The Core

A pretty straight forward SEO question. I haven't tried this in a while and I don't feel like sacrificing a page. 

Imagine you have a well crawled site who's home page is ranking for a term. For whatever reason you wreck the on-page SEO - removing any mention of that term or variations of it.  How quickly might you expect to lose ranking? 

I'm trying to diagnose a historic traffic drop on someone else's site and I'm wondering if they managed to tank their own results overnight.

If I were pressed to answer:

For an 8-month old site, I think my answer would be 3 days.

For a long-term, white, trusted, kw-in-domain site the answer used to be 'months.'

Keep in mind that I've been out of the game for a few years.   ...but I'll bet you a beer that last one still holds.

I would want a more specific definition of "variants" (which I think they are getting increasingly sophisticated with) but that aside months would be nearer than weeks.

>reverse

That was my basis for my 3-day comment. Back 18mo ago when I was pumping that motorhome site with bootstrap, I could see a change in as little as 3 days ---and that got into the 7-digit serps.

And ALL of this assumes that no one even breathes on the whois record.

I'm actually investigating this for someone else, so very limited access to data.  (No not "a friend" - a real someone else).  Traffic dropped significantly in the space of a day and I believe that day was the launch of their new site.  They have a stack of 301s directing old landing pages but the traffic drop was fast and didn't coincide with a known Google update so I suspect that those 301s were not in place when the new site went live. 

The other possibility was that there on-page was so horrific compared to the old site that G dropped them like a stone. I don't have a copy of the site before it was changed (archive.org coverage doesn't help much), but looking at their current site that isn't outside the realms of possibility.  It just seemed to fast.  I'm getting on someone forgetting to put 301s in place. 

Web development firms who don't understand SEO basics (such as "if you change all the URLs and don't have a plan to deal with that then things are going to get messy") need shooting.

a 301 issue shouldn't do it in the space of a day unless the site was very frequently called - when launching new sites (and I do do 301's!) I generally see, even on sites with a daily homepage crawl, that most rankings aren't impacted for a couple of crawls and most deeper pages are crawled max twice a week for most sites, so you're looking at a week minimum for a substantial issue unless all your traffic is to the homepage.

Of course, if the dev site had a noindex using robots.txt which accidentally went live, you only need one crawl to get everything dropping.... I think WT would tell you that... or if it was recent potentially something like majestic would say blocked by robots.txt if they did a global nocrawl/noindex....