Our Journey back to Good Rankings.

[HLTalk]

17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss.  The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase:  hair loss.  Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases.

I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could:  Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart.  Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for.

For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along.  Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down.  Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic.

Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long.

Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation.  The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place.  Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero.  By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design.  We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either.

Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016:

• Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress.  (80 pages) - proper 301's.

• News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's.

• Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages).  301's.

• Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's.

• Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%.  Almost zero.

• Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs.  All of these 410'd.

• Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed.  All 410'd.

• Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc).  All 301'd to new Article URL.

Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content.   It was a lot of work!

• After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us.  I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to.  Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us.  He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda.  He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday.

• Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site

• Cleaned up Google Search Console fully

• Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there.

• Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised.

• Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts.

• Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media.

• Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless:  "Hi! Need help!?"

**Despite this, nothing has helped.  Nothing has budged.  Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January.  Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it.  It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up.  I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience.  Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years.

That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers.  It hasn't worked.  As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss.  Its simply not there.  At all.  And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible.  But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems.

I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post.  But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.

[HLTalk]

Update:

In addition to the following happening on our /shop/ subdomain (the bread and butter of the site):

1)  Stupidly moving it to shop.domain.com for 2 months, redirecting everything there, then deciding to move it back to domain.com/shop/ ....

2)  Developer failing to enable canonicals resulting in the new shop install having 4+ duplicate pages for every product for about 5 months.

I have now found that the default setting for Magento store software is a 302 redirect for the 'Auto-redirect base URL' option.  Our base URL changed from HTTP to HTTPS.   This means that probably for about the last 9 months, our store home page has been 302'd  (no link juice passing, and way too long to use a temporary flag like this).

This 302 is Magento's default option, and my developer failed to point out the devastating effect it could have on rankings if we didn't change it to "301".

Not sure if this has played a role in our lost rankings, as our store is just a sub-section of our site, and I have no idea how I am going to fix this and tell Google "Wait!  Here's a 301 instead!  Please restore our juice!" 

[HLTalk]

We haven't submitted the Disavow yet.  Im literally about to upload it today.

Thank you for those graphs.  One comment on the first graph showing the major drop in 2012.   This was also about the time that Google started changing things up in search results.   It was in 2012 that I began seeing the following changes:

• We were pushed from Placement 1 by new "Google Ads" at the top of the page.
• Later we were pushed further as 5-6 ads were now above us on Page 1.
• Later, sites like American Academy of Dermatology that had barely a paragraph of content on "hair loss" began appearing above ours, simply because they are recognized medical organizations.
• Still later in 2012, we began seeing random pointless "hair care" articles written by bloggers on sites like "Huffington Post", pushing us literally off Page 1 to Page 2.

By mid 2013 we were halfway down Page 2, mostly replaced with sponsored ads, empty-content (but reputable) medical sites, and random news articles that would come and go on a weekly basis.

I remember this time period well because I was so upset by the choices Google was making.  They all seemed to drastically degrade the search results quality for our key search phrase.  I wasn't the only site that was getting pushed away either.  There were at least 4 other hair loss sites that were just outstanding content-wise.  Both quality, breadth, and depth, and they all dropped like flies.

We managed to hang on to Page 2 for another year or two.  But as I pointed out above:  **Our Home page and core content is completely gone from Google now.  99% of our traffic is coming from the forum rankings.  With that, we see about 99 users in real time.  Without it, the number drops to "2". **

[HLTalk]

"Do you know if any link-building has been done?" Tell me if this would qualify.   I also run a couple other fairly decent ranking websites on the topic of hair loss / alopecia.   One has a forum with several hundred thousand URLs also.  At one point I put a link to HLT in the header of the other websites forums.  It was an image link, but it resulted in tens of thousands of links to HLT from that one domain.  I did the same thing on another domain I own that is a little less popular.   In fact when the disavow guys were looking at my current incoming links, they found that 80% of the tens of thousands of links were coming from two sites - these two.   I explicitly asked them if this move on my part could've caused damage to my rankings.  They didn't seem to think so, unless it was a keyword-rich anchor text link.  (something like that).

