Finding Cause of Google Demotion (second time around!)
-
Our website, christnotes.org has historically ranked very well in it's space. We have always been in top 3 positions for daily bible verse related searches. There have been no fluctuations in rankings until it took a hit around September 4th through October 14th with approximately 35% drop in PVs and over 60% drop in traffic from Google. The site fully recovered google traffic mid-Oct. On November 24th the site was once again hit, this time with a 50% drop in pageviews and over 75% drop in traffic from google. Google Analytics Image depicting the two drops attached.
When the first drop hit, we checked everything - bad links, broken URLs, page speed, etc. There was a slight increase in page speed so we did a little tweaking and made some improvements (8.36 second page load to 5.5)
This time around, I can find no cause and no areas that need fixed to recover our rankings and traffic. Very confused on Google dropping rank then recovering after what looks like a page speed fix and then dropping again a month later.
Any suggestions????
-
Hi David,
That looks like a tricky issue you have there. Your dates don't immediately look like matching with well known updates, but to be honest a lot of stuff was going on in the last 3-4 months of 2013 so it is easy to get confused!
You say that you traditionally ranked well for 'daily bible verse' related searches. I am not familiar with what phrases these might be, but have your rankings actually dropped on your 'main' keywords or have they remained pretty steady but you still see the traffic drop?
I would look into trying to identify better where the traffic was lost and that might help identify why. So you could look at things like landing pages and compare between the month of lost traffic with the month before. Once you have your list of landing pages that lost significant traffic you could look at any keyword data still available for those pages to try to get an idea of what kind of queries (and intent) were bring traffic to those pages and then go and have a look at what kind of serps those type of queries return now. Have some big sites (wikipedia or similar) moved into top positions? Are knowledge graph boxes answering the question without the user needing to click through to your site?
Understanding what content lost traffic (and/or tracked keywords lost rankings) should give you a better idea of what happened and be able to guide you in planning your next steps.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Why do SEO agencies ask for access to our Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager?
What do they need GTM for? And what is the use case for setting up Google Search Console?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NBJ_SM0 -
Google image search
How does google decide which image show up in the image search section ? Is is based on the alt tag of the image or is google able to detect what is image is about using neural nets ? If it is using neural nets are the images you put on your website taken into account to rank a page ? Let's say I do walking tours in Italy and put a picture of the leaning tower of pisa as a top image while I be penalised because even though the picture is in italy, you don't see anyone walking ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Would google consider this the anchor text?
Hi guys, For a button based link, can you define the anchor text google will use. I have attached screenshot of what i mean. Cheers. geavig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Dropped from Google?
My website www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk appears to have been penalised by Google. I ranked fairly well for a number of venue related searches from my blog posts. Generally I'd find myself somewhere on page one or towards the top of page two. However recently I found I am nowhere to be seen for these venue searches. I still appear if I search for my name, business name and keywords in my domain name. A quick check of Yahoo and I found I am ranking very well, it is only Google who seem to have dropped me. I looked at Google webmaster tools and there are no messages or clues as to what has happened. However it does show my traffic dropping off a cliff edge on the 19th July from 850 impressions to around 60 to 70 per day. I haven't made any changes to my website recently and hadn't added any new content in July. I haven't added any new inbound links either, a search for inbound links does not show anything suspicious. Can anyone shed any light on why this might happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Is Sitemap Issue Causing Duplicate Content & Unindexed Pages on Google?
On July 10th my site was migrated from Drupal to Google. The site contains approximately 400 pages. 301 permanent redirects were used. The site contains maybe 50 pages of new content. Many of the new pages have not been indexed and many pages show as duplicate content. Is it possible that there is a site map issue that is causing this problem? My developer believes the map is formatted correctly, but I am not convinced. The sitemap address is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/page-sitemap.xml [^] I am completely non technical so if anyone could take a brief look I would appreciate it immensely. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan | |0 -
Google Places Drop
Hi everyone! I have a client that was ranking very nicely for a number of keywords. In the 5 pack for most of the keywords we were targeting. His account went under review for some unknown reason about 2 months ago. It disappeared from the listing... Then a few weeks ago it became approved again. He is now no longer ranking for any of those keywords. He is ranking for some obscure ones but the money words are gone. Do you think this was due to the review? Some sort of GP update over the last 60 days? All of my other clients are still ranking strong in Google Places. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeattleJoe0 -
% of the time you find email addresses - broken link building
Hello, What percentage of the time do you find an exact email address of the person to contact when doing broken link building? And what do you do if you can't find an email address? Always interested in more tools if I need them, my last post here brought out several good tools. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to get around Google Removal tool not removing redirected and 404 pages? Or if you don't know the anchor text?
Hello! I can’t get squat for an answer in GWT forums. Should have brought this problem here first… The Google Removal Tool doesn't work when the original page you're trying to get recached redirects to another site. Google still reads the site as being okay, so there is no way for me to get the cache reset since I don't what text was previously on the page. For example: This: | http://0creditbalancetransfer.com/article375451_influencial_search_results_for_.htm | Redirects to this: http://abacusmortgageloans.com/GuaranteedPersonaLoanCKBK.htm?hop=duc01996 I don't even know what was on the first page. And when it redirects, I have no way of telling Google to recache the page. It's almost as if the site got deindexed, and they put in a redirect. Then there is crap like this: http://aniga.x90x.net/index.php?q=Recuperacion+Discos+Fujitsu+www.articulo.org/articulo/182/recuperacion_de_disco_duro_recuperar_datos_discos_duros_ii.html No links to my site are on there, yet Google's indexed links say that the page is linking to me. It isn't, but because I don't know HOW the page changed text-wise, I can't get the page recached. The tool also doesn't work when a page 404s. Google still reads the page as being active, but it isn't. What are my options? I literally have hundreds of such URLs. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeanGodier0