A Bazaar 10 Days In WMT & Moz
-
Hey All,
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like this or has any idea what happen to one of my sites last week.
I have a lot of question and unanswered weirdness that seems to be occurring in the data.
It kind of plays out like this.
- Noticeable drop off in organic SE traffic
- WMT kicks out 70% of my structured schema data
- Moz drops DA to 14 from 17
- Moz MR drops from 3.50 to 2.74
- Total Indexed pages (as per SEOQuake tool bar) Drops from 500 to 224
- All the images submitted via a sitemap have been unindexed according to WMT.
This only a 3 month old web site with a minimal back linking profile, we're talking less than 100. No one has been working on the site, the only thing that has happen in the last month is blog post being posted. All unique content and well formatted.
Then at the beginning of this week I saw traffic increasing again, and this was confirmed when WMT updated and I got my Moz update.
- All schema data back in WMT, with no acknowledgement of the drop; the graph just continues in a steady rise as tho nothing happened.
- Traffic back up to normal levels, as tho nothing happened.
I have noticed a 100% increase in the amount of pages being blocked by robots.txt, I haven't changed it, nor has anyone else, it has been the same since the site was launched.
I'm hoping that Moz will put the DA and MR back to where they were, and no damage will be done.\
But my question is, What the hell happened? It nearly wiped the site of the face off the earth for 10 days, how do I find out what did it, why and stop it from happening again?
I have noticed the number of pages indexed by google, as quoted by SEOquake tool bar not WMT regularly jumps from anywhere from 200 to 500, Any ideas?
I know their are many different elements at play here, where do I start, I can't sit back and hop it never happens again.
Thank you to anyone that wants to roll their sleeves up and have ago at this one.
Best, IAn
-
Ian I don't think anyone is going to be able to help you without being able to see your site, do some checking around the SERPs, etc... If you don't want to provide that information, we understand, but I don't think anyone could provide you with a useful answer.
As far as new sites going up and then dropping down in the first few months, we used to call this the "Google Sandbox effect". Nobody talks about it anymore for various reasons, but many of us believe that there is still an amount of time for a new site where Google will give it the benefit of a doubt in order to collect metrics about it from the SERPs, such as user's reactions to it appearing in the search results for different queries. Once that data is crunched the rankings often go down. That's just a theory, but I thought I'd throw it out there. It doesn't seem to make sense in this case though, as it doesn't explain the Moz metric drops, which are not associated with Google at all.
Google recently cleaned house a bit on structured data in the SERPs, which might explain that part of it. Even if your data markup was using the correct syntax it wouldn't help if you don't have the trust metrics necessary for Google to deem the sight worthy of structured data in the SERPs.
-
Thanks for your reply,
All the pages that are blocked in robots.txt are ones I want blocked, admin; login etc. But the robots.txt hasn't been changed for over 6 weeks. What jumped out at me was; Why all of a sudden would their be a spike on WMT of blocked pages? Why didn't these show up 6 weeks ago? They have been blocked all the time. Maybe it's nothing but why did they show up at the same time the site was dropped?
No pages that shouldn't be blocked are blocked.
Thanks,
Ian
-
I see. Well first of all, the Moz Rank and Domain Authority don't actually feed information to Google and are nothing more than a slight-indicator of what's happening. If your DA went from 17 to 14 this could be for any number of reasons but even if it went back up to 17 all the sudden you wouldn't see any difference in traffic or SERPs just based on this number alone.
I'm not sure why it would disappear for 10 days and then reappear, to be honest. Could be any number of things. But I wouldn't worry about it if your placement has since returned.
I would worry about the pages being blocked by your robots.txt that you don't want blocked. Am I understanding that correctly? Do you have an example of that?
-
Hi Jesse,
Sorry, That's my fault for not clarifying myself properly. Allow me to elaborate.
What I mean by "No one is working on the site" Is no coding or backend work is going on, work which could have disturbed the site from Google's point of view, or caused a sudden change in the code, that would cause the mark up data to disappear from WMT.
The site is very much being actively optimised, onsite with blog posts and additional site pages being added almost daily, and off site through social media channels and outreach programs. Their are 100 Back links which have been picked up in WMT, their are an awful lot more than this out there.
Traffic is building nicely considering the age of the site (3 months). This is why it was such a shock when it was virtually wiped out for 10 days.
My question is not about SEO or how to do it (however I always appreciate someone else point of view and interesting spins), it's about why WMT and MOZ would have knee jerk reaction to something, and almost simultaneously drop the site. Then a week later pick it straight back up again?
When nothing was changed/done (coding/site structure/links) on site. The code/site structure/backend hasn't been touched for 6 weeks, only content has been added.
I'm trying to find a way to find out what caused this, for want of a better word 'seizure', and know how to stop it ever happening again.
I hope this clarifies my position a little, sorry for being vague before.
BEst IAn
-
Based on this quote: "This only a 3 month old web site with a minimal back linking profile, we're talking less than 100. No one has been working on the site," none of this is surprising to me. You have a young site and you're not working to market it. So yeah, you're gonna see your rankings disappear.
Why some of the pages have been de-indexed could be for any number of reasons. I think the only way to tell would be to post your URL and some of the fine folks here could take a look.
But besides that mystery, the best thing for you to do is roll up your own sleeves and get a good SEM campaign going for this domain. That's the name of the game!
