Ranking all but lost after new content pushed
-
Okay, I thought I was following best practices. In our industry, electronic hardware, we were ranking well for a particular product line (/spacers) but we wanted to do better. We addressed several concerns that Moz found first; duplicate page titles, lack of meta-descriptions and overall lack of targeted keywords. We also took a new approach to add a better structure to our site. Instead of being presented with a list of part numbers we wanted the user to learn more about our products with content. So we added a /products page with content and a product specific page (/spacers) that is almost a definitive buyers guide.
We are attempting to answer the questions that we think our customers find most relevant. Well our customers might find it relevant but Google sure didn't. After our deployment of new content our rankings for targeted keywords in Google fell from 10-15 to 80-95
As an open ended question, could somebody explain to me why our ranks fell off a cliff?
Homepage: https://www.lyntron.com
New catalog summary page: https://www.lyntron.com/products
New content with focus to rank high: https://www.lyntron.com/spacers -
- Let's talk you can call me here?
- https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/users/383525
- On the right side under "Additional Contact Info"
-
Thomas,
Thank you so much for taking the time to evaluate our current situation. Let me see if I can address some things that you brought up.
Have we moved to Shopify?
No. The stakeholders wanted a look and feel that of Amazon.com and McMasterCarr.com
Fix your robots.txt & make a sitemap index.
Robots.txt - I'm not sure what I need to fix in the file given your statement.
Sitemap Index - I made an index file and submitted that to google. But over time I found that single file more difficult to correct crawl errors. By creating individual sitemaps for the relevant part types I felt that was easier to manage. Is there a direct benefit from Google to have a single sitemap index covering the whole site? Am I getting penalized for doing sitemaps the way I am?Rel="canonical"
You are correct that /spacer is being canonicalized by /spacers. That was my intent. I was under the impression that if multiple pages, of similar content, was serving the same purpose I should pick one and tell the engines to focus on that. When /spacers was created we thought that page really answered the questions that people tend to ask about our product. Thus the creation of /spacers and pointing heavily to it.
Meta Descriptions too long
Agreed. I'll have to figure out how to deal with that working along side the content writer. Programmatically it's fun because every page is template driven.
301 /spacer to /spacers
I'm not sure why that is. Could you explain to me the benefit of that? I don't want /spacer to go away and it hasn't moved. We haven't rebranded the site nor changed URLs.
I'm also up for a phone conversation if you'd like to continue that way.
-
Hi I am happy to cover this with you here is the crawl of https://www.lyntron.com_
| 25,908 | Pages with Duplicate Body |
| 27,326 | Pages with Duplicate Titles |
| 13,117 | Max Fetch Time |
| 24,160 | Thin Pages |
| 6,044 | Failed URLs |
| 1,410 | Duplicate Body Sets |This will work for 30 days:
Photo (big): https://imgur.com/FmVJbAU.png
Please let me know you see this I will be happy to help.
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
-
**I am going to be done by Tomorrow **
Fix you robots.txt & make a sitemap index
- https://www.lyntron.com/robots.txt
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en
- https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/xml-sitemaps
** I want to get the full crawl don't want to drop the conclusions but**
https://www.lyntron.com/spacer** is no index Because**
https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
Address https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
URL Encoded Address https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
Content text/html; charset=UTF-8
Status Code 200
Status
Indelibility Non-Indexable
Indelibility Status Canonicalized
Size 992.8 KB
Title 1 Spacers & Unthreaded Standoffs | Lyn-Tron
Title 1 Length 41
Meta Description 1 Spacers are used to create space between 2 objects in an assembly. In the world of Electronic Hardware and Electronic Components, spacers are most often found spacing circuit boards, motherboards, panels and doors. Lyn-Tron Spacers are unthreaded and come in Steel, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Brass and Nylon. All Lyn-Tron Electronic Hardware is made in the USA and held to the highest quality standards.
Meta Description 1 Length **404 (is way to long) **
Meta Description 1 Pixel Width 2408Tomany H1's https://youtu.be/i_xnKznRNCc
"How Many Headings Should You Use? Does the Order of Heading Tags Matter?"
