Why has my site dropped off the face of Google???
-
Hi All,
My site was ranking well for a long time and suddenly can't be seen at all any more. I have been trying to figure this out for some time and can't get to the bottom of it.
Funny thing is also even when searching for my site with a keyword "snowboard gulmarg" my URL www.klinehinmalaya.com does not appear and somewhere way back in the listing my another page www.klinehimalaya.com/packages.php comes up.
Any help would be good right now.
Thanks in advance,
Catherine.
-
Catherine,
If you have a blog you should be using structured data. But in any case that couldn't be the reason of the drop.
I am guessing competitors using some shady techniques to outrank you and others or perhaps lack of content. I do see only 18 pages were indexed. Having a blog and posting regularly can help you. For example posting experiences from your customers? or any extra info you can provide on the locations you offer skiing (I don't know). Do a little research and see what's missing in other pages and get your hands on it.
In any case, if the site outranking you are spammy, you can always report them to Google, they don't pay too much attention, however, you could then throw a thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums (if you didn't do any backhat link building, which apparently you didn't.
Once you start creating good content, over time you will earn links which ultimately and combined will give you an edge over your competitors. That just needs time, time and more time.
Hope that helps!
-
Federico,
Just looked into GWT and nothing present in Manual Actions. However I did click into search appearance and saw this message "We do not detect any structured data on your website" what does this mean and is it bad.
I can't think of anything else, perhaps it was the recent google update, but it is weird as my competitors have spammy websites and I have useful info on our site that was written by a our writer specifically for us.
Thanks for the help but still confused.
Catherine.
-
Did you verify your site with GWT?
If yes, go to "Search Traffic" > "Manual Actions" and see if there's something there.
Penalties could occur for several reasons, manipulative backlinks, stuffing, full spam, etc. Check there and see if you have any.
If not, then it could be Hummingbird or Panda affecting your site.
-
Hi Federico and Moeez,
Thanks for your advice. Sorry but I am pretty new to the web and trying to grasp things. I was just checking Google Webmaster Tools and can't seem to find the area to check the manual actions in the tool. What do you mean by Manual Actions, do you mean link building etc.?
Catherine.
-
I agree with Federico, check your manual actions in webmasters tool.
-
Your site is indexed by Google (check screenshot).
There seems no manual penalty as to the quick backlink check I made, but did you check your Manual Actions to any possible penalty?
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
-
Our new site will be using static site generator which is supposed to be better for SEO?
Hi folks, Our dev team is planning on building our new marketing webpages on SSG or Static Site Generator(we are stepping away from SSR). Based on my research this is something that can help our SEO in particular for site speed (our site has a poor score).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Are there any challenges or concerns I should be aware regarding this direction? If so what are they and how can this be addressed? Thanks0 -
Site Speed Testing Tools For Production Sites
Hi Guys, Any free site speed testing tools for sites in production, which are password protected? We want to test site speed before the new site goes live on top priority pages. Site is on Shopify – we tried google page insights while being logged into the production site but believe its just recording the speed of the password page. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup1 -
New site migration (multiple sites into one + new domain)
Hi, I have read so many very helpful guides and experiences from you guys that will greatly help me but I have a few questions please. Our company has 3 sites, the main site and 2 sites for different product ranges: BrandProductName.com (main site - DA = 22 raking well for product name) Productname2.com (DA = 10 ranking very well for product name and little competition) BrandProductName3.com (DA = 10 poor ranking) We wish to bring all the sites into one with categories for the 3 different product. The main site is an e-commerece site whereas the other 2 are not (currently). On top of this as the main domain has one of the product names in it they wish to change the domain to be just Brandname.com. So the plan is to combine site 2 and 3 into site 1 and change that domain name. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a job. I am fairly happy with the steps required (having read all the guides and migrated many sites in the past) but with the added domain name change this is a little daunting. So my questions are: Should I merge the 3 sites into 1 and then changed the domain at a later point? Should I change the domain of the main site first and then merge site 2 and 3 in later? Should I just do it all together? Or based on the data i have provided do you disagree with the plan, what would you recommend? We are not in a massive rush to complete all of this so we have the time to plan and execute this when we are fully ready. Any help / advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csimmo0 -
Rankings Continue To Drop
