Can You Help Explain This Nightmare Screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools?
-
Your Next Dress (http://dress.yournextshoes.com/) has been performing poorly in search for a long time.
My theory is that Google's algorithm somehow thinks our content is poor, and that we're not ranking for that reason. While we have deleted hundreds of blog posts and improved plenty of others, our SEO has continued to tank and recently reached zero. We do not have a manual penalty of any kind, though I've tried to disavow dubious looking links just in case.
Is there anything that I am missing?
-
Can you give us more information about Google "forgetting" your pages? I'm not very clear on your answer here.
-
The first glaring problem I see that could have caused this penalty is the shared header navigation across all subdomains. Each subdomain should have main navigation to it's own pages - you have a shared nav on all sites that is interconnecting all sites like crazy, and also sending the crawler everywhere.
-
I would look at where you have links coming from. Not saying you did this, but a lot of ecom sites do a lot of link submissions in an attempt to rank. That big of a drop, that fast propbably means they didn't like your link profile. Google does not have to assign you a penalty just to drop your rankings in the toilet. Sometimes, they just look at what you have, determine it does not fit within their newly established quality guidelines as well as the next guy, and poof you are on page 10.
Most likely your anlytics are working , and you are really seeing this drop. Here is what I would do to start with:
1. Look at the linking domains and manually go and check the pagerank of the linking sites. If they are zero, or godforbid they redirect you to another domain, disavow. You can also search manually for the linking site in google. If it doesnt appear when searching for them by name, Google most likely doesnt want you to find them for good reason.
2. Check to make sure all the blog pages have been properly redirected, or removed from Google. You state that you have removed 100's of pages from the blog, but have these been removed or requested for these to be removed form Google's index?
3. Check the redirect functions on your subdomain. Make sure that the home page of tyour subdomain cannot be accessed on any other URL of your site. This can be a tricky thing to get right, and I have seen many sites take a dive due to unintentional duplicate pages due to a subdomain.
That should get you off to a good start
-
Jane, good answer. Your Next Dress could definitely benefit from more backlinks. But I don't think a lack of backlinks is the reason why we're being penalized by Google.
Anyway, you can see my other query on "windy skirt", which we used to rank for. Now all the top 18 search results are Youtube videos, which at least explains why we're not ranking for that query.
-
Hi there,
Although tied to the parent domain as a subdomain, this subdomain on its own has very few inbound links from third parties. OSE sees only 7 linking domains that are not Your Next Shoes. For a subdomain (which does not traditionally inherit terribly much authority from its parent domain), this is quite low. Although it does not explain a sudden drop (unless Google considered it to be ranking unfairly before, e.g. because links from the parent were counting as impartial inbound links when they should not be), general poor performance might be because of a low number of linking sites when compared to competitors.
-
Thank you for the responses. Google is actually crawling our site quite frequently, and there seems to be no problem. I guess we're just stuck in the dark on this one.
-
You tried to see the graph of cached pages? Maybe google "forgot" your pages and if they doesn't have pages, then, also doesn't send search.
I think you can send a new sitemap, then, review all 404 errors google are returning (if you have), and use siteexplorer to analize your links in search of possible spam links.
-
When you see a sudden, large drop in traffic, it typically means one of two things:
1. You messed up your website somehow (maybe your home page is taking forever to load or it is returning a 404 for some reason)
2. Google hit you with a penalty
Based on the information here and here, it seems that there was an algorithm update around June 28. There isn't much more specific information.
If you haven't received any notifications of manual penalties, then you probably have an algorithmic one. So, I'd keep checking your website and backlinks for thin or duplicated content, over-optimized anchor text, links from dubious places, keyword spamming, or any other similar things. 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
-
How to can customize header moveable?
Hi, i want to keep header of my website https://www.bestchromebookpro.com moveable like if i scroll down page then the header remain showable . please can someone guide me how i do this or suggest me any resource? Thanks in advance
Content Development | | Amiie7840 -
Can Anyone Recommend a Web Page Automated Tagging Solution for Large Sites?
We're looking for a way to automate content tagging on our site with a pre-existing solution/software/tool. This is mainly for content organization and to better establish internal linking connections for a large site. We work with Adobe Creative Suite.
Content Development | | ari_seo0 -
Is there a good tool for finding Duplicate Content?
Hi! Are there any recommendation voor Duplicate Content finder tools? Is it offered on MOZ (not the one that belongs to 'seo issues') or a different site?
Content Development | | Marketing-SurpriseFactory1 -
How to create a dynamic visual sitemap using Google sheets?
Does anyone have a solution where you can use a listing of page names with tiers in a Google spreadsheet and have it dynamically appear in a visual sitemap architecture format within in a Google document? Thanks in advance Moz community!
Content Development | | peteboyd0 -
Can We Publish Duplicate Content on Multi Regional Website / Blogs?
Today, I was reading Google's official article on Multi Regional website and use of duplicate content. Right now, We are working on 4 different blogs for following regions. And, We're writing unique content for each blog. But, I am thinking to use one content / subject for all 4 region blogs. USA: http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/ UK: http://www.bannerbuzz.co.uk/blog/ AUS: http://www.bannerbuzz.com.au/blog/ CA: http://www.bannerbuzz.ca/blog/ Let me give you very clear ideas on it. Recently, We have published one article on USA website. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/choosing-the-right-banner-for-your-advertisement/ And, We want to publish this article / blog on UK, AUS & CA blog without making any changes. I have read following paragraph on Google's official guidelines and It's inspire me to make it happen. Which is best solution for it? Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Content Development | | CommercePundit0 -
Can unreliable server hurt your serps?
Hi I have a small personal blog about food and wine that I recently moved from blogger to wordpress and it is currently being hosted by the company who moved the blog over from one system to the other. This week I've noticed an 80% drop in organic traffic thanks to losing pretty much every first page SERP, there's no messages in WMT, i dont pay for links, all that's on the site is original content about food and wine that I enjoy. I've never had a previous drop in ranking/traffic like it. The one thing I can say, is that the guy who took over the hosting is hosting it himself on his own server and the website has been down more times than I would consider reasonable, often for hours at a time (this is when I catch it and I don't check often). Would the site be penalised for this? If I move servers to a reliable co i normally use, how long will it take to recover?
Content Development | | xoffie0 -
Google Blogger Vs. Sub Domain Blog - Authority building.
We are looking into offering blogs for our customers on their current sites that we have built & host for them. My developers have given me 2 options. 1. Sub domain with a hosted blog. 2. A Google Blogger blog with our customers sub-domain pointed to it. In my opinion I feel that a blog hosted on the sub domain is a better option as it is more authority then a Google Blogger blog. What does everyone think? Having a blog hosted on the subdomain would help with authority building vs. a Google Blogger site? Thanks for any help!
Content Development | | DCochrane0 -
Article submission - where can you submit articles for FREE???
Hi guys, Can anyone please help! Can anyone tell me if there are any cheap or free places where I can submit articles to help me get good rankings or improve my rankings?? Any help be much apprciated! Thanks Gareth
Content Development | | GAZ090