Google Dropping Pages After SEO Clean Up
-
I have been using SEOmoz to clear errors from a site. There
were over 10,000 errors to start with. Most of these were duplicate content, duplicate titles and too many links on a page. Most of the duplicate errors have now been
cleared. This has been done in two weeks (down to around 3000 errors now).But instead of improving my rankings, pages that were on the second page of Google have started to drop out of the listings altogether. The pages that are dropping out
are not related to the duplicate problems and get A grades when I run SEOmoz
page reports.Can you clean up too much too quickly or is there likely to be another reason for it?
-
I totally agree with XNUMERIK. I had I site I took over after a "black hat" SEO was working on it and we dropped from #8 in Google to #212 after all my corrects. We're number #1 now for that same keyword within 3 months.
There is no "Data" to back up what I'm about to say, but it has worked nearly 100% of the time for me.
Here is what I think happens:
I corrected the technical stuff first (on-page) (site structure, internal linking and things like that)
The drop occurred when Google Crawled my site before I had a chance clean up all the backlinks, 301s coming into the site.
So, naturally I dropped because I basically blew my page authority.
Once I had a good fix on all the off-page corrections to match the on-page stuff, I fetched as Google (in Google's Webmaster Tools) and submitted all linked pages. (I only recommend doing this when you've had major changes like you've done)
It usually takes 4 to 5 crawls and I'm right back up where I was and usually higher then before. It doesn't take much longer with new links to the pages to rank it faster, especially if there is quality on-page SEO done.
-
When google is recalculating/reassessing your credentials (trust, popularity...) typically after a major update/change to your website/page, it is not uncommon that a page drops heavily before recovering to a much better position.
Best thing you can do is wait a few days and see what happens.
When you are doing "well" or "not so bad", you should always keep a backup before making any changes, this way you can go back to the older version much more quickly.
-
I usually am terrified to make any changes to "errors" on pages that are already performing well. As i think anyone will agree, no one, even G themselves fully 100% understand search results, ect.... Sometimes what an application may percieve as an "error" could actually be an unintended asset. Just my two cents after getting burned by correcting "errors"
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
-
How fast should a page load to get a Green light at Googles PageSpeed?
So, trying to get e big e-commerce site to work on their page loading issuses. Their question left me without an answer, so how fast should a site be, so that it will get a Green light at the Googles Page Speed test? Is there a number in seconds? Do we know that?
Technical SEO | | ziiiva1230 -
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Hi There! (i am beginner in seo) I have dynamic and static pages on our site. I created a static page for a specific keyword. Fully optimized it, (h1, alt, metas, etc.....maybe too optimized). My problem is that this page is alive for weeks, checked it in GWT and it is in robots.txt, google sees it, and indexed it. BUT whenewer i do a search for that keyword, we still appear with the dynamically created link in the google listings. How could i "redirect" google, if sy make a search for that keyword than shows our optimized page? Is there a tool for that? I cant delete the dynamic page... Any ideas? Thx Andrew
Technical SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Re: Auto Detection of Currency based on IP & Google SEO
Greetings to the fellow Moz community members! On an e-commerce site, I am using a script to change the default currency of storefront based on IP detection ( GBP for UK visitors, CAD for Canadian visitors and so on). My question is : can this create any problems at all in Google Crawling or Indexing? Will google be able to understand the setup? I don't think this should trigger the "cloaking" or presenting different content to search engines vs users, but just want to double check from the collective wisdom here. Thanks for reading, and wish you a good day ahead. Warm Regards Amit
Technical SEO | | amitgg0 -
Home Page Deindexed Only at Google after Recovering from Hack Attack
Hello, Facing a Strange issue, wordpress blog hghscience[dot]com was hacked by someone, when checked, I found index.php file was changed & it was showing some page with a hacked message, & also index.html file was added to the cpanel account.All pages were showing same message, when I found it, I replaced index.php to default wordpress index.php file & deleted index.htmlI could not find any other file which was looking suspicious. Site started working fine & it was also indexed but cached version was that hacked page. I used webmaster tool to fetch & render it as google bot & submitted for indexing. After that I noticed home page get deindexed by google. Rest all pages are indexing like before. Site was hacked around 30th July & I fixed it on 1st Aug. Since then home page is not getting indexed, I tried to fetch & index multiple time via google webmasters tool but no luck as of now. 1 More thing I Noticed, When I used info:mysite.com on google, its showing some other hacked site ( www.whatsmyreferer.com/ ) When Searching from India But when same info:mysite.com is searched from US a different hacked site is showing ( sigaretamogilev.by )However when I search "mysite.com" my site home page is appearing on google search but when I check cached URL its showing hacked sites mentioned above.As per my knowledge I checked all SEO Plugins, Codes of homepage, can't find anything which is not letting the homepage indexed.PS: webmaster tool has received no warning etc for penalty or malware. I also noticed I disallowed index.php file via robots.txt earlier but now I even removed that. 7Dj1Q0w.png 3krfp9K.png
Technical SEO | | killthebillion0 -
Why wont google Index this page?
A week ago i accidentally changed this page settings in my CMS to "disable & dont index" as i was going to replace this page with another, but this didnt happen, but i forgot to switch the settings back! http://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/funeral-plans Anyhow in an effort to get it back up quickly i submitted in GWTs but its still not indexed. When i use several SEO on page checking tools it has the Meta Title data as "Form" and not the correct title. Any ideas please? Yours frustrated Ash
Technical SEO | | AshShep10 -
Google Places for Local SEO
I am a webmaster at a company with over 50 clients, and I have to list the businesses of our clients in Google Places. Most of our clients are architecture agencies and construction companies, so they are unfamiliar with these things, and that's why I have to list their businesses on Google Places. It would be easier for me to manage all the places for these different businesses if I create the places with one gmail account. Can I use one gmail account to list the businesses for all our clients?
Technical SEO | | Arianittt2 -
How do I get google to index the right pages with the right key word?
Hello I notice that even though I have a site map google is indexing the wrong pages under the wrong key words. As a result its not as relevant and is not ranking properly.
Technical SEO | | ursalesguru0 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0