Why would a website lose rankings?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Jason Hodge: Why would a website lose rankings in all keywords without changes being made?
  
  Last week our website took a massive hit. Every keyword he had dropped significantly in Google rankings. We have not made any recent changes to our website. We've ranked high, good inbound links, not posting on any spammy sites, etc.., but it all just tanked, resulting in us only getting 10-20% of our original traffic.
  
  I've checked Google webmaster tools and everything seems ok there, except for one slow page.
  
  I know of one website with 44 inbound links that I previously was a guest blogger for that closed down in the last month.
  
  At this point I'm just not sure what going on or how to fix it. I would gladly take any advice. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and volunteering your valuable time to help me.
  
  The website is medicalfitnesspros(dot)com ;
• 
  Greg Baka: I suggest running a few of your keyword combinations that include the word "katy" through the Penguin Analysis tool at penguinanalysis(dot)com ; ; It only costs a few dollars to do so and if everything comes up safe you can cause cross "Penguin Penalty" off your list of things to worry about. ; If it comes up as dangerous, then it will tell you how to fix the problem.
  
  There is a good article on how it works and how to read the results here: http://moz.com/blog/its-penguin-hunting-season-how-to-be-the-predator-not-the-prey
  
  Good luck!
• 
  Edwin Jonk: +Jason Hodge ;we ask our members to disable their links. Therefore can you disable your link like ;
  www(dot)medicalfitnesspros(dot)com 
  
  Thanks in advance.
• 
  Jason Hodge: Thank you +Greg Baka, I will give that a try today! I hope it gives me some answers.
  
  I apologize for that +Edwin Jonk I've corrected it now. 
• 
  Jason Hodge: +Greg Baka ; On my first analysis for the primary keyword we use (dropped from a #3 ranking to 16), we got a -15.05%, which appears to be a good thing.  ;Should I pay for the more thorough analysis and clean up anything that it says. It just seems like this might be a dead end road based on the initial report.
  
  Edited: my other reports show a -50.81% and a -49.95%
• 
  Greg Baka: +Jason Hodge - Those are good scores! My sites started out at around 130% and lots of links had to be disavowed to get down to about 5%. ;
  So the good news is you probably don't have a Penguin penalty. The bad news is you still need to find the problem...
• 
  Jason Hodge: Well +Greg Baka, I'm not sure if I'm glad or disappointed. Haha I have no idea what I'm going to do now though. I guess just start building more inbound links and writing more blog posts. 
• 
  Nikhil Gabda: You need to check when rankings got dropped if its after panda 4.0 update? If yes than this might be the possibility.
  Try to collect backlinks from that period which are irrelevant and disavow them.
• 
  Jason Hodge: +Nikhil Gabda, it was one week ago (last Monday or Tuesday). I don't think I have any irrelevant back links and I haven't added anything new lately. Is there any way to lookup what you are suggesting? 
• 
  Greg Baka: Good morning +Jason Hodge ; - Using the process of elimination is your best bet to avoid wasting time and resources on the wrong medicine.
  
  So if it's not Penguin, and it's not Panda (your site appears to have lots of original content on the pages - if you have been borrowing other site's content be sure to let us know that ), then it might be something wrong with your site code or your server.
  
  Who does your webhosting?
  Take a look at GWT - any big changes in your crawl stats?
  Have you been getting any messages at all in GWT?
  Have your htaccess or robots.txt files disappeared or been changed?
• 
  Greg Baka: +Nikhil Gabda ; - You have Panda and Penguin mixed up. It's a common error. Panda is only about content. Penguin is only about links. Check out this recent article that describes them in detail: http://moz.com/blog/google-algorithm-cheat-sheet-panda-penguin-hummingbird
• 
  Jason Hodge: Thanks +Greg Baka!
  I just called my webhost (Bluehost) and they said they haven't noticed anything weird with the server lately. ;
  
  I write all of my own content.
  
  In GWT I have this message on several pages:
  Error: Missing required field "updated".
  But that's really it.
  No other messages noticed in GWT
  
  No changes to htaccess or robots.txt
  
  2 possibilities?
  Could my server have crashed while they were crawling it, causing it to drop?
  Could the website that had 44 good quality inbound links that was closed down hurt me?
  
  I noticed that when I do a google search logged in it shows my #3 and #4 ranking just like it always has before, but when I log out it drops me down to page 2. It's weird to me that it is IDENTICAL to previous results when logged in, but completely changed around when logged out.
• 
  Nikhil Gabda: Thanks +Greg Baka ;for correcting me :)
• 
  Greg Baka: +Jason Hodge ; - Can you share more info on the GWT messages? What field was "updated"? If you can paste in a copy of the message someone here may understand it.
  
