Can You Help Explain This Nightmare Screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools?
-
Your Next Dress (http://dress.yournextshoes.com/) has been performing poorly in search for a long time.
My theory is that Google's algorithm somehow thinks our content is poor, and that we're not ranking for that reason. While we have deleted hundreds of blog posts and improved plenty of others, our SEO has continued to tank and recently reached zero. We do not have a manual penalty of any kind, though I've tried to disavow dubious looking links just in case.
Is there anything that I am missing?
-
Can you give us more information about Google "forgetting" your pages? I'm not very clear on your answer here.
-
The first glaring problem I see that could have caused this penalty is the shared header navigation across all subdomains. Each subdomain should have main navigation to it's own pages - you have a shared nav on all sites that is interconnecting all sites like crazy, and also sending the crawler everywhere.
-
I would look at where you have links coming from. Not saying you did this, but a lot of ecom sites do a lot of link submissions in an attempt to rank. That big of a drop, that fast propbably means they didn't like your link profile. Google does not have to assign you a penalty just to drop your rankings in the toilet. Sometimes, they just look at what you have, determine it does not fit within their newly established quality guidelines as well as the next guy, and poof you are on page 10.
Most likely your anlytics are working , and you are really seeing this drop. Here is what I would do to start with:
1. Look at the linking domains and manually go and check the pagerank of the linking sites. If they are zero, or godforbid they redirect you to another domain, disavow. You can also search manually for the linking site in google. If it doesnt appear when searching for them by name, Google most likely doesnt want you to find them for good reason.
2. Check to make sure all the blog pages have been properly redirected, or removed from Google. You state that you have removed 100's of pages from the blog, but have these been removed or requested for these to be removed form Google's index?
3. Check the redirect functions on your subdomain. Make sure that the home page of tyour subdomain cannot be accessed on any other URL of your site. This can be a tricky thing to get right, and I have seen many sites take a dive due to unintentional duplicate pages due to a subdomain.
That should get you off to a good start
-
Jane, good answer. Your Next Dress could definitely benefit from more backlinks. But I don't think a lack of backlinks is the reason why we're being penalized by Google.
Anyway, you can see my other query on "windy skirt", which we used to rank for. Now all the top 18 search results are Youtube videos, which at least explains why we're not ranking for that query.
-
Hi there,
Although tied to the parent domain as a subdomain, this subdomain on its own has very few inbound links from third parties. OSE sees only 7 linking domains that are not Your Next Shoes. For a subdomain (which does not traditionally inherit terribly much authority from its parent domain), this is quite low. Although it does not explain a sudden drop (unless Google considered it to be ranking unfairly before, e.g. because links from the parent were counting as impartial inbound links when they should not be), general poor performance might be because of a low number of linking sites when compared to competitors.
-
Thank you for the responses. Google is actually crawling our site quite frequently, and there seems to be no problem. I guess we're just stuck in the dark on this one.
-
You tried to see the graph of cached pages? Maybe google "forgot" your pages and if they doesn't have pages, then, also doesn't send search.
I think you can send a new sitemap, then, review all 404 errors google are returning (if you have), and use siteexplorer to analize your links in search of possible spam links.
-
When you see a sudden, large drop in traffic, it typically means one of two things:
1. You messed up your website somehow (maybe your home page is taking forever to load or it is returning a 404 for some reason)
2. Google hit you with a penalty
Based on the information here and here, it seems that there was an algorithm update around June 28. There isn't much more specific information.
If you haven't received any notifications of manual penalties, then you probably have an algorithmic one. So, I'd keep checking your website and backlinks for thin or duplicated content, over-optimized anchor text, links from dubious places, keyword spamming, or any other similar things. 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
-
Schema Markup + Google Authorship ?
Hello MOOOoooOOzzz ! Oye one small innocent question. If I get it properly now we have to use schema.org. Ok fair enough. But how do we use schema.org + Google Authorship ? Is it going to be something like ? [itemprop="href="https://plus.google.com/108179715370724871324?rel=author">Bob Smith](bob.html) What do you think ?
Content Development | | AymanH0 -
Free Duplicate Content Checker Tools ?
Hi Moz, I am really looking for free tools which can carry my content duplication issue, as i visited http://moz.com/community/q/are-there-tools-to-discover-duplicate-content-issues-with-the-other-websites suggested copyscape which is paid. I want FREE to handle my duplication issue.' Thanks in Advance. Best,
Content Development | | Futura
Teginder1 -
Any help on best practices to move blog domain?
Hi, I am going to move my blog hosted on wordpress.com to a folder under mysite.com. (e.g. mysite.com/blog/). I start to think after the blog has gone live there will be duplicated content issue because I am going to import my posts in last 2 years onto the new location. I what way can I avoid that happen? Can I set something up (e.g. 301 redirect) in my current wordpress.com account? Any advice. Please help! Thanks
Content Development | | LauraHT0 -
Linkbait help please!
The problem we find as a small printing company (www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk) even though we are in a decent field for ideas (design, printing, business advertising) we are really struggling with types of resource / link bait content to create which is either not out there already or would create a decent buzz (ideas we have bounced around such as exhibition guides sound ok but they have been done to death such as independent sites). Any help would be really appreciated.
Content Development | | BobAnderson0 -
Google RSS Feed News Feed To Inner Pages
Ive been working on a large ecommerce website that has thousands of pages, although we are working on adding custom content daily to the largest pages, we have "defaul content" with dynamic tags matching search query. Someone recommend we add a google Rss feed where they can also add some type of tag. Is this a bad idea? Ive asked in the past but my main concern is issue with duplicate content, It would be next to impossible to have all pages filled with custom content. Any help much appreciated!! Thank you!
Content Development | | TP_Marketing0 -
Does this on huffington post help your seo aims
Hi, i am a huge fan of Huffington post, it is an amazing site, not just saying this because they have mentioned our site over 50 times, but i really like the site. But one question i have which i have noticed over and over again is does the following help with seo, as i am a bit puzzled with it here is one of their pages http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/16/one-direction-set-to-be-worth-64m-in-a-year-after-worldwide-success_n_1602135.html?utm_hp_ref=uk-celebrity and the section i am puzzled about is Follow: Louis Walsh, One Direction, Simon Cowell, Sony Music, The Sun, UK Entertainment, X Factor, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Uk News, UK Entertainment News Can anyone let me know why the site does this and what benefits it brings
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does anyone know if a large forum can impact your seo rating on specific terms?
I have a large forum and I'm trying to figure out how to leverage it for SEO. Hopefully it'll help. Any advice? Does google ignore forums?
Content Development | | RamseySolutions0 -
Can un-unique content damage my rankings?
Hi there, I run a blog @ http://ablemagazine.co.uk We produce our own editorial content for our print magazine. Which means I have a great bank of uniquely written content. I can usually afford to post 1-2 completely 100% unique articles a day. I've also been copy/pasting 2-3 articles from the BBC or The Guardian a day to keep up activity. Should I continue doing what I'm doing? Should I post exclusively unique articles? Thanks
Content Development | | craven220