Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
-
Hello,
We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
-
Hi Kristina,
Thank you very much for taking the time to review our site.
These 15000 pages were basically Layered Navigation pages. We did not feel that they were useful for Google, so we used to block them through robots.txt. However the Google bots got them somehow into their index. So then we added canonical tags on our pages and removed the block from robots.txt (In June 2015). Finally Google bots removed those pages from the index due to the canonical tags. We have around 2000 "real" pages on our website. Therefore right now it seems to us that Google's Index is showing the right number of pages. This has been the case since Sept 2015, but our rankings have stayed low.
-
Hi Nancy,
To be clear, when you say that there were 15,000 blocked pages, do you mean that Google reported that its crawler was blocked from crawling them? Or that Google was blocking them itself, thinking that they're malware or something like that?
The term "blocked" makes me think there's a technical issue here, not a penalty. Were these 15,000 pages important pages? I see that Google still has around 1,950 of your sites' pages in its index. How many should it have?
Best,
Kristina
-
Thanks for your insight and help Once Again!
Yes, at that time we dropped because we were attacked with tons of links from foreign countries. At that time we reviewed all of our back-links and used the disavow feature of Google Search Console.
-
Hi NancyH, I wouldn't use ebay.com as a comparison, with a DA of 95 any page speed issues are trumped by the backlink portfolio. I'm not seeing anything else that sticks out as an issue, I did notice that the peak of first page results was in Mar 2014, during the summer of 2014 there seems to have been the biggest dip and you have rebounded a bit since this summer of this year, sitting at about 769 first page results. Do you remember if anything changed with the site in the spring/summer of 2014? Have you dug into your analytics to see if any of those metrics changed around the same time? That is about all of the insight I can give without doing a full audit of the site. Maybe someone else in the forums can offer additional insight.
-
Hi VERBInteractive,
Thanks for looking into our issue and responding. I agree with you but improving our page speed over mobile devices is a challenge. Our development team is working this issue. We noticed many other ecommerce website (for instance ebay.com ) are still doing well over search although their page speed on Mobile devices are poor. Could you look further and see if you notice any other issue on our website?
-
Hi Nancy,
Have you explored your page speed on mobile devices? I noticed a big drop in the spring of this year (although it does look like you are slowly regaining a lot of first page results). This would have been right around google's algorithm change to favor mobile ready sites. If you look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thecpapshop.com%2F&tab=mobile you will see that although the user experience score is pretty good the speed score is pretty low. See what opportunities there you can fix.
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
-
Traffic going down in all sites in a niche
Hello, A client has three Ecommerce sites in a niche. Because of competition and a (possibly) non manual penalty due to doorways and paid links (though I think it's mainly competition too) our traffic is going down. What are the keys to increasing traffic at this point. Feel free to include tricks that cost money. A Hrefs (I love Moz though!) has some neat content tricks. Please give me the best tricks in the industry to increase traffic. We're adding content to the main site of the three and maybe that's what to focus on, but we're having trouble driving serious traffic with the content. We need serious traffic. We are experts in our field and capable of almost anything as far as information goes in our field. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Google Panda and Penguin "Recovery"
We're working with a client who had been hit by Google Panda (duplicate content, copyright infringement) and Google Penguin (poor backlinks). While this has taken a lot of time, effort and patience to eradicate these issues, it's still been more than 6 months without any improvement. Have you experienced longer recovery periods? I've seen sites perform every black hat technique under the sun and still nearly 2 years later..no recovery! In addition many companies I've spoken to advised their clients to begin right from the very beginning with a new domain, site etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
Why Link Spamming Website Coming on First Page Google?
As we all already know about link spamming. As per Google Guidelines Link building, Exact Keywords Anchor Link Building is dead now but i am looking most of the website coming on first page in Google doing same exact keywords linking. I think directory, article, social bookmarking, press release and other link building activity is also dead now. Matt always saying content is more important but if we will not put any keywords link in content part then how website rank in first page in Google. Can anybody explain why is website coming on first page because when i am doing same activity for quality links with higher domain authority website then we are affected in Google update.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Google Penguin w/ Meta Keywords
It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed: I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization. If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so? The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot. Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings. I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account. Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Drop in non-branded organic search April 1
I saw an intense drop in non-branded organic search for major pages on my site on April 1st this year. The homepage wasn't affected and it's not an annual thing. I've attached a screen shot showing the drop. I'm new to the company and recently learned that they had hired a pretty black hat company last year and I'm worried that this is Panda...although the timing seems wrong. Has anyone experienced panda effects between the two updates? I'd love to get some feedback!! 1ry2a.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CIEEwebTeam0 -
Google rankings dropped like a stone
I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesBSEO0 -
Can you set up a Google Local account under a PO Box?
I have a client that wants a Google local listing in a town he serves but does not have a physical location. Is it an issue to share an address with an existing company? Is is it better to use a P.O. Box? or is there a forwarding address company? Is this considered a black hat Local SEO tactic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BonsaiMediaGroup0
