A Bazaar 10 Days In WMT & Moz
-
Hey All,
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like this or has any idea what happen to one of my sites last week.
I have a lot of question and unanswered weirdness that seems to be occurring in the data.
It kind of plays out like this.
- Noticeable drop off in organic SE traffic
- WMT kicks out 70% of my structured schema data
- Moz drops DA to 14 from 17
- Moz MR drops from 3.50 to 2.74
- Total Indexed pages (as per SEOQuake tool bar) Drops from 500 to 224
- All the images submitted via a sitemap have been unindexed according to WMT.
This only a 3 month old web site with a minimal back linking profile, we're talking less than 100. No one has been working on the site, the only thing that has happen in the last month is blog post being posted. All unique content and well formatted.
Then at the beginning of this week I saw traffic increasing again, and this was confirmed when WMT updated and I got my Moz update.
- All schema data back in WMT, with no acknowledgement of the drop; the graph just continues in a steady rise as tho nothing happened.
- Traffic back up to normal levels, as tho nothing happened.
I have noticed a 100% increase in the amount of pages being blocked by robots.txt, I haven't changed it, nor has anyone else, it has been the same since the site was launched.
I'm hoping that Moz will put the DA and MR back to where they were, and no damage will be done.\
But my question is, What the hell happened? It nearly wiped the site of the face off the earth for 10 days, how do I find out what did it, why and stop it from happening again?
I have noticed the number of pages indexed by google, as quoted by SEOquake tool bar not WMT regularly jumps from anywhere from 200 to 500, Any ideas?
I know their are many different elements at play here, where do I start, I can't sit back and hop it never happens again.
Thank you to anyone that wants to roll their sleeves up and have ago at this one.
Best, IAn
-
Ian I don't think anyone is going to be able to help you without being able to see your site, do some checking around the SERPs, etc... If you don't want to provide that information, we understand, but I don't think anyone could provide you with a useful answer.
As far as new sites going up and then dropping down in the first few months, we used to call this the "Google Sandbox effect". Nobody talks about it anymore for various reasons, but many of us believe that there is still an amount of time for a new site where Google will give it the benefit of a doubt in order to collect metrics about it from the SERPs, such as user's reactions to it appearing in the search results for different queries. Once that data is crunched the rankings often go down. That's just a theory, but I thought I'd throw it out there. It doesn't seem to make sense in this case though, as it doesn't explain the Moz metric drops, which are not associated with Google at all.
Google recently cleaned house a bit on structured data in the SERPs, which might explain that part of it. Even if your data markup was using the correct syntax it wouldn't help if you don't have the trust metrics necessary for Google to deem the sight worthy of structured data in the SERPs.
-
Thanks for your reply,
All the pages that are blocked in robots.txt are ones I want blocked, admin; login etc. But the robots.txt hasn't been changed for over 6 weeks. What jumped out at me was; Why all of a sudden would their be a spike on WMT of blocked pages? Why didn't these show up 6 weeks ago? They have been blocked all the time. Maybe it's nothing but why did they show up at the same time the site was dropped?
No pages that shouldn't be blocked are blocked.
Thanks,
Ian
-
I see. Well first of all, the Moz Rank and Domain Authority don't actually feed information to Google and are nothing more than a slight-indicator of what's happening. If your DA went from 17 to 14 this could be for any number of reasons but even if it went back up to 17 all the sudden you wouldn't see any difference in traffic or SERPs just based on this number alone.
I'm not sure why it would disappear for 10 days and then reappear, to be honest. Could be any number of things. But I wouldn't worry about it if your placement has since returned.
I would worry about the pages being blocked by your robots.txt that you don't want blocked. Am I understanding that correctly? Do you have an example of that?
-
Hi Jesse,
Sorry, That's my fault for not clarifying myself properly. Allow me to elaborate.
What I mean by "No one is working on the site" Is no coding or backend work is going on, work which could have disturbed the site from Google's point of view, or caused a sudden change in the code, that would cause the mark up data to disappear from WMT.
The site is very much being actively optimised, onsite with blog posts and additional site pages being added almost daily, and off site through social media channels and outreach programs. Their are 100 Back links which have been picked up in WMT, their are an awful lot more than this out there.
Traffic is building nicely considering the age of the site (3 months). This is why it was such a shock when it was virtually wiped out for 10 days.
My question is not about SEO or how to do it (however I always appreciate someone else point of view and interesting spins), it's about why WMT and MOZ would have knee jerk reaction to something, and almost simultaneously drop the site. Then a week later pick it straight back up again?
