Google Organic Rankings Dropped Suddenly

Google Organic Rankings Dropped by 85% after the Hosting Server Transfer

[TalhaAnsari]

Hi, I hope everyone is doing well.

A few days ago, my hosting service provider transfer my website data to a new server. After the server transfer was completed, my website was offline for about 12 hours.

Then I contacted support and found out it happened because the SSL "Encrypt communication to and from your website using SSL" settings were set to "FULL STRICT" in Cloudflare control (inside the Hosting CDN Settings). And they changed it to "Flexible", and after that my website was live.

I am using Cloudflare as my CDN and that is attached to my hosting account. This means I don't have to manually change the CDN IP address or any settings by directly going to the Cloudflare account.

What I noticed after the server transfer, that my website organic rankings on Google dropped by 85% and therefore the overall traffic is also dropped by 80-90%. All that happened in just 1 day.

That is very unfortunate for me, and I want to know the cause behind it.

I would be grateful if someone could help me to fix this problem.

Thanks a lot!

[not2easy]

Hi TalhaAnsari and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

A quick look at your access logs should show you whether the redirect is done correctly. You don't want chained redirects and it should be one click to a 301 server response at the same URL.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

A website being offline for 12 hours will definitely cause Google to notice that visitors they sent you bounced right back to google. Google's crawler will have noticed the same.

Good news, if your site is back up and the URLs are all the same and the content displayed on them is all the same then Google will notice and begin restoring your site in their results, give it a couple of days to complete if all is OK on your site again.

In the meantime you will want to verify that all of your http header responses are correct and that there are no surprise redirects happening. Double check how the CDN is handling http to https redirects and make sure it propagates any changes you make. Make sure the URLs are identical to what existed before the change, check for new query strings as well.

It's normal for websites to have technical issues, Google is protecting their users but if your content is available again fairly quickly, within 24-48 hours, you can expect things to slowly return to normal.

Good luck!