Question: “Can the H1 Tag appear below the h2 tag in the code does the spider still know what’s going on?”
Answer: “yeah I wouldn’t worry about it we handle h1s and h2s very well but don’t make your entire page h1 or h2” Matt Cutts, GoogleH1-1 Spacers
H1-1 length 7
H2-1 1/8" Spacers
H2-1 length 12
H2-2 3/16" Spacers
H2-2 length 13
Canonical Link Element 1 https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
Canonical Link Element 1 Indexability Non-Indexable
Canonical Link Status 1 Indexability Status Not crawled
Word Count 4745
Text Ratio 3.63
Crawl Depth 2
Link Score
Inlinks 4
Unique Inlinks 4
% of Total 0.13
Outlinks 242
Unique Outlinks 230
External Outlinks 4
Unique External Outlinks 4
Hash 4411485c90296d40616747de3f7f40ae
Response Time 0.42
Last ModifiedYou should use a 301 from https://www.lyntron.com/spacer to https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
drop the link below & site: in Google search
site:https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
- https://i.imgur.com/7lyO4JG.png Running two crawls now
- https://i.imgur.com/QdtuT8E.png Faceted navigation needs noindex is some urls
- https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lyntron.com%2F1-4in-aluminum-round-spacer-unplated%2Fpn%2FAA6341-04-0.187-00
- This might not open on your computer use The preview from URLAbove to see what I'm showing below:
- https://www.google.com/search?prvw=AHHjJUNRLFS9wnmyla4BGJzI4EXHUc3Y4w&q=previewid%3Afaf9a71c-5d30-401f-b3e6-f7eacfd09dd1&useragent=Mozilla%2F5.0+%28Linux%3B+Android+7.1.1%3B+Nexus+6+Build%2FN6F27M%29+AppleWebKit%2F537.36+%28KHTML%2C+like+Gecko%29+Chrome%2F66.0.3359.106+Mobile+Safari%2F537.36&filter=0&gws_rd=cr&newwindow=1&igu=1
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
-
running deep crawl now
-
Thomas,
Have you had a moment to review our situation?
-
Happy to help!
When you answer a question for Google, you should make each page the answer to the question asked by the audience.
I am guessing you moved to Shopify?
I have not really had the opportunity to look at the site yet about to jump on a flight.
But I do find what you mean by spacer
https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
Or
https://www.lyntron.com/swage-spacer
I Will get you a lot more information by tomorrow night
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
-
@ThomasZickell -
Thanks for hopping on this thread and taking a peek at our site. The site structure wasn't changed from my perspective. So I'm not sure that 301s are the primary culprit. We added a main "catalog" page (/products) and a product type page of (/spacers). The original pages and URL mapping stayed the same.
I'm interested in what your test shows.
One theory in the office is that the term 'spacers' is to broad for what we actually sell. Things like 'wheel spacers', 'dental spacers', 'tile spacers', 'inhaler spacers', etc... are more popular in searches. Our niche is very specific. So.... Perhaps our content change now informed Google what we are and they're correctly weeding us out from a search term like 'spacer'
-
I am guessing you did not make page to page 301 redirects to the have you updated site structure and left the old URLs with out a without the redirect ?
I am guessing that is what happened
I can tell you what happened when I test domain just give me 48 hours.
