My 12 year old site suddenly has all of its landing pages deindexed?

[Meier]

Half of my landing pages have suddenly been de-indexed without warning.

These have been ranking for over two years! Climbing from the bottom of page two to the top three of page one with fundamental content marketing and healthy real links.

I'm desperately trying to figure out what has gone wrong. They even deindexed my Medford Oregon landing page, then reinstated in and I asked to be re-indexed on search console and deindexed it again.

I've checked screaming frog, and I see no robot issues. There were some wp-media attachments with kind of similar URLs (city name-locksmith) ranking on page four that I found (i thought I set Yoast to redirect all attachment, strange) and I deleted those because I thought that might be the problem.

But they have deindexed even more today! We are a 12 year old company and our livelihood was built on search, which is why we have maintained good ethics (which most locksmiths don't care about) and have done our best to play by Google's rules.

I checked with wp-engine and everything seems to be perfect for our hosting.

Any suggestions would be so greatly appreciated.

[evolvingSEO]

Hello

I was able to find your site and took a look at it. Indeed some pages are not indexed.

It seems like it's because they are very similar in content. Your Location pages don't offer much unique value besides just changing the city name and some of the content a little bit. I'm sure Google is looking at it as low quality content, that duplicates the same purpose.

If you want to index and rank separate city pages they need to be super unique and specifically add value for the user in each location. The content feels spun (created programmatically) even though it might be manually created, there is still a lot of just copy/pasting etc. Think about what it would take to have a 100% unique page, with unique content for each location (testimonials, photos, information, maps, service info etc).

If they are not the city pages that you're referring to, please link to an example so I (and others) can take a closer look!

Hope this helps!

[Dalessi]

Hi, I would check and make sure there have not been any manual penalties. This seems pretty strange. Also, make sure all the links pointing to your site are high-quality links. If there are a bunch of bad links I would use the Disavow Tool to tell Google to not use them.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Meier

It seems odd that you would just suddenly lose indexing to those pages. Please pop the URL in a reply and I'll take a look.

Have you added tag groups or categories in the blog that compete with the indexed pages?
Attachment pages should just be noindexed or not set up in the first place. No point 301ing them

Regards

Nigel