BIG Dip in Rankings

Hi, a small site we operate that receives 1k-3k clicks per day (weekends much higher than weekdays) immediately lost ranking for a bunch of terms on the 24th. All terms that we have lost ranking for are terms that have high(ish) volumes of search (anything with 500+ searches per month) . Our main keyword which was previously ranking #2 (sometimes structured data) for the past 6-9 months suddenly stopped rankings.

Some facts about the site:

• Content is 10.5 months old, domain is 12 months old (recently renewed)
• We've done little to no link building/off page seo, outside of links on our existing sites (same niche/genuinely for users)
• No major changes in recent backlinks in Google webmasters
• The website still ranks #1 for smaller terms
• If we filter results by date (e.g. only show past year in Google) setting the date back 10 years, we're still ranking high
• It is specific terms we are not showing up for (high search volume), not specific pages/the site itself. If we search for a longtail for one of our terms that we lost ranking for that has low volume, we are still ranking high
• There are no manual penalties, no changes to the site AT ALL for the past 4 weeks. Everything fine on the technical end
• Site stats like bounce rates and time on page have been the same (low bounce rate, high time on page, etc). We've actually been improving if anything

Some things that we think might be related to this:

• We renewed the domain for this site 4 days before this drop happened, no changes to WHOIS information though
• The site's ahrefs rank jumped up from 9m to 7m on the same day that this drop happened. The same thing happened to another website of ours, which is unaffected (same niche, but a much bigger site). No new links on the 24th that show in ahrefs. We had one on the 23rd which was from a new site of ours (the other website had a link from this site as well, which does suggest it could be the cause). Contacted ahrefs support and they tell me there's been no change in their rank algorithm
• We've had a huge spike in amount of pages crawled per day on lots of our sites as-of the 18th. Pages crawled per day went from 500-2k to 5k-10k. Our other sites that had this spike have not had ranking drops.

Anyone have any idea what this might be? We've waited a week to see if this will recover itself, but seems less likely that will be the case now.

We commonly have similar things happen to new sites, but never something like this on a 1 year old site.

Thank you.

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submitted by /u/dann2g
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