Whitehat site suffering from drastic & negative Keyword/Phrase Shifts out of the blue!
-
I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles.
The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course.
Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect...
Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later.
However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions.
My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives?
I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site?
-
Snowflake,
When you migrate to HTTP's i believe you have to add the new protocol to Search Console. Google looks at HTTP and HTTPs as 2 different sites, which is why you might be seeing your index count going down under your HTTP account in SC. If you add the HTTPs version of your website to search console, you may see that those pages have been indexed under the HTTPs protocol. Check it out, wait a few weeks and see what happens.
Secure Your Site With HTTPS - Search Console Help
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en -
That is a very good shout!
-
Thanks Don,
I had read that article initially actually which is why I thought a few weeks was enough for it all to have settled back out but maybe I'm expecting a bit much for a 600 page site.
Many thanks for your help I'll maybe just be patient if there is nothing glaringly wrong
-
Also a quick point, if you still have your Google search console setup for HTTP, even though you use HTTPS now, I'd suggest looking at what is being reported as indexed in there. That maybe the missing link.
Cordialement,
Don
-
So I'm not seeing anything blocking crawling on your site which is good. But I did notice that you have at one time used URL types "http" and "https" which leads me to believe you may have recently switched to HTTPS. In such case you should know that it may take Google sometime to adjust. On a technical level, https and http are 2 different domains.
It is highly likely that Google has index the HTTP version of some of these pages which is why your index count maybe lower then normal for the HTTPS version.
I do see you properly 301 redirected these pages and your sitemaps are reflecting the https as well, if again this was a recent change it just looks like its going to take a bit of time for Google to catch up.
This is worth a quick look, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en (scroll to the bottom) and see the section "Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS".
I sent you additional info in PM.
Hope this helps,
Don
-
We did go from http to https about a month ago but we were careful that all the redirects and sitemaps were reflected correctly. I dont think there is an issue with the robots text (it is present and nothing weird blocking).
I'll take a look at those links and send you a pm - many thanks Don
-
Hi,
There are several reasons.
If you have recently changed your url structure. IE (went from using www to not, or https or not, or trailing / or not). In these cases Google could have indexed the pages already under the "other" version.
Google could be having a crawling error, like in a robots.txt or lack there of. Improper canonical tags, blocked access, improper redirects, or a manual penalty.
If you would like to post a link (or pm me) I will take a look and see if I can spot a potential problem for you.
Here are a couple links on Google that should help:
Why Pages Drop From Index
Overview Pages Not Being CrawledHope this helps,
Don
-
Checking Webmaster Tools it looks like Google has unindexed 500 out of our 630 pages in the last 2 weeks.
Is there any reason for why this maybe?
-
Thanks for your input Donford,
I've had a look in OSE again and I can't see any spam links (all the genuine links are rated 0 through to 3) which looks very good. So it doesn't appear to be a negative campaign against me.
I may try Majestic for peace of mind... it makes it even more the stranger that we are being penalised so much
-
Hi Snowflake,
You can use the OSE (Open Site Explorer) here on Moz to check the links they found. You can download that report to CSV to easily sort and see if you have a possible negative campaign running against you.
You could also use, Majestic, or SEMRush. to find more links. Just note there is no tool, free or paid that is going to be able to get all the links pointing to your site.
If you don't find a lot of spam links to your site, chances are there isn't somebody trying to target you with a negative campaign.
Hope it helps,
-
Thanks Eric,
There are a few languages of the site but as far as I'm aware no duplicate content in the same language but I will check with Siteliner just to be sure.
For disavowing backlinks - is this just via webmaster tools you are recommending to do that? If so we haven't done that yet but it seems sensible to try. When I last checked back links there were a few random sites that we certainly hadn't submitted to and looked spammy but when I went onto them we couldn't see our links.
Do you have a recommendation for a better backlink testing tool?
-
I know this is frustrating. There are a few areas that I would look into that could be causing this: duplicate content issues and links. First, look to see if you have any duplicate content issues on the site. There could be a duplicate copy of the site (perhaps a dev version that should not be indexed) or even certain content on your site that's causing issues. You might try Siteliner's crawler to identify if there are any issues you can fix.
Another possible reason is the links to the site. The site could have been hit by negative SEO, and a lot of "low quality" links or off-topic links could be pointing to your site. I've seen this in the past, and the only thing you can do is identify the links and disavow them. Sometimes you can get them removed, but disavowing them should work.
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
-
Are bloggs published on blog platforms and on our own site be considered duplicate content?
Hi, SEO wizards! My company has a company blog on Medium (https://blog.scratchmm.com/). Recently, we decided to move it to our own site to drive more traffic to our domain (https://scratchmm.com/blog/). We re-published all Medium blogs to our own website. If we keep the Medium blog posts, will this be considered duplicate content and will our website rankings we affected in any way? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Can anyone suggest good keywords for this
hello everyone, can you please suggest Good Keywords for my client domain www.amojobs.com. Any one can help please ?? my client Need it urgent.. Thanx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | poojathakar0 -
How to make second site in same niche and do white hat SEO
Hello, As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties. Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche. What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.) We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Strange referral site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com would like some insights from the community
Hello Mozzers! I've noticed that our site has been receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from a rather suspect looking site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com Can anyone shed any light on this beast. Stopped receiving traffic around 11th November, but was getting 20K sessions over a 4 week period. The traffic was of poor quality, but would be good to know how or why they were linking to my site (fejobs dot com). Looks very suspicious. Thanks Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Site De-Indexed except for Homepage
Hi Mozzers,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | emerald
Our site has suddenly been de-indexed from Google and we don't know why. All pages are de-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools (except for the homepage and sitemap), starting after 7 September: Please see screenshot attached to show this: 7 Sept 2014 - 76 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools 28 Sept until current - 3-4 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools including homepage and sitemaps. Site is: (removed) As a result all rankings for child pages have also disappeared in Moz Pro Rankings Tracker. Only homepage is still indexed and ranking. It seems like a technical issue blocking the site. I checked for robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, canonical and site crawl for any 404 errors but can't find anything. The site is online and accessible. No warnings or errors appear in Google Webmaster Tools. Some recent issues were that we moved from Shared to Dedicated Server around 7 Sept (using same host and location). Prior to the move our preferred domain was www.domain.com WITH www. However during the move, they set our domain as domain.tld WITHOUT the www. Running a site:domain.tld vs site:www.domain.tld command now finds pages indexed under non-www version, but no longer as www. version. Could this be a cause of de-indexing? Yesterday we had our host reset the domain to use www. again and we resubmitted our sitemap, but there is no change yet to the indexing. What else could be wrong? Any suggestions appeciated. Thanks. hDmSHN9.gif0 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Why does my competitor rank so well with so many paid/traded links?
Greetings everyone! I've really been enjoying my Moz membership these past few weeks after studying my data and comparing it with my competitors I think it's high time I started asking some questions. The website I manage has a very good ranking history but over the past year we've seen a slight decline in our SERP positions. I don't think this has anything to do with on-page optimization but rather with our link profile. We have only about 10k links total while they have 175k - our mozranks are nearly identical, but his moztrust is 4.46 and our's is 3.51. I am guessing, on our end, I need to remove some of these low-quality nofollow links (though I'll be honest I have no idea how we obtained them to begin with) but what I don't understand is how our competitor is ranking so well because when I browse their link profile, it is filled with paid link and traded link directories that don't appear to be penalized for what they are. I was under the impression that this was bad SEO, but now I am thinking I should just play his own game and submit to these sites too. Looking for any advice or ideas on a better way to compete... ❤ Jennifer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Virage0 -
Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus1110