Shoing strong for last 2 years for search terms NOW GONE! What happened?
-
Hi All! I have a 9-11~ my website www.popscrap.com has been showing strong (top 2) for about 2 years now for many of the search terms we are targeting (scrap software; scrap medal software; recycling software; etc.), and I just noticed today that we are nowhere. What do you suggest for troubleshooting this to find the cause and fix?
Thanks!
-
Well, I removed the suspect content, and after 2 weeks, nothing. Then I added Google Authorship to each page, and the NEXT DAY the site is back in the top positions for our target terms, and the leads are pouring in. Was it the Google Authorship? It certainly felt like it. But I thought that was not a ranking factor.
Anyway, thanks for all the support! BB
-
On a quick look my gut instinct is that this is ok. However, on a site: search I'm seeing that you have over 19,000 pages indexed in Google. That's a bit of a Panda flag for me as most likely there are not 19,000 unique pages that add value on your site.
-
Thanks for the response, Marie
I asked the question as I was wondering whether I'd need to add "boilerplate" text to each description to fill it out. I'd rather not as a) it's not very scaleable and b) I'm not sure it would add value to our users per se, as in the main people want to see pictures. Here's an example of one of the shorter descriptions we run.
-Is the content the same MLS description that is on multiple sites? If so, then I'd noindex it Of the 4,500 pages, 95-98% are content that's unique to our site (the other ~2-5% are managed by individual realtors who I'm guessing probably copy and paste descriptions from their own sites. We're not in the US so aren't part of the MLS network).
-Do users engage with your content? Mos' def.
-
It's hard to say what Google views as thin. Here are some factors I would consider when making that decision:
-Is the content the same MLS description that is on multiple sites? If so, then I'd noindex it.
-Do users engage with your content? Short content can be useful. If Google sees that people are actually engaging with your site then they will have no problem with thin content.
It sounds to me like these pages are probably ok. But I can't say for certain.
-
"Thin content" question:
I run a real estate website and carry about 4,500 property pages (each page consisting of between 5-13 photos and about 50-300 words of a property description) Might the pages of ~50 words run the risk of being deemed "thin content" even though they have photos on them?
I also have around 200-250 article pages that are far more text-heavy.
FWIW, I don't think I've been hit by Panda 4.0. (I've slid from about #8 to #12 over the past 2 weeks but I suspect that's more to do with sluggish content marketing/link-building). -
If unpublishing causes the pages to either be removed from your site or noindexed then yes, that's the same thing.
-
Thank you! But what about unpublising? Is that the same thing as removing, in the eyes of Google?I want to remove ALL pages under the "Scrap Laws" menu, because I think that is where the issue is. But I don't want to delete totally and have to recreate them all later. Thnaks again!
-
While you can test this over time, it would be difficult because you will never know if you've done enough to satisfy Panda. And really, you don't even know for sure if Panda is the culprilt. (I think it is, but no one can say for sure.)
So, let's say you took out some of the low quality content and a month later nothing has changed. That could mean that you didn't take out enough to make the Panda algorithm see your site as high quality. But, it could be that you just need more time. While some sites recover within one Panda refresh (and that usually happens approximately monthly), others seem to need several refreshes.
In regards to unpublishing vs deleting the content, you can either delete the pages or you can use a noindex tag to tell Google not to include the pages in the index. Having low quality pages on your site that are noindexed will not hurt you in the eyes of Panda.
-
Thanks Marie! I'm getting the feeling it's the content. Quick question: Could I just unpublish the content and then test over time, OR do I need to completely delete the questionable content from the site? Does Google see it if it is unpublished and still penalize?
-
There were two major algorithm updates last week - Panda and the Payday loans algorithm. Payday loans affects sites that had done really spammy link building and it is very unlikely that this affected you. But, Panda is certainly possible.
I haven't had a good look at the site, but I see that you have 263 pages indexed in Google. Are all of these pages high quality pages that Google would be proud to show to searchers? If you've got duplication amongst the pages or if you've got "unhelpful" pages that are indexed then you need to remove or noindex them. On a quick look here are some examples of pages that should be removed or noindexed:
http://www.popscrap.com/component/content/category/11-demo-articles
http://www.popscrap.com/component/users/?view=remind
http://www.popscrap.com/24-products/120-scrapshield - It looks like a good amount of the text on this page is on multiple pages of your site.
Of course, there could be other issues. If you've made any changes to the site recently then I'd look at those changes first, but otherwise I'd go on a thorough cleanup so that only the pages that are the best are shown to Google.
