Drop in traffic last 24 hours plus title tag not correct
-
Over the last 24 hours we've seen a drop in traffic to our website from Google. Basically since Satursday 19th Nov the traffic has drop about 50% normal levels.
The strange thing I noticed is that when you search Google for a search phrase the snippet Google is showing as the title is not the same as we have in a meta title tag on the page and this is across many pages, not just 1 or two.
Anyone know why this is and what is happening ?
Thanks
-
How strange that today we check our rankings for the profile pages and they are pretty much back to as they were with regards rankings, including pages that we didn't even modify.
I believe either Google had a problem crawling our site, a DNS problem or a problem with the Panda update they released last Friday.
I was 100% sure before that our content, meta etc was correct and couldn't see why we would of been punished.
-
We currently have a total of 7000 incoming links to our site, of which 3,051 are pointing to the homepage.
Those two domains above that I mentioned are nothing to do with our company and I don't know why they are linking to us. Should we inform Google of this linking to our site, if yes - how do I do it.
-
That is not going to look good to any search engine. Do you have many other external links?
-
Further to the previous posts, our problem is 100% related to the title tags and how Google is interpreting them. For example we have a page with a title
Heathrow Hotels - Cheap Hotels Near Heathrow Airport - Cheap London Hotels
but Google is showing the page title as
"Hotels near Heathrow Airport London ( - Cheap Hotels in London" when we do a cache of the page in Google's system
-
I'll look forward to hearing how you go.
I've thrown together a quick 10 question survey to gather some information about the effect of the algorithm change. If you would like to be included you can go to Google algorithm change survey.
Sha
-
I don't think the issue is because something one of our competitors have done to be honest. It is a collection of profile pages that have been hit.
-
Thanks for your useful response. Will let you know how we get on.
-
Well that is great news Tommo so then the next thing to look at is the content itself.
There is an explanation of the two stated algorithmic changes that relate most closely to your issue in the 2nd & 3rd dot points in this Google Webmaster Blog post.
Remembering that your problem is a drop in traffic, it seems that what Google is pulling from your page text is not moving searchers to click through to your site. So the challenge is to ensure that the text on the page includes the most useful information possible, written in such a way that it motivates people to want to buy the product. If you can get this right, whatever Google pulls from the page, it will be more likely to result in clicks.
This is not an easy thing to do, but if you can achieve this aim, you are likely to not only improve the current problem, but also improve sales conversions.
Again, I would run a test with a small number of pages and see what works.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Hi yes product pages, but the content is freshly written in house with no reference or relevant taken from the source. So we def do not have a dup content issue.
-
Hi again Tommo,
Yes, I would say that it is very likely that what you are seeing is the result of what is loosely referred to as a "panda slap". This is why I suggested that I believe you need to look at the content of your pages.
The clue is that Google does not think your Titles accurately reflect what is on your pages and when it serves what it thinks is accurate, less people are clicking through.
If you want to test this, I would choose a small group of my highest value keywords, roll up my sleeves and work on improving the content. When the improvements are made, if rankings and/or traffic improves for those pages, you have your answer - and a clear strategy for fixing the problem
Also, when you say "product pages" my first thought is "are you using product information that is provided by manufacturers?". If the answer is yes, then you are likely to have a serious problem with duplicate content. Dr Pete talked about duplicate content and panda in his recent blog post Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Maybe the problem is relating to a recent Google tweet http://twitter.com/#!/google/status/137689499198160898
-
The problem appears to relate to all of our product pages. Other location pages are fine (slight drop in positions) as are the generic search phrases.
What should we look to check next ?
-
I believe Rand wrote a blog post about this showing that different title tags were showing up in the SERPs after certain high-authority sites created links to a page with a different Anchor Text than the Title tag. I believe Google was showing the listing in the SERPs with the Anchor Text the other sites had used instead of the page's own Title information.
Check to see if you have suddenly gained a lot of links from somewhere.
-
I wouldn't worry about a reinclusion request just yet. Has one of your competitors done something with their site that caused it to rank above you perhaps? Have you identified if it's just one page that's no longer ranking? What kind of additional information can you find to help pinpoint the traffic decline?
As for Google rewriting title tags, they've been doing that for quite some time now, even to sites like apple.com, depending on your search query.
-
Thanks for your quick response.
These pages have been ranking for very competitive phrases for many years. Just this weekend, we've seen a drop in traffic which in turn made me run through and check the actual search positions for selected phrases.
Looking at Seomoz ranking report for November 17th, 2011, everything was fine at this point. Other pages are ranking OK, just some location/area pages and specific product related pages appear to have been affected somehow
Should we consider a reinclusion request to google as they have reported nothing to us?
-
Hi Tommo,
Without actually looking at your site, it is pure guesswork, but the key here would be that Google thinks what it is serving in the results page provides the searcher with a better insight into the content of your pages than the Titles and descriptions that you have loaded.
This would indicate that perhaps your Titles & descriptions may be misleading or keyword stuffed.
Since the overall result is that serving what Google thinks accurately reflects your page content has lead to a dramatic loss of traffic, I would say it is time to look very closely at the content on your pages and think about improvements that may make them more interesting and useful for users.