  Were those 44 good links a big portion of your link profile? If you only had 100 links, then loosing 44 would definitely hurt...
  
  But supposedly there are diminishing returns from links from the same domain, so the first is the most value, the second is a bit less value, and by the time you get out to 43 and 44 those later ones have minimal effect.
• 
  Jason Hodge: Sure +Greg Baka ;
  
  In the Search Appearance -> Structured Data it shows "Missing updated" in the errors column. When I click on it, it says:
  _Crawled: 6/6/14
  Data only shows detected fields and may be different than live data._
  When I click on that I scroll down and can see:
  Error: Missing required field "updated".
  It appears that since 5/28 we have had over 100 of these errors occur.
  
  In searching, it doesn't appear that they are a big deal, but with as many as have been appearing, maybe that is a problem.  ;It appears that there have been no new errors since 6/6, but it may be because my site hasn't been crawled since then. The odd things about those pages is that they are not pages I've made changes to lately.  ;I'll attach an image for you, if it let's me.
  
  I don't know think it's a huge portion of my links, but it is one of my highest ranking. And it linked to several things, many that are not related to the ones that took a hit. Basically she would take part of my blog post and use it with a to be continued to the full article on my website. If it let's me post it, freckletown is the website that was linking to me.
• 
  Jason Hodge: Ok, so it doesn't seem to let me post images as a reply. Are we allowed to link to images?
  
  Freckletown appears to link to 26 of our pages which is second most out of 134 different websites. Maybe that is significant after all.
• 
  Greg Baka: Errors in structured data shouldn't effect your rankings. Did you have structured data clarifying reviews from Freckletown?
  
  You're a local business, and it appears that Freckletown was in your area. So links from it would have been very valuable. If the remaining 134 websites that link to you are distant or weak, then the loss of those 26 links could be what is really hurting your site.
  
  +Jason Hodge ; - Watch for a private message from me...
• 
  Jason Hodge: I don't understand your question well enough to answer it.
  
  Yes, in comparison to the other links, they were high quality. So maybe that's what it was after all.
  Thanks. I'll look for your private message.
• 
  Greg Baka: I'm guessing you mean the structured data part. It's probably not that important. Things like customer reviews and ratings get "marked up" with structured data as a way of positively identifying them to search engines as reviews or ratings. If the search engines accept them you may see them appear as stars or review snippets in the search engine results. If they don't get accepted, they cause no harm.
• 
  Jason Hodge: Oh ok, thanks +Greg Baka ;
• 
  Brad Sacks: Where do you get a graph that shows the keyword history like above? Thanks in advance.
• 
  Jason Hodge: +Brad Sacks ;I use SEOgearstools (dot) com
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:01:45 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/why_would_a_website_lose_rankings +Jason Hodge
  
  The cuetimes listed on this page are functional while the live broadcast continues and also once Youtube has finished processing the public broadcast. Processing time varies between 6-24 hours. During this period the clip is viewable in full but the cuetimes cannot be relied on. ;
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
• 
  John Britsios: +Greg Baka I was reading their Facts page and the information there was fully inaccurate. Google does not do their estimates based on percentages.
  
  So be careful.
• 
  Jason Hodge: So this is odd, but our rankings just suddenly shot up again. Not quite all the way, but ;
  16 -> 3
  117 -> 6
  19 -> 7
  65 -> 8
  19 -> 9
  87 -> 12
  88 -> 12
  Etc.....  ;
  I've been working on trying to start linking, but I can't imagine I've done that much.  ;It's really odd and I do not have a good explanation for it. Anyone want to throw out any theories?
• 
  Greg Baka: Theory 1: Google works in mysterious ways? ;-)
  
  In GWT you can see a list of new incoming links. Look to see if anything good showed up there...
• 
  Jason Hodge: LOL +Greg Baka ;that's about all I can figure too.
  I took a look at new incoming links and it's mostly just sites that pick up whatever we have recently posted. Nothing significant.
  I did buy some Google adwords since the original post, but surely that wouldn't have any impact...right? ;
• 
  Greg Baka: All the reputable sources say that using (or not using) Adwords does not effect your organic Google search ranking.
• 
  Jason Hodge: I figured, and hoped, that was the case. That wouldn't be fair for any of us.
  I'm just glad to see things rebounding. I wanted to keep all of you up to date though in case you encounter it in the future. I find it interesting.