Advice for rapidly declining ranking-- can an old indexed sitemap cause this?
-
Hi Everyone,
Today, I woke up to a dramatic page rank decline (nearly 20 positions) for a client's website (eacoe.org). When I looked in Webmaster tools, I noticed that the site was just indexed yesterday by Google (a request that the webmaster had submitted back in April of this year). Would this re-indexing event have caused the sharp decline?
In Webmaster Tools, I don't see many errors (one 404 error that we are planning on fixing). I likewise see no Manual Actions/ penalties brought up by Google about our site. My first concern is that the re-indexing led to rank decline, but I'm not entirely sure if I should be focusing on something else. And if it is the re-indexing, what are there any recommended steps of attack?
Thanks for your help!
-Bruce
-
Thanks for your help, Bernadette. I really appreciate your advice.
I had thought to crawl the site-- I see a few 302 redirects and one 404 response. Webmaster Tools does not indicate any errors found by Google.
The link idea is a good idea-- when I took a look at our backlinks detected by OpenSite Explorer, I find that we have increased in the number of links in the last 3 months 120 (we had lost 50 links, but the domains linking to our site overlap completely). Moz does not show any of the links as spammy.
Are there any other link-related tools that I should be considering here?
-
Bruce, whenever you lose rankings, there are a few things that you should check. First, I would crawl your own website using Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl, or another crawler to see if you can identify any issues. I would also look at the links to the site--have you lost links or gained any "shady" or unnatural links recently? Have you done anything related to a disavow file that might have caused this?
There are so many potential issues to deal with that could have been the culprit--but I would first crawl your own website and see if it's can be crawled properly. Then look at the links.
As for the sitemap issue, I don't think that it's going to be a sitemap issue if your pages are being indexed. But, if the sitemap does not have the current pages on your site and is not up to date I would fix it.
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
-
Google is indexing our old domain
We changed our primary domain from vivitecsolutions.com to vivitec.net. Google is indexing our new domain, but still has our old domain indexed too. The problem is that the old site is timing out because of the https: Thought on how to make the old indexing go away or properly forward the https?
Technical SEO | | AdsposureDev0 -
Accidental No Index
Hi everyone, We control several client sites at my company. The developers accidentally had a no index robot implemented in the site code when we did the HTTPS upgrade without knowing it (yes it's true). Ten days later we noticed traffic was falling. After a couple days we found the no index tags and removed them and resumbitted the sitemaps. The sites started ranking for their own keywords again within a day or two. The organic traffic is still down considerably and other keywords they are not ranking for in the same spot as they were before or at all. If I look in Google Search console, it says we submitted for example 4,000 URLs and only 160 have been indexed. I feel like maybe Google is taking a long time to re-index to remainder of the sites?? Has anyone has this issue?? We're starting to get very concerned so any input would be appreciate. I read an article on here from 2011 about a company that did the same and they were ranking for their keywords within a week. It's been 8 days since our fix.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
What to do with old conversion pages
Hey folks! I have a ton of old conversion pages from past trade shows, old webinars, etc that are either getting no traffic or very little. Wondering if I should just 404 them out? Here's an example: http://marketing.avidxchange.com/rent-manager-user-conference-demo-request-2015 For the pages getting traffic (from PPC, referral links, organic) my presumption is to keep those. The only problem is we have multiple instances of the same asset (prior marketers would just clone them for different campaigns), so in those cases should I 301 them to one version? Looking for advice on best practices here for future instances. Such as future trade shows, after we use the conversion pages at an event, should I just delete/404 them? Cleaning up old pages should I just delete/404? They don't have any value really and they're annoying to have hanging around. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bill_King0 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Children in this Sitemap index Warnings
Hi, I have just submitted a sitmap for one website. But I am getting this warning: Number of children in this Sitemap index 3
Technical SEO | | knockmyheart
Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt.Sitemap: www.zemtube.com/videoscategory-sitemap.xmlValue: http://www.zemtube.com/videoscategory/exclusive/www.zemtube.com/videoscategory-sitemap.xmlValue: http://www.zemtube.com/videoscategory/featured/www.zemtube.com/videoscategory-sitemap.xmlValue: http://www.zemtube.com/videoscategory/other/It is a wordpress website and the robots.txt file is:# Exclude Files From All Robots: User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /tag/ End robots.txt file#I have also tried adding this to the robots.txtSitemap: http://www.zemtube.com/sitemap_index.xmlWebmaster-Tools-Sitemaps-httpwww.zemtube.com_.pdf0 -
How can the search engines can crawl my java script generated web pages
For example when I click in a link of this movie from the home page, the link send me to this page http://www.vudu.mx/movies/#!content/293191/Madagascar-3-Los-Fugitivos-Madagascar-3-Europes-Most-Wanted-Doblada but in the source code I can't see the meta tittle and description and I think the search engines wont see that too, am I right? I guess that only appears the source code of that "master template" and that it is not usefull for me. So, my question is, how can I add dynamically this data to every page of each movie to allow crawl all the pages to the search engines? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | mobile3600 -
Will rel=canonical cause a page to be indexed?
Say I have 2 pages with duplicate content: One of them is: http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage This page is the one I want to be indexed on google (domain rank already built, etc.) http://www.originalpage.com is more of an ease of use domain, primarily for printed material. If both of these sites are identical, will rel=canonical pointing to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage" cause it to be indexed? I do not plan on having any links on my site going to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage", they would instead go to "http://www.originalpage.com".
Technical SEO | | jgower0 -
Dismal content rankings
Hi, I realize this is a very broad question, but I am going to ask it anyways in the hopes that someone might have some insight. I have created a great deal of unique content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. You can select a video category from the top dropdown, then click on a video beside the provider box to see. The articles I've written are accessible by the View Article tab under each video. I have worked hard to make the articles informative and they are all unique with quotes from expert physicians. Even for strange health conditions that don't have a lot of competition - I don't see us appearing. Our search results are quite dismal for the amount of content we have. I guess I'm checking to see if anyone is able to point me in the right direction at all? If anything jumps out... Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0