-
To help figure out what is causing the 404 errors do the following in webmaster tools:
-login to your websites profile, then on the left hand side navigation hit crawl > crawl errors > not found. Under not found review the list of URL's for clues (you can also click on an individual link to see where the 404 page was linked from). Depending on how large your site is, if the 747 not found URL's is a large percentage of your total page count, you could be experiencing a temporary rankings drop that will disappear one you fix your error pages. If you could add a link to a few of the 404 error pages we could help you figure out what is wrong with your site code or server setup.
-
Just my two cents friend..
4 days back, Google released Panda 4.0. You can check if that caused the drop.
Here is a tool that can help you find if any of the Google penalties are behind the drop:
http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Once on the page, click on the 'Log-in to Analytics' button and allow the tool to access your Google Analytics account and check if the recent Panda caused the drop. Hope this helps.
Good luck. By the way, thin content is of no use these days and you should be investing all your quality time in producing quality content.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
I looked at some of your content, and some of it seems quite thin, such as the regulations for each state. There's really only a couple of sentences (in the instances that I saw) that deal with the individual state, and then there's a lot of boilerplate content, navigation, and other site elements that are the same from page to page. Just one more thing to think about.
-
It looks like google penalize you, it's happen to one of my websites on January, I was going nuts because I didn't see any message until 2 weeks after on my google webmaster tools. I would recommend a couple o days to see if you see something if not then try to check your links if a couple of websites you are linking got penalized they you can get in trouble too.
-
Kevin, any insight into where to start with respect to the 747 missing URL's?? What causes that? How to fix? Thanks!!
-
haha! Ok! Thanks Kevin!
-
No, no. My bad. You mentioned above that you've been ranking strong for two years, and then when I peaked at your site I saw the RT template. I wrongly assumed the Joomla template was released at the same time as the Magento template (I actually use the same exact template for Magento at www.88k.com.tw, although heavily modified). I was just thinking if you had done a site revamp with a new template that might be a factor in your recent bump off SERPs. Sorry to worry you about that. But it looks like you found an issue with the 404 errors. Good job.
-
Also, I just noticed this (see image). 747 missing URL's!?
-
What do you mean by "it's not 2 years old"? Is being under 2 years old a factor?
-
Thanks! Yes, it's Google. We actually are ranking better on Bing and Yahoo now!
Looked at Google Webmaster and it shows a steep drop on 5-21. (image attached)
-
A couple of things I'd do right away:
Look in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any notices there (I'm going to assume that it's Google where you are no longer ranking).
Look in your analytics to see if there was a particular day that you dropped off. You can then look to see if that coincided with any known algorithm update.
-
My bad. Looks like it is. It was release for Magento only late last year.
-
Always great to help out a fellow Rocketeer! Did you recently update your website, because that template is not 2 years old. This could certainly be a factor.
-
Thanks, Kevin. I haven't made any changes in months, and do not do any crazy linking schemes. Competitors seem to be at the same places on the page. We are the only one hit by this.
-
That's a tough one without more to go on. Google releases updates to it's ranking algorithm every so often and some site get hit hard. If you're content hasn't changed and you haven't engaged in any unusual activity in terms of link building or advertising, then I'd say wait it out. Give it a week or two, which is how long it's taken many other quality sites to bounce back from a Google update. Unlikely you'll have issues here, but you still might want to check your webmaster tools to see if any manual actions have been applied.
This might be a good time to go over your site, again, for the first time;-) See what could be done to answer visitor questions and lead them to the right pages.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New Website's Not Ranking for Branded Term
Hey Friends, I can't seem to figure out why https://feello.com/ isn't ranking on Google for it's branded term (Feello). It's ranking in 1st position on Bing and Yahoo but on page 2 (16th or so) on Google. Going through the list and can't come up with an answer. Metadata: Yes Indexed to Webmaster: Yes, Fetched pages: Yes Google cache on May 27, 2017: Check Using canonical and redirecting for non-www and HTTPS version: Yes & Yes Feello in domain name: Yes Set up social profiles and GMB: Yes Driving traffic: Yes, some email and ads Checked robots.txt: Yes, not created yet Created and Submitted Sitemap: Yes - https version Checked for blocked resources: None. The list goes on...Any ideas would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GarrettDenham0 -
HTTP HTTPS Migration Gone Wrong - Please Help!
