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
-