Hi there I'm at wits end trying to stop the slow bleed in our rankings to our store URL's that started mid March 2017 and continues through to today. I'd appreciate some pointers and hope this will throw up a challenge to someone out there. Here is the background: 1. We run an e-commerce store on Shopify with a blog. The recent ranking decline has been almost entirely on the store URL's (catalogue and product pages) while at the same time we have seen steady growth in search volumes in the blog - this makes me think we are seeing a Penguin4 penalty of some type, because the impact is confined to the store URLs. 2. We received a linked based manual penalty back in 2014 and this was successfully removed within 3 months. We have quite a large disavow file as a result. 3. Shortly after launch of Penguin 4.0 in Sept/Oct 2016 we saw a really nice boost in traffic and ascribed this to being under a previous Penguin algo penalty, now removed. 4. Come March 2017 we see a small but steady weekly drop in rankings for our store URL's only, this steady drop continues through to today and over time has become significant. Approximately a 50% decline in visitor numbers to store URL's only as of today, since March. All of this despite: a. Initially I thought this was a Panda issue (because it seemed to coincide with Panda releases in March and May) so the entire website has been rewritten (during June and July) with thin content removed across the store and the blog. Remaining content has been given a serious content boost, being very careful to watch for over-optimisation, and for keyword cannibalisation. I think I've got this right. There are also no crawl issues being highlighted by Moz Pro or SEMRush site audits. b. Recently discovered, only last week in fact. A very low domain website, trust score (0 and 0) had been copying our blog articles steadily on a weekly basis, starting Oct 2016 (yes same time as Penguin4) and only caught last week (my fault for missing this). These articles were copied verbatim with all links and so generated nearly 400 spammy backlinks to our store URLs (about 30% of all the links we have). I've had all these articles removed from the spammy site via DMCA so none of those links exist anymore (as of 8/14/17). I've also disavowed this domain with Google. Could these spam links be the issue, and Google is still needing to crawl this site to see the links are no longer there? I'm not sure because my understanding is that Penguin4 would have devalued these links to start? c. A general review of links and anchor text. I've used Moz Pro and SEMRush backlink audit (linked to Google Search Console) and have removed all toxic links by contacting web masters and using Google disavow. This included removing any links that I think are causing over optimised anchor text. After disavow, according to SEMRush, we have no toxic backlinks left and only 50 out of 1200 links with "Money" anchor text. This exercise was completed two days ago when the last disavow file was uploaded. However I don't believe there was an issue here before as toxic links were < 1% of all links and exact match "money" anchor text in the region of 5%. d. One potential problem with our backlinks is that we have quite a few high domain/high trust links to our scholarship page with anchor text "official website". The net result is that our "Other" anchor text category is just over 50% of total links - these are mainly educational institutions with .edu domains. e. A review of internal linking. We had some what I would refer to as SEO links, linking all product and collection pages across the store, through a tagging type system. This was removed two days ago as it was probably unnecessary for user experience. Other than this I have two concerns remaining with our internal linking structure. The first is that we have quite a big static navigation on the left margin of our store collection pages. This is not faceted navigation, but static. The second is that we've internally linked from almost every blog to our "key" money page in the store, however with varied and non-money anchor text. f. There is nothing in Google Search Console indicating a problem, no manual actions, no significant HTML improvements, and Google has indexed over 90% of URL's compared to the sitemap. All broken links have been fixed - there were a lot before but all fixed as of three weeks ago. g. Checking site speed in GA. Speed has remained constant over the period and we have put in some fixes to improve it. Site speed has not got worse and scores average in Googles speed checker. That's about it. It's possible that with the recent changes made with respect to b, c, e and f above I just need to wait a couple more weeks for Google to catch up, and would appreciate thoughts on this. However I'd also like some thoughts on the static navigation on our collection pages, plus importantly on linking from blog articles to mostly a single money page in the store - of all that remains I think this is potentially a problem. Our website is located at www.thekewlshop.com Many thanks for your help. Charles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | charlesfitz0 -
Google Tag Manager
Has anyone used Google Tag Manager and do you feel it is worth it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
Suddenr Ranking Drop
Hello all . Im experiencing a sudden ranking drop for one of my websites . Keyword = Green Tea Search Engine = google.lk URL = www.eswaran.com/greenTea.html This page was at 7th on 1st page . Since coupe of weeks back its moving backwards . I didn't even do any link building for this page other than doing little changes to titles tags . What would be the reason for such a issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Osanda0