Sincerely,
Tom
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
-
Content suggestions from MOZ
Hello, I checked moz content suggestions and for one of my keywords “Burgundy bike tours”. It gives me expressions such as “Burgundy France” and “Burgundy wine”. My question is whether I should include the exact expression “Burgundy wine” in a sentence or if include burgundy somewhere in my text and wine somewhere else if it is fine ? PS : What is the real difference between marketmuse and moz ? and why do they sometimes give different suggestions ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
No content using Fetch
Wooah, this one makes me feel a bit nervous. The cache version of the site homepage shows all the text, but I understand that is the html code constructed by the browser. So I get that. If I Google some of the content it is there in the index and the cache version is yesterday. If I Fetch and Render in GWT then none of the content is available in the preview - neither Googlebot or visitor view. The whole preview is just the menu, a holding image for a video and a tag line for it. There are no reports of blocked resources apart from a Wistia URL. How can I decipher what is blocking Google if it does not report any problems? The CSS is visible for reference to, for example, <section class="text-within-lines big-text narrow"> class="data"> some content... Ranking is a real issue, in part by a poorly functioning main menu. But i'm really concerned with what is happening with the render.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Strange rankings on new website
HI All My website is 10 years old, and has decent rankings. The domain is www.advanced-driving.co.uk I have recently had a major overhaul of the site, before it was very outdated, with lots of duplicated content. My main keywords are "advanced driving course" and "advanced driving courses" both of which I am on page 1. However, since I have been live with new site - (5 days) I am not ranking for some easy win keywords. I have submitted new content thought webmaster tools, and whilst some content is ranking, others are not. The content not ranking is fresh and unique ( have used copyscape on all new pages). For example my homepage is on page 1 for "advanced driving courses london" - around rank 6. So I hand made some content titled advanced driving courses london to provide more of an exact match, outlining our courses in London and the routes we take - http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/defensive-advanced-driving-courses-london/ However, this page which is unique does not rank at all....I have done this with another website and it worked well, but google is not understanding this at all. Also I am now on page 1 for "advanced driving course" but not for "advanced driving courses" - well I am but the page for the plural keyword is a page not really related - surely Googles semantic search should realise course and courses are the same! I suspect that Google is still getting used to my new website? No errors or anything in Webmaster tools... Can anyone confirm this - or outline if I have done something awful..!! Thanks Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robert780 -
Adding new content wanted to see if we are correct path
Hello SEO’ers. This is my second post here on SEOmoz and I have a question / look it over type of deal. I have been reading through the information I have found here on SEOmoz from the community and it has been very informative and helpful. My question deals with my site http://www.tacticalbootstore.com One of the things we have learned is we needed better content as what we had was too thin. We have completely rewritten all of the manufacturer pages and are uploading them now 10/14 complete. This content I believe is about as unique as it will get. New Example here: http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-m-74.html Old Example here: http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/altama-boots-m-86.html From these Manufacturer pages we have also written 3 other pages that are linked to from the manufacturer page Buyers Guide Example here: http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-buying-guide-a-98.html FAQ Example here: http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/frequently-asked-questions-about-bellville-boots-a-96.html Sizing Information Example here: http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/belleville-boots-sizing-chart-a-97.html I believe this creates a virtual silo? We are in the process of rewriting all of the item product descriptions as well as that content was too thin. New Example here: http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/blackhawk-83bt02de-mens-desert-ops-boot-p-3916.html Old Example here: http://www.tacticalbootstore.com/altama-mens-inch-exo-boots-p-4086.html Please take note we have only uploaded the 1 new item description the rest of them still have thin content. We hope to have all of the products written and posted by week’s end. Would you guys mind checking what I have submitted here and tell me if we are on the correct path or not? Do you have any other ideas we could implement? I really appreciate your time in looking at this for me. I hope one day to be able to contribute to the community as well with the knowledge I will learn here. Thank you, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scamper1 -
Compare the rankings
Hi All, I have an example 2 domains are targeting the same keyword, one of them ranks higher then another. Here is the image from OSE http://www.freeimagehosting.net/udq2f Would you be able to tell ( based on the image )which of the domains is winning , "domain 1" or "domain2" and what exactly the " looser " should do to improve its rankings Rgds Webdeal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
Well Ranked National Site - Need Local Rankings
We are a virtual company doing business in 30 states nationwide. All our business is done via the phone, fax, email and express mail. Back in 2008 I optimized our small 8 page website for our key terms and was able to rank the site #1 nationally for our main keywords. (I did a 6 month consulting gig for the company). The site remained #1 in Google until last year when some serious competitors entered the space and knocked us down to the middle of page one. Then with the Panda update #1 & #2 we have seen our traffic drop 50% mostly due to not receiving the City + Keywords rankings any more. I have now been hired full time to bring us back but my question is this Do I need to build out city specific pages on the existing website? Do I need to buy keyword specific domains and create microsites? Do a combination of both? I would love to do both but I have to prioritize my efforts. Any thoughts would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FidelityOne0