic traffic is not being usual for a 8 years old website after a good 7 years period.
I have tried almost everything like redesigned my complete website, Seo techniques, article, blogs, press releases, ad campaign but nothing works.

Now my question is, Will my website ever get back to normal, If possible then how!

I don't know what's happening, Can anyone please help?

Thanks a lot..

[Planet13]

Do you know EXACTLY what date your site lost traffic?

Was it a sudden (overnight) drop in traffic?

Was it more gradual (week by week, or month-by-month) drop in traffic?

did all your pages lose about the same amount of traffic equally? Or did just a few really popular pages lose a LOT of traffic?

If you search in google for this:

site:yourdomain.com

And look at the search results, is there something unusual? Are there pages that you DIDN'T create that are listed for your site?

Have you looked at your backlinks? Are there many spammy / suspect backlinks pointing TO your site?

Answering these questions will probably help us help you diagnose the problems.

[Saurabh Sharma]

Thanks for your reply, yeah all of my few popular page ranking was start loosing their positions some where around aug-sep 2013. My page indexing is fine i checked it via site:abc.com & also monitoring webmaster tool everything is fine. Apart from that there is nothing unusual with the search results. last year I accidently added some spammy directories which i removed later on. But rankings are still going down.

[A1Seo]

It looks like your site got hit in Hummingbird which means there's nothing wrong with your site as such i.e. it's not a penalty but Google Algo update.

It's sort of reversible, depends on niche to niche and site to site. Since your site is quite old, I believe it's possible to recover.

I can't give any exact advice without looking at the site but compare your content and publishing style with your competition might give you an idea.

In my recent experience of recovery successes, most common issue was the way content is being published i.e. site structure.

[Saurabh Sharma]

My site rankings are still excellent on Bing and Yahoo, but on google the serp results are very poor!

[Robert Charlton]

To consider several kinds of problems that might be affecting you in Google, but not in Bing or Yahoo....

last year I accidently added some spammy directories which i removed later on.

I'm not clear what you mean by "added some spammy directories". What was spammy about them? How long were they up? How long ago did you remove them? In the process, did you make other changes to your site as well?

I'm wondering whether you might have done something which might have appeared to Google that you tried something spammy and when you saw it didn't work you changed back. Google's got a patent on a penalty for that. It's not certain they've implemented it, but I'm thinking that they have. See this discussion....

Google's Rank Modifying Patent for Spam Detection
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4486158.htm [webmasterworld.com]

More likely, though... as Google has been applying refinements to its algorithm, it is raising the bar, and it may be that your rankings are simply eroding because your content is no longer special enough and your backlink quality isn't high enough.

How are you getting your backlinks?

"Blogs and press releases", which you mentioned, have also gone through a bunch of re-evaluations by Google as inbound link sources. If press releases aren't rewritten into unique articles, chances are that they aren't helping you. If you've included anchor text in them, they might be hurting.

If you're guest blogging for links, you might also be running into problems. Google might be considering them self-placed links and treating them as spam. Please elaborate what you're doing.

These are the kinds of things that might be affecting your Google rankings, but not Bing or Yahoo.

[MarieHaynes]

Any chance the sudden drop was October 4? It's a little bit later than you said, but really, I have not seen any sites that had a catastrophic drop with Hummingbird. October 4 was a Penguin update. If you have a lot of self made links then this is quite possible.

[MarieHaynes]

I should add as well that there are MANY other possible reasons. Quite often we jump to saying that an algorithm must have hit us, but I've seen sites that dropped because of things like accidental noindexing of some pages, forgetting to put their analytics code on some pages, migrating the site and using different urls, etc etc.

Also, have you checked the manual spam actions viewer for penalties? (Webmaster Tools --> Search Traffic --> Manual actions)

[lucy24]

I have tried almost everything like redesigned my complete website, Seo techniques, article, blogs, press releases, ad campaign but nothing works.

Stop. Only change one thing at a time, and wait at least a month. (Probably much longer, to make certain, but I do realize the children can't go six months without food.) If you try eight different things in rapid succession, you'll have no way of knowing which one works. You might even have one thing that pulls you up and another that pulls you down so the visible net effect is zero.