Google Dropping Pages After SEO Clean Up
-
I have been using SEOmoz to clear errors from a site. There
were over 10,000 errors to start with. Most of these were duplicate content, duplicate titles and too many links on a page. Most of the duplicate errors have now been
cleared. This has been done in two weeks (down to around 3000 errors now).But instead of improving my rankings, pages that were on the second page of Google have started to drop out of the listings altogether. The pages that are dropping out
are not related to the duplicate problems and get A grades when I run SEOmoz
page reports.Can you clean up too much too quickly or is there likely to be another reason for it?
-
I totally agree with XNUMERIK. I had I site I took over after a "black hat" SEO was working on it and we dropped from #8 in Google to #212 after all my corrects. We're number #1 now for that same keyword within 3 months.
There is no "Data" to back up what I'm about to say, but it has worked nearly 100% of the time for me.
Here is what I think happens:
I corrected the technical stuff first (on-page) (site structure, internal linking and things like that)
The drop occurred when Google Crawled my site before I had a chance clean up all the backlinks, 301s coming into the site.
So, naturally I dropped because I basically blew my page authority.
Once I had a good fix on all the off-page corrections to match the on-page stuff, I fetched as Google (in Google's Webmaster Tools) and submitted all linked pages. (I only recommend doing this when you've had major changes like you've done)
It usually takes 4 to 5 crawls and I'm right back up where I was and usually higher then before. It doesn't take much longer with new links to the pages to rank it faster, especially if there is quality on-page SEO done.
-
When google is recalculating/reassessing your credentials (trust, popularity...) typically after a major update/change to your website/page, it is not uncommon that a page drops heavily before recovering to a much better position.
Best thing you can do is wait a few days and see what happens.
When you are doing "well" or "not so bad", you should always keep a backup before making any changes, this way you can go back to the older version much more quickly.
-
I usually am terrified to make any changes to "errors" on pages that are already performing well. As i think anyone will agree, no one, even G themselves fully 100% understand search results, ect.... Sometimes what an application may percieve as an "error" could actually be an unintended asset. Just my two cents after getting burned by correcting "errors"
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 page speed testing failures
When running our domain through google's page speed insights I'm getting the error message 'An error occurred while fetching or analyzing the page' at around 65% load. I'm concerned it's affecting our organic rankings. The domain is https://www.scottscastles.com/ When testing in https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/ it is also failing at around 70% with the message 'It's taking longer than expected. You can leave this tab open and check back in a little while. We'll have your results soon.' but the results never come. I've tried testing on a few different speed testing sites without failures (https://tools.pingdom.com, https://gtmetrix.com, https://www.webpagetest.org and a few others). We’re stumped as everything appears correct and was working but now isn't. Is this Google or us, or a combination of the two? Any help greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
A few pages deindexed from Google .. PLEASE HELP!
My client has a fairly new site and we were agressively building content to the website. It is an ecommerce store and we have got a blog as well. We guest blogged in a few places and wrote 3-5 articles a day. Last few days, i noticed 3-4 pages that we were building links to got deindexed. What could be the reason? We weren't using any bots to build links, only a couple of it around 5-10 links to a page. Google WMT is not showing any messages and no manual action is seen. What could be the reason? I've submitted those URL for reindex and so far nothing seems to work. Any idea? Please help.
Technical SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Local SEO - Page Titles
Hi Folks, Complete newbie (well last 12 months) I have recentley added a blog to my site and have been doing quite a bit of quite word researching through google. I have found some good keywords that have up till now escaped me! Heres my question because I trying for local traffic, mainly newcastle durham and sunderlanddo i go with one of the following two options get two very similar keywords in my article and go for both and rely on google to bring up local listings for the end user in my area e.g Small garden design | Garden design from the experts. (keywords bold ) or Garden Design | Newcastle | Sunderland | Durham | so I have geo locations in title either way I will obviously have both keywords and locations in the artcle Help please I dont want to write many hours and find I have missed a trick! Many thank guys n girls!
Technical SEO | | easigrassne0 -
How can I see the SEO of a URL? I need to know the progress of a specific landing-page of my web. Not a keyword, an url please. Thanks.
I need to know the evolution on SEO of a specific landing-page (an URL) of my web. Not a keyword, a url. Thanks. (Necesito saber si es posible averiguar el progreso de una URL específica en el posicionamiento de Google. Es decir, lo que hace SEOmoz con las palabras clave pero al revés. Yo tengo una url concreta que quiero posicionar en las primeras posiciones de Google pero quiero ver cómo va progresando en función a los cambios que le voy aplicando. Muchas gracias)
Technical SEO | | online_admiral0 -
Google Cache is not showing in my page
Hello Everyone, I have issue in my Page, My category page (http://www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html) is regular cached in past, but before sometime it can't show the cached result in SERP and not show in cached result , I have also fetch this link in google web master, but can't get the result, it is showing following message. 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /search?q=cache%3A http%3A//www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html was not found on this server. That’s all we know. My category page rank is 2 and its keyword is on first in google.com, so i am little bit worried about this page cache issue, Can someone please tell me why is this happening? Is this a temporary issue? Help me to solve out this cache issue and once again my page will regularly cache in future. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
301 lots of old pages to home page
Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page? I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google. Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao1 -
Why does our page show a description in english in google spain?
Hi! We have a multilingual page and I have set in Google Webmaster Tools the language preference for the root domain to be none, Spanish for the .com/es, English for the .com/en, and German for the .com/de. The title and description show in the right language in Google Germany and google UK, but in google.es (Spain) the title and description appear in English instead of Spanish. Does anybody know why could this be happening and how to fix it? kJtF3.png
Technical SEO | | inmonova0