_Do you think this did maybe some Penguin damage?   Three days ago I removed all links to HLT from those sites.  Instead I placed a single image link to HLT on both of those sites home pages, and nowhere else. _

"Is the site set up correctly in Search Console?"
The site is run on a handful of subdirectories.  
/shop/ .. /interact/ .. /news/ ... /guides/ ... /profiles/
There is a property set up for each of these in Console.
Most are set up as HTTP and HTTPS even though we're on HTTPS now.
Just so I can track the old HTTP and address any issues there.

"Any current warnings?"
It was a mess as it had not been looked at ... ever. But the only noteworthy warning was a mass quantity of Soft 404's that we fixed about 45 days ago. Dev also submitted faulty forum sitemap resulting in 170,000 regular 404's i console.  Im cleaning that out at 1,000 per day. All other issues have been fairly minor and center almost entirely about properly redirecting dead links.  Site has been up for so long that its been a massive cleanup effort.  I would say 99% of everything identified in console was resolved 30-45 days ago now.  None of it obviously damaging aside from the soft 404s.

"Any dates where Google may have hit you with a penalty"
Unfortunately we only had Analytics tracking on the home page, going back roughly 5 years.  From that, and apparently some tools these guys have access to, they see no major problems in traffic or ranking drops.  They did note a noticeable drop after a Panda release back in mid 2012, but then a recovery immediately after the next Panda update.  Aside from that, the data is limited.

I know we've made some big mistakes in the meantime. When I found out that Google required mobile functionality on sites, I signed up with a service that auto-converts your site to mobile and throws it on an m.domain.com subdomain.  So for roughly 4 months in 2105, my whole (mobile) site was sitting on a subdomain that never existed before, and was a train wreck visually.  Broken links, bad formatting, but it worked in Mobile and Google acknowledged our mobile issues had been fixed.  I believe this was a very bad move on my part, adding a random subdomain alongside the main site being at www still.

When trying to fix the store as I mentioned, my developer forgot to enable canonicals, so the whole store had 4-6 duplicate pages for everything, and that sat, undiscovered from Nov 2015 to about April 2016.  In that time, the store traffic absolutely tanked.

That being said:  99.9% of our current traffic is coming into the forums.  With that, we are seeing an average of 100 users in "real-time".  Without that, it drops to 2.  The home page and rest of the site are absolutely gone from Google.

[JamesNorquay]

It does sound like the site was legacy and the update did take too long to occur, we have seen this same thing with other business owners on legacy CMS's who have not moved over quickly enough so it is a common issue.

I guess the thing you need to think about is the following -

1. Were all the links disavowed pure spam, most of the profile looks branded, We have seen SEOs disavow quality in the past which can have an adverse impact on the domain (see attached) I presume the disavow may have been mostly legacy spam.

2. The domain may have been hit by Panda in the past (see attached) though without seeing internal data it is hard to give a more accurate analysis.

Hope this helps, 
James

pORcb Awu8P

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

It certainly sounds like you have been through the mill with this and it is something I see a lot of. There comes a point where fixing one thing can cause issues with another and before you know it, there could be all manner of issues at play.

Google clearly indexes your site because it is cached and not blocked but as for what could be going on, this would be impossible to tell without doing an audit, but here are a few pointers / questions.

1. Is the site setup correctly in Search Console? Has Google got any current warnings, of have you had any in the past? Have you verified each iteration of the site? (non-www, www & https)
2. Are you aware of any dates where Google might have hit you with a penalty of some sort? My first thought was Panda when you mentioned so many pages, but could be others too
3. Do you know if any link-building has been done? Perhaps you might be caught in Penguin?

As I said, it really could be so many things that are causing this and could even be something like .htaccess rules or robots.txt blocking important elements.

-Andy