I'm stumped!
-
I'm hoping to find a real expert to help out with this.
TL;DR Our visibility in search has started tanking and I cannot figure out why.
The whole story:
In fall of 2015 I started working with Convention Nation (www.conventionnation.com). The client is trying to build a resource for convention and tradeshow attendees that would help them identify the events that will help them meet their goals (learning, networking, sales, whatever). They had a content team overseas that spent their time copy/pasting event information into our database.
At the time, I identified several opportunities to improve SEO:
- Create and submit a sitemap
- Add meaningful metas
- Fix crawl errors
- On-page content uniqueification and optimization for most visible events (largest audience likely to search)
- Regular publishing and social media
Over nine months, we did these things and saw search visibility, average rank and CTR all double or better.
There was still one problem, and that is created by our specific industry. I'll use a concrete example: MozCon. This event happens once a year and there are enough things that are the same about it every year (namely, the generalized description of the event, attendees and outcomes) that the 2015 page was getting flagged as a duplicate of 2016.
The event content for most of our events was pretty thin anyway, and much of it was duplicated from other sources, so we implemented a feature that grouped recurring events. My thinking was that this would reduce the perception of duplicate or obsolete content and links and provide a nice backlink opportunity.
I expected a dip after we deployed this grouping feature, that's been consistent with other bulk content changes we've made to the site, but we are not recovering from the dip. In fact, our search visibility and traffic are dropping every week.
So, the current state of things is this:
- Clean crawl reports: No errors reported by Moz or Google
- Moz domain authority: 20; Spam score 2/17
- We're a little thin on incoming links, but steady growth in both social media and backlinks
- Continuing to add thin/duplicate content for unique events at the rate of 200 pages/mo
- Adding solid, unique strategic content at the rate of 15 pages/mo
I just cannot figure out where we've gone astray. Is there anything other than the thin/copied content that could be causing this? It wasn't hurting us before we grouped the events...
What could possibly account for this trend?
Help me, Moz Community, you're my only hope!
Lindsay
-
Thanks, Bernadette.
The consolidation has been done, and surprisingly seems to correlate with our dropping visibility.
Do you have any experience with a "consolidation" that might shed some light?
-
Lindsay, there are so many unique issues that could be causing this that it's difficult to diagnose the problem without having a specific URL to look at. However, it sounds as if you've been looking at a lot of the on-site and on-page factors. Have you looked at the links to the site and done anything to evaluate the links to your website and make sure you don't have low quality links that need to be disavowed?
When you mention the thin or duplicate content issues, have you considered consolidating the content and removing the previous year's content (or moving it an archiving it) so that only the current content exists? Besides archiving or removing it from the site, you may want to use the canonical tag. Another way to deal with that content would be to use the robots.txt file to disallow indexing of certain older content pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Why isn't Google caching our pages?
Hi everyone, We have a new content marketing site that allows anyone to publish checklists. Each checklist is being indexed by Google, but Google is not storing a cached version of any of our checklists. Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Checkli
https://www.checkli.com/checklists/ggc/a-girls-guide-to-a-weekend-in-south-beach Missing Cache:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DfFNPP6WBhsJ:https://www.checkli.com/checklists/ggc/a-girls-guide-to-a-weekend-in-south-beach+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Why is this happening? How do we fix it? Is this hurting the SEO of our website.0 -
Disavow Experts: Here's one for ya ....
Not sure how to handle this one. Simply because there are SO MANY .... I want to be careful not to do something stupid ... Just a quick 3 minute video explanation: https://youtu.be/bVHUWTGH21E I'm interested in several opinions so if someone replies - please still chime in. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HLTalk0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Interlinking vs. 'orphaning' mobile page versions in a dynamic serving scenario
Hi there, I'd love to get the Moz community's take on this. We are working on setting up dynamic serving for mobile versions of our pages. During the process of planning the mobile version of a page, we identified a type of navigational links that, while useful enough for desktop visitors, we feel would not be as useful to mobile visitors. We would like to remove these from our mobile version of the page as part of offering a more streamlined mobile page. So we feel that we're making a fine decision with user experience in mind. On any single page, the number of links removed in the mobile version would be relatively few. The question is: is there any danger in “orphaning” the mobile versions of certain pages because links don’t exist pointing to those pages on our mobile pages? Is this a legitimate concern, or is it enough that none of the desktop versions of pages are orphaned? We were not sure whether it’s even possible, in Googlebot’s eyes, to orphan a mobile version of a page if we use dynamic serving and if there are no orphaned desktop versions of our pages. (We also plan to link to "full site" in the footer.) Thank you in advance for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
Eric0 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
What's your daily SEO checklist?
First thing every morning I login to Google Webmaster tools looking for any errors, review data, sites linking to us, etc. I then login to Google Analytics and SEOMOz to check traffic to our terms to see if there have been any changes that need to be addressed. What's your daily checklist?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics1 -
Canonical URL's - Do they need to be on the "pointed at" page?
My understanding is that they are only required on the "pointing pages" however I've recently heard otherwise.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey0 -
Why isn't link velocity in the 2011 Ranking Factors?
How come there's no reference to link velocity in the Search Ranking Factors, 2011 or prior? We know that we have to continue building links for a client even if they're already doing well, not just because of the competition nipping at their heels but because if we stop they slip down anyway, so we know that stopping link building will often times have an adverse effect... meaning link velocity right? So how come there's no mention of it? Just curious 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0