Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
-
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
-
Well I'd say that the nonindex issue Gareth pointed out, and the major markability error I discovered are your two biggest concerns initially. But yeah, once the dust settles, the other issues I point out are all a concern. Unique content that's specific to each page is quite important to long term SEO success.
-
Wow Alan - I'm surprised at how quickly you were able to find so many issues -- HUGE thank you!!!! Egad I had no idea about this stuff - especially the videos - I wrongly assumed that because the videos are stored on the backend in a single location, that having them placed in multiple areas was fine. I cannot thank you enough for pointing these errors out -- I really appreciate your expert advice!
-
Once you fix the noindex, here's some other stuff. It's a "quick hit - what stands out" kind of an audit to see if there are any really obvious red flags.
1. Odd Links
Looking at the source of your POS Nightclub and Bar page I found some odd things going on related to links. Specific examples:
A) You've got a link off to the right side of the page just under the main navigation bar (under the "News" link). This link is titled "News" and it rotates different links to different news items. One of them goes to a site called Spoke.com and the rest go to other DInerware.com pages.
Each of these links has a link "title" attribute that appears to contain the intro text of whatever it's pointed to. The problem here is it's significantly filling content at the source level that's totally irrelevant to the page. If this is happening on the entire site,there's a lot of topical dilution.
While this issue itself shouldn't be a problem big enough to be concerned with, I do believe its harming your sites quality from a topical perspective. And since this is stuff only search engines see, or is only seen when hovering over whatever individual article is viewed in the rotator, it's not good to have so much content there. Not good at all.
Also, the Spoke directory isn't exactly a high quality directory. So linking there isn't helping your site's perceived trust aspects.
2. Apparent mass repetition of video content
Am I correct in that you've got some videos posted to multiple pages of the site? Causing serious duplicate content problems? Many pages seem to have almost no unique text while having several videos. If these are then shown on more than one page, not only do you lose out from a lack of HTML text based content (a significant factor), but you get hammered by the duplication.
3. Links to PDFs
I see links to PDFs in the right column of the Product Training page, and none of them have the php code at the end of them. Yet within the page itself, PDFs have it http://www.dinerware.com/pdf/DinerwareCFGManual.pdf?phpMyAdmin=6e28a551fa44f2aa65e57201d6164da9
What's that about?
4. Markup Language Fail - The biggest problem
When I run your site through the W3C Markup Validation check, it fails and can not process. This alone means you've got a site coding problem that's most likely causing serious problems with search engines.
Go to http://validator.w3.org and enter in http://www.dinerware.com/pos-product/training/
I doubt the complete breakdown that I got when submitting that URL is temporary - and if you see it too, that's a critical issue.
-
No problem!
-
HOLY SMOKES!!! Gareth - thank you so SO SO much! I'm not a back-end web person, but will get the right folks on it asap - wonder how that mistake could have been made -- I'm grateful to you!
-
Hi Jeanie, I just had a quick look at your site and noticed you have noindex, nofollow on all of the pages I checked. You may want to adjust this as you're telling the search engines not to index these pages. Take a look at your source code and you'll spot it quite easily.
-
http://www.dinerware.com - Thanks, Alan
-
Jeanie - what's your site? Can't offer help without knowing that.
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
-
Recently rankings for "Tree Service" dropped
Hi, we've had a page which was ranking top 1 on the Google rankings but has complete dropped out to 5. We don't have any duplicate errors from that page on here. Do you have any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | FIT0 -
Site Audit Tools Not Picking Up Content Nor Does Google Cache
Hi Guys, Got a site I am working with on the Wix platform. However site audit tools such as Screaming Frog, Ryte and even Moz's onpage crawler show the pages having no content, despite them having 200 words+. Fetching the site as Google clearly shows the rendered page with content, however when I look at the Google cached pages, they also show just blank pages. I have had issues with nofollow, noindex on here, but it shows the meta tags correct, just 0 content. What would you look to diagnose? I am guessing some rogue JS but why wasn't this picked up on the "fetch as Google".
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Changing site URL structure
Hey everybody, I'm looking for a bit of advice. A few weeks ago Google sent me an email saying all pages with any text input on them need to switch to https for those pages. This is no problem, I was slowly switching the site to https anyway using a 301 redirect. However, my site also has a language subfolder in the url, mysite.com/en/ mysite.com/ru/ etc. Due to poor work on my part the translations of the site haven't been updated in a long time and lots of the pages are in english even on the russian version etc. So I'm thinking of just removing this url structure and just having mysite.com My plan is to 301 all requests to https and remove the language subfolder in the url at the same time. So far the https switching hasn't changed my rankings. Am I more at risk of losing my rankings by doing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ruhol0 -
We lost ranking for balers keywords for sinobaler.com site, What could be wrong?
From recent marketing, I have checked the backlinks droped down a lot, and some main keywords ranking also drop. How can fix this issue?
Technical SEO | | SINOBALER_Baler0 -
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website0 -
Photography Sites with Same Developer - Why Is One Ranking & Other Not?
I'm currently confused about the difference in ranking between two competing sites, created by the same agency. http://jmayphoto.com/index2.php#!/home (302 redirected from http://jmayphoto.com...yeah) is not ranking well, and I'm not surprised. However, competitor http://www.shanrenee.com/ is ranking within the top 5 spots for a primary target keyword (dallas wedding photographer) and I don't understand how it's doing so well. I definitely see differences, but not enough to explain how Shan Renee is one page. What am I missing?
Technical SEO | | BrittanyHighland0 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Should I build a new site?
I'm currently working on a site which is built using Zen Cart. The client also has another version which has the same products on it. The product descriptions and the vast majority of the text has been re-written. I've used the duplicate content tool and these are the results: HTML fingerprint: 0000a7ee1f07a131 0000a7ec1f07a931 92.31% Total HTML similarity: 76.33% Standard text similarity: 66.72% Smart text similarity: 45.81% Total text similarity 56.27% I considered using a different eCommerce system like Magento or Volusion. So I had a look at a few templates, chose one and then used the tool again and got the following: HTML fingerprint: 0000a7e41b012111 0000a7ec1f07a931 72.00% Total HTML similarity: 64.65% Standard text similarity: 11.69% Smart text similarity: 17.90% Total text similarity 14.80% Do you think its worth doing this? thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | TheYeti0 -
Impact on domain when using a subdomain for majority opf site content
Hello, We're looking to use a subdomain for a bookings engine that will also host the majority of our site content as it wil house the details of the courses that we'll be selling online. All content is currently available on www.existingdomain.co.uk A few pages will remain here but the majority will ultimately be hosted on a different IP address under a subdomain: courses.existingdomain.co.uk I am a little concerened about search engine reaction to this content separation. Would this approach dilute the rankings of www.existingdomain.co.uk? Is there anything else we need to be mindful of? We have alternative options if this is a real SEO faux pas. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Urbanfox0