We have a large (25,000 Products) ecommerce website, and we did an HTTP=>HTTPS migration on 3/14/17, and our rankings went in the tank, but they are slowly coming back. We initially lost 80% of our organic traffic. We are currently down about 50%. Here are some of the issues. In retrospect, we may have been too aggressive in the move. We didn't post our old sitemaps on the new site until about 5 days into the move. We created a new HTTPS property in search console. Our redirects were 302, not 301 We also had some other redirect issues We changed our URL taxonomy from http://www.oursite.com/category-name.html to https://www.oursite.com/category-name (removed the .html) We changed our filters plugin. Proper canonicals were used, but the filters can generate N! canonical pages. I added some parameters (and posted to Search Console) and noindex for pages with multiple filter choices to cut down on our crawl budget yesterday. Here are some observations: Google is crawling like crazy. Since the move, 120,000+ pages per day. These are clearly the filtered pages, but they do have canonicals. Our old sitemaps got error messages "Roboted Out". When we test URLs in Google's robots.txt tester, they test fine. Very Odd. At this point, in search console
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GWMSEO
a. HTTPS Property has 23,000 pages indexed
b. HTTP Property has 7800 pages indexed
c. The crawl of our old category sitemap (852 categories) is still pending, and it was posted and submitted on Friday 3/17 Our average daily organic traffic in search console before the move was +/-5,800 clicks. The most recent Search Console had HTTP: 645 Clicks HTTPS: 2000 clicks. Our rank tracker shows a massive drop over 2 days, bottoming out, and then some recovery over the next 3 days. HTTP site is showing 500,000 backlinks. HTTPS is showing 23,000 backilinks. I am planning on resubmitting the old sitemaps today in an attempt to remap our redirects to 301s. Is this typical? Any ideas?0 -
Do Local Search Efforts (Citations, NAP, Reviews) have an impact on traditional organic search listings (without the A, B, C mapping icons), but rather the traditional listings?
Are citations, NAP, Reviews, and other local search efforts impact traditional SEO listings? Can one elaborate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JQC0 -
List of Search Engines subscribing to the ajax crawling scheme?
Hi, Does anyone have a list of (major) Search Engines that subscribe to the Ajax Crawling Scheme? (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/) Specifically interested in major international Search Engines such as Bing/Yahoo, Baidu & Yandex - if anyone knows, please let me know! Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Monthly Searches from Google Keyword Planner
I've used Google Adwords, Google Analytics and competitors keywords to compile a master list. I'm now looking to evaluate metrics on the keywords / phrases / long tail phrases. My question is this ... Based on Googles use of Geo Targeting, would I be better to evaluate metrics (Avg. Monthly Searches, Competition, Avg CPC) based on United Kingdom or my local city (I only operate in my local city). I am looking to use the results to redesign my website. I will use the favorable keywords / phrases / long tail keywords to implement a new menu, new content page creation, articles, etc. Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Indexing falling/search queries the same - concerned
Hello, I posted abou this a few days ago but didn't really get anywhere and now have new information after looking into it more. This is my site - http://www.whosjack.org My page indexing has been falling steadily daily currently from thousands of pages indexed to just a couple of hundred. My search queries don't seem to be currently affected, I have done crawl tests to see if the site can be crawled and put the site:whosjack.org into Google and had 12,000 results come back when goole has said it has indexed 133 and falling. However all pages indexed on the site:whosjack.org search seem to be stories with just two words in the title? I am sure I am missing out on traffic here but can't work out what the issue is and how to fix it. I have no alerts on my dashboard and when I submit sitemaps to webmaster tools I get 15,115 URLs submitted 12,088 URLs indexedwhich cant be bad?Any help/suggestions really appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
Url structure for multiple search filters applied to products
We have a product catalog with several hundred similar products. Our list of products allows you apply filters to hone your search, so that in fact there are over 150,000 different individual searches you could come up with on this page. Some of these searches are relevant to our SEO strategy, but most are not. Right now (for the most part) we save the state of each search with the fragment of the URL, or in other words in a way that isn't indexed by the search engines. The URL (without hashes) ranks very well in Google for our one main keyword. At the moment, Google doesn't recognize the variety of content possible on this page. An example is: http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html#style=vintage&color=blue&season=spring We're moving towards a more indexable URL structure and one that could potentially save the state of all 150,000 searches in a way that Google could read. An example would be: http://www.example.com/main-keyword/vintage/blue/spring/ I worry, though, that giving so many options in our URL will confuse Google and make a lot of duplicate content. After all, we only have a few hundred products and inevitably many of the searches will look pretty similar. Also, I worry about losing ground on the main http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html page, when it's ranking so well at the moment. So I guess the questions are: Is there such a think as having URLs be too specific? Should we noindex or set rel=canonical on the pages whose keywords are nested too deep? Will our main keyword's page suffer when it has to share all the inbound links with these other, more specific searches?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress0 -
Local Searches done from outside of local area better than searches from within local area
Here's a strange one: I am working on a site for a local business and targeting local searches. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Various keyword position tools show the site ranking very well for searches like "Anytown Widget Store". Doing the same Google search from a browser in Anytown, the site shows up much lower. So I tried changing the location in Google to other cities, using a variety of browsers and it comes up much higher out of town than in town. I have seen plenty of geographic discrepancies before, but usually they went the other way - searches from the actual local area did slightly better than the same searches done elsewhere, which would make sense. Any thoughts on why this would happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Ker0