A Bazaar 10 Days In WMT & Moz

[cookie777]

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.

1. Noticeable drop off in organic SE traffic
2. WMT kicks out 70% of my structured  schema data
3. Moz drops DA to 14 from 17
4. Moz MR drops from 3.50 to 2.74
5. Total Indexed pages (as per SEOQuake tool bar) Drops from 500 to 224
6. 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.

1. All schema data back in WMT, with no acknowledgement of the drop; the graph just continues in a steady rise as tho nothing happened.
2. 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

[Everett]

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.

[cookie777]

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

[jesse-landry]

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?

[cookie777]

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

[jesse-landry]

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!