When nothing was changed/done (coding/site structure/links) on site. The code/site structure/backend hasn't been touched for 6 weeks, only content has been added.
I'm trying to find a way to find out what caused this, for want of a better word 'seizure', and know how to stop it ever happening again.
I hope this clarifies my position a little, sorry for being vague before.
BEst IAn
-
Based on this quote: "This only a 3 month old web site with a minimal back linking profile, we're talking less than 100. No one has been working on the site," none of this is surprising to me. You have a young site and you're not working to market it. So yeah, you're gonna see your rankings disappear.
Why some of the pages have been de-indexed could be for any number of reasons. I think the only way to tell would be to post your URL and some of the fine folks here could take a look.
But besides that mystery, the best thing for you to do is roll up your own sleeves and get a good SEM campaign going for this domain. That's the name of the game!
Good luck!
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
-
1500 words per post * 10 posts vs 15000 words in one article, which is best for SEO?
If you don't have any problems with Text/HTML ratio. Which one do you prefer for better results? With reasons of possible, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Eslam-yosef0 -
Microsoft SEO Toolkit vs MoZ
Hi MoZ Community, Does anybody know how well is Microsoft SEO Toolkit. As far i have noticed this tool reports around 20 violations under three broad areas like : SEO, Content and Performance. On many violations I have found MoZ to be silent like : 1-unnecessary redirects 2-Invalid mark ups 3-Missing Tag 4-like vilations and others Important is that it tells solutions as well against each violation on how to fix that. Any body can give insights while comparing it with MoZ. Tanveer
On-Page Optimization | | Sequelmed0 -
To Many Links & Long Titles
One of our clients currently has a number of pages that "Too many on page links", Now her menu in itself has the majority. With it being an eComerce website it has quite a few categories. How harmfull is this to search rankings. The other side of thing's, Currently the client has a large number of pages where the title of the page is the product, However her products for example could be "The pink fluffy bear 2x4 with extendable arm and voice activation ( batteries not included )" Again, how Harmfull is having a large volume of pages named like this.
On-Page Optimization | | bmkdigital0 -
Www.colourbanners.co.uk/ & colourbanners.co.uk showing up as two seperate URLs - is this going to be dupliacte content issue?
Hi Guys, I have just created a report in Moz and there appears to be 91 duplicate content issues with the site which i need to fix as i think it could be the reason why we are suffering from a penalty. One of the main questions i have is these 3 variations of the URL http://www.colourbanners.co.uk/ http://colourbanners.co.ukhttp://colourbanners.co.uk/Each have links pointing to them. My question is, could this be causing a dupe issue?regardsGerry
On-Page Optimization | | gezzagregz0 -
Are plural & singular versions of keywords considered repeats ?
Hi Are plural and singular versions of keywords if used in same page element such as a title tag considered as a keyword repeat ? How naughty are keyword repeats in title tags ? I personally think that so long as the page content justifies their existence in title then should be fine. I ask because i hear talk that one should avoid kw repeats in title tags, but surely in cases like the below example its ok ? If i were to give this page: www.leisurecentres.com/uk-leisure-centre-guide This title tag: UK Leisure Centre Guide | Leisure Centres Surely thats ok ? Cheers Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How woud you deal with Blog TAGS & CATEGORY listings that are marked a 'duplicate content' in SEOmoz campaign reports?
We're seeing "Duplicate Content" warnings / errors in some of our clients' sites for blog / event calendar tags and category listings. For example the link to http://www.aavawhistlerhotel.com/news/?category=1098 provides all event listings tagged to the category "Whistler Events". The Meta Title and Meta Description for the "Whistler Events" category is the same as another other category listing. We use Umbraco, a .NET CMS, and we're working on adding some custom programming within Umbraco to develop a unique Meta Title and Meta Description for each page using the tag and/or category and post date in each Meta field to make it more "unique". But my question is .... in the REAL WORLD will taking the time to create this programming really positively impact our overall site performance? I understand that while Google, BING, etc are constantly tweaking their algorithms as of now having duplicate content primarily means that this content won't get indexed and there won't be any really 'fatal' penalties for having this content on our site. If we don't find a way to generate unique Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions we could 'no-follow' these links (for tag and category pages) or just not use these within our blogs. I am confused about this. Any insight others have about this and recommendations on what action you would take is greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | RoyMcClean0 -
Link Product Thumb & Product Name with same anchor link?
We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name. So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link? We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy. It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0