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
-
Duplicate content in Shopify reported by Moz
According to Moz crawl report, there are hundreds of duplicate pages in our Shopify store ewatchsale.com. The main duplicate pages are:
On-Page Optimization | | ycnetpro101
https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches?page=2
https://ewatchsale.com/collections/all/brand_seiko
(the canonical page should be https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches) https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/gender_mens
(the canonical page should be https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/mens-watches) Also, I want to exclude indexing of pages URLs with "filter parameters" like https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/color_black+mens-watches+price_us-100-200 Shopify advised we can't access our robots.txt file. How can we exclude SE crawling of the page URLs with filter names?
How can we access the robots.txt file?
How can we add canonical code to the preferred collection pages? Which templates and what codes to add? Thanks for your advice in advance!0 -
Ranking drop from 6 op 23 in one day - freaking out
Dear, Moz We have been hard at work going some off site and on site SEO. However yesterday we got around 1600 404 errors from google, and ranking dropped from 7 in front page to 25. What we did: I found an error in Htacces, where my partner had this (rewritebase with double // and rule with // - I quess this started creating urls for google, because twww.website.com//category-category-cateory OK. But google says that they will not effect your rankings because 404s? Second think i found was that we had some urls, which had canonical tag to a page called search. Now that search (duplicate of homepage) we 301 to our main homepage. Can that effect ranking? You have 404s that have canonical to a page that itselft redirects (301) to homepage. We also removed the / splash. Nothing more.. Below is the htaccess, that had the double // error. Please comment. Options +FollowSymLinks
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase //
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$
RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.website.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://website.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond $1 ^(index.php)?$ [OR]
RewriteCond $1 .(gif|jpg|css|js|png|ico)$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.)$ - [S=1]
RewriteRule .//index.php [L]
DirectoryIndex index.php0 -
Q&A Page Titles
Hello All! I am currently updating page titles and metadata descriptions for a websites Q&A section and have run in to a problem while updating page titles. Since it is the Q&A section of the website, all of the page titles are around 100 characters and some are up to 200 characters long. Here is an example: Page Title: My child is working below grade level in math. Do I have to purchase the curriculum from the grade below as well? The problem is that this is obviously too long for a SERP to display however I know it is best practice to have matching titles on both the title tag and page title. My question is what hurts SEO value more: the title tag and title of the page not matching or having a very long title displayed on the SERP?
On-Page Optimization | | Myles921 -
Should I Use WooCommerce Tags & Attributes?
I'm helping an online furniture store search engine optimize a WooCommerce store and I'm trying to make sure our taxonomies make sense. I'd love any help you guys can give, but I'm particularly interested in determining whether we should use tags. Product attributes make sense to me, but I'm concerned to use tags because of the propensity for creating duplicate content. Thanks in advance for any help you guys are willing to give.
On-Page Optimization | | cbizzle0 -
Grade F page on Moz positions No 1 on Google Keywords not contained
Hi I am trying to understand why a page list in position 1 on Google despite the fact it does not include the search terms anywhere in the page source. One of our sites has been in that position for years has great content and links for the key word terms so how can the other page overtake it and all of the other keywords without so much as a sniff of the keyword in the URL, Meta, content or images. It grades F on Moz! How can I discover the technique that has been used. This really is black art stuff or do Google accept payment from major corporations to list their pages irrespective of content?
On-Page Optimization | | Eff-Commerce0 -
Does the follow link from the moz Profile really count after first with nofollow?
Hey all, I discovered that the link from the public profile might not count. To my knowledge Google "counts" the first link to another page on any given page. The public profile has a nofollow link before your follow link:
On-Page Optimization | | Sebes
linktodomain.tld linktodomain.tld Doesn't this invalidates all the public profile links? What is your stance on this? Regards Sebastian2 -
2013: Top 10 content SEO tips survey
Hi folks, I was asked to write a short top 10 SEO list for editors. My search returned outdated results and SEO is changing fast these days… So, here is my little survey: What are the best settings for these most important things: Title tag: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks? Meta description: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks? Meta keywords: Use them? How many? H1 tag: How many characters / words? Best keyword positions? Best tricks? H2-H6 tags: How many characters? Best keyword positions? Best tricks? Image alternative text: How many characters / words? Best tricks? Text length: Minimum, maximum? What’s better: 1 long article or split an article in several pages? How much links within an article? Min? Max? Usage of keywords within links? Your favorite SEO tip? I would love to hear your thoughts 🙂 Best wishes,
On-Page Optimization | | GeorgFranz
Georg.0 -
Dealing with a category page that is optimised & ranks for same keyword as homepage
Hi, I'm working with a very niche website where only one product is sold. This means there is a small keyword set (just variations of same keyword) that we are optimising for. Currently the homepage www.example.com ranks in position 2 for target term - "sample". But there is also a required deeper page www.example.com/sample which has lots and lots of internal links targeted to "sample" pointing to it. This page ranks position 8. Effectively this is optimising the deeper page for the same keyword as for the home page through internal anchir text. This deeper page must exist as it has much more detailed information about the product. We want the homepage to rank highest and I'm trying to figure out if we are confusing Google and splitting authority between 2 pages. Best result for us would be to have homepage in position 1 and the deeper page can disappear (total visits would increase). So the question is, is there a solution to do this? My initial thought was use canonical tag on the www.example.com/sample page specifiying www.example.com. Can we do this? Its not duplicate content. Other option I considered is to nofollow links to the deeper page. Again not sure if this will have positive or negative impact. My fear is by removing 40 odd internal links with "sample" anchor text will reduce relevancy of the domain as a whole for the "sample" keyword. Any help much appreciated! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Red_Mud_Rookie0