Sorry to bring bad news, but I hope it helps,
Sha
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
-
Optimising meta tags: How to write them perfectly without duplicating? Impact of using different keywords?
Hi friends, Generally most of the articles about tags are either title rag or header tags, but not about both. I would like to know how to write perfect title and header tags. How much they must be relevant and different? Can we use the same tags for title and H1? If we are planning to rank for different keywords, can that different keywords can be used? I'm really curious to see some interesting answers for this. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Domain Authority Keeps Dropping & FRED
Hi Moz! I've seen a big drop in Domain Authority 31 > 22 recently. I need a plan of what to sort out first, here are the points I know we need to improve: Page Speed Quality content - guides, blogs, videos Better UX experience to improve page engagement Backlinks - quality earned links & improvement of presence on social media This is our site http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ I am the only SEO, with a small content team - who only really work on adding new products to the site. Our dev team are in France and we can be restricted by them. But I'm worried & I need a plan of what to tackle first to help improve this. We also saw keywords drop out in March - I'm assuming after Fred, some keywords aren't ones I would worry about, but then some are - for example - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/dollies-load-movers-door-skates this page ranked at position 6 for Dollies - now dropped out altogether. Any ideas are welcome - help 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey2 -
Big ranking drop after 12/Jan/2017
Hello, moz users. Has anyone confirmed that keyword ranking dropped since last few days? I've tracked several keyword ranking by Moz and SEMrush and the ranking dropped big time on both tools today. one of the keywords dropped its ranking from 10 to out of SERP. Mozcast has shown high temperature so I assume there is or has been algo update but I would like to know someone encountered the same issue. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Yuki-hero0 -
Dates appear before home page description in the SERPs- HUGE drop in rankings
We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc. A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap. Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012. This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs. The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard. When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything! We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | GoUp3 -
Meta Titles and Descriptions
Is there no use of writing Meta Titles and Descriptions? I have them added to 100's of my articles but Google picks the actual title from the URL and title in the article only... any reason for this? How can i check if my Meta title and Description are being seen by Search engines but it will just take time to index the new metas may be few more months to change in Search results.
Algorithm Updates | | skandlikp90 -
Lost 75% of my traffic on Oct 25, help appreciated
So I've been running coolquotescollection.com since 1997 (!) as a hobby project. I lost about 75% of my organic search traffic on the 25th of October, literally overnight. I've been doing a lot of research but I still don't know why I was penalized. Image attached. I naturally thought this was because of Penguin (Oct 17, my drop was Oct 25). However, after checking backlinks I only discovered 11 domains with about 100-400 links each, the major ones were forum signatures and blog sidebars, 6 domains were spam sites / directories. They almost exclusively used the same anchor text (domain name or similar), so this doesn't seem like a black hat attack. Some of the directories used keywords in their urls however (like "funny quotes").
Algorithm Updates | | Sire
1. Is this really enough for such a heavy penalty?
I added these domains to be disavowed today, I'm aware this might take weeks or months to change. I've automated so that pictures gets uploaded to my Facebook page with a link to my page. This started in early 2014.
2. Can Facebook links be considered link spam?
They don't even show up in webmaster tools.
Example: https://www.facebook.com/CoolQuotesCollection/photos/a.510328825689624.1073741825.326096120779563/615403025182203/?type=1&theater I analyzed keywords and the major ones dropped between 2 and 6 positions. Notable exception: I seem to still rank nr 1 for "cool movie quotes" even though page is not optimized for that keyword. Moz warned about over 5000 pages with duplicate content. It was a single page that used a querystring url parameter I have excluded in webmaster tools. I have now entered a canonical link on these pages. Example:
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-url-example...
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-another-url.......
3. Could the Google algo penalize this even though I have excluded the "url" parameter? I have a lot of internal links in the page navigation. Can this cause problems? See the absolute bottom of this page where I have 94 links for example: http://coolquotescollection.com/laughs
4. Could a lot of internal links (navigation to page numbers) be the problem? Some more facts: Site is http://coolquotescollection.com/ Domain is 14 years old. The web site launched in Sep 1997, a year before Google! (Not relevant but you might understand why this is important to me). I haven't done any SEO work for at least 12 months, probably closer to two years. The only SEO work I've done is to optimize the pages, no link building at all, no black hat stuff. I'm automatically building a sitemap that contains all pages, see here: http://coolquotescollection.com/robots.txt I've used webmaster tools for years, haven't gotten any warnings. I checked backlinks there, also here from moz and ahrefs. I'm annoyed that a quality content site can be penalized so hard (75% drop) when there are no, or just smaller issues. I'm just lucky this is not my business site, if so I would have gone out of business. Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated! z3yFNdb.png Cci7vfI.png0 -
Added the Review rich snippet and rankings have dropped?
Hi Mozzers, I am really surprised what happened here. I conducted a small campaign by adding reviews rich snippet to 10 different microsites(covering different locations). Today I was checking if the snippets were showing up correctly in the SERPs and noticed that most of these locations with review snippet dropped in the rankings? How weird is that? Can anyone explain what happened here? Has anyone experienced this? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
Algorithm Updates | | Greg_Gifford0