Sudden site drop google, not banned or penalised?
-
Hi all,
We've been working on our site weldingmart.com for a while. 4 weeks ago we got a sudden drop from google rankings even with our own brand name. No clear cause found, and decided to walk through all technicalities of the SEO fundament. thus we did the following
-> Setup google webmasters tools
no issues found, a few 404's, few 410's sure thats all ok,
-> Setup robots.txt to only index homepages, lister pages, content and product detail pages (disabled all filters and search queries) Also we banned russian and spammy bots for performance-sake.
-> Added sitemaps, and around 14k pages seemed to be already indexed.
-> When searching for "site:weldingmart.com" i can find 14k pages.
-> we had a low 33/100 page speed score and improved this to 76/100So we did a lot of clean up and improved a lot of items. but still 2-weeks in. we still have no ranking improvements. Before we went down we had around 100 clicks a day from google. now 5 avg.
by the way i think a main issue is the low link count of course but still googling your own name should return us in top3 right.
Is there something we are missing, do we need more time. I just want to verify that we do not mis anything!
-
of course we checked that but nothing special, we released a new site in October.
-
Can you tell a bit more about your improvements? What did you do before the drop?
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
-
Some of my website urls are not getting indexed while checking (site: domain) in google
Some of my website urls are not getting indexed while checking (site: domain) in google
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Image Search / sudden drop in traffic
One of our sites in Germany had a very sudden drop in traffic (starting Oct. 7th). The site gets most of it's organic traffic from Image Search. Checking in Search Console revealed that search volume for keywords increased in that period our average position is stable our click rate dropped dramatically (we double checked - searching the keyword in "anonymous mode" still showed our results for main keywords in top image positions (first 2 rows)). As an example (see attached screencopy) - keyword had clickrate of 1% (average) - dan dropped to 0.06% while the position remained stable. Germany is still using the "old" version of image search (unlike the rest of the world) - which gives the site preview rather than just the image slider when you click on a result in image search. Our first thought that this was changed - but it seems that it didn't change. Ideas what might cause this dramatic drop in click%? There have been no major technical modifications on the site for the last 2 months. thanks, Dirk GjlV8CW.jpg
Technical SEO | | DirkC0 -
Google crawl rate dropped after we activated CloudFront
Hello! Previously we've been using Amazon CloudFront for our static content (js, css etc). But to be able to reduce load on our origin servers and to be able to give our international users a good user experience we decided to deliver a couple of our sites through CloudFront. We noticed very nice drops in page load time, but when checking Google webmaster tools we noticed that all CloudFront-activated sites got a huge drop in pages crawled per day (from avg ~3500 to ~150). Also one of the sites have issues with the Google sitemaps (just marked as "Pending" in GWT) and no new pages or updated pages seems to be updated in the Google SERP. The rest of the sites gets some updates on the Google SERP, but very few compared to before CloudFront activation. Is there anybody here who have experience in full site delivery through CloudFront (or other CDNs) and effects on SEO/Google? Would be very glad for any insights or suggestions. The risk is that we need to remove CloudFront if this just continues.
Technical SEO | | Ludde0 -
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
Google Analytics Annotation
Is there a way to add annotations to the GA visitors graph? There is a YouTube tutorial on how to do this but the comments suggest is has not be rolled out yet in the US and I can't get it to work. Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Will training videos available on the "members only" section of a site contribute to the sites ranking?
Hello, I got asked a question recently as to whether training videos on the deeper pages of a website (that you can only access if you are a member and log in) will help with the sites ranking. On the SEOMoz software these deeper pages have been crawled as far as I can tell with errors reported on pages from the "members only" section of the site, leading me to believe the members only pages and their content will contribute to the sites overall ranking profile. I have suggested uploading the informational videos on the main pages of the site for now, making them accessible to all visitors and putting them in a more obvious place to encourage more sharing and views, however I've also said I would check it out with some experts so any information will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks 🙂 Charlotte
Technical SEO | | CharlotteWaller0 -
301 an old site to a newer site...
Hi First, to be upfront - these are not my websites, I'm asking because they are trying to compete in my niche. Here's the details, then the questions... There is a website that is a few months old with about 200 indexed pages and about 20 links, call this newsite.com There is a website that is a few years old with over 10,000 indexed pages and over 20,000 links, call this oldsite.com newsite.com acquired oldsite.com and set a 301 redirect so every page of oldsite.com is re-directed to the front page of newsite.com newsite.com & oldsite.com are on the same topic, the 301 occurred in the past week. Now, oldsite.com is out of the SERPs and newsite.com is pretty much ranking in the same spot (top 10) for the main term. Here are my questions; 1. The 10,000 pages on oldsite.com had plenty of internal links - they no longer exists, so I imagine when the dust settles - it will be like oldsite.com is a one page site that re-diretcts to newsite.com ... How long will a ranking boost last for? 2. With the re-direct setup to completely forget about the structure and content of oldsite.com, it's clear to me that it was setup to pass the 'Link Juice' from oldsite.com to newsite.com ... Do the major SE's see this as a form of SPAM (manipulating the rankings), or do they see it as a good way to combine two or more websites? 3. Does this work? Is everybody doing it? Should I be doing it? ... or are there better ways for me to combat this type of competition (eg we could make a lot of great content for the money spent buying oldsite.com - but we certainly wouldn't get such an immediate increase to traffic)?
Technical SEO | | RR5000 -
Google has not indexed my site in over 4 weeks, what's the problem?
We recently put in permanent redirects to our new url, but Google seems to not want to index the new url. There was no problems with the old url and the new url is brand new so should have no 'black marks' against it. We have done everything we can think off in terms of submitting site maps, telling google our url has changed in webmaster tools, mentioning the new url on social sites etc...but still nothing. It has been over 4 weeks now since we set up the redirects to the url, any ideas why Google seems to be choosing not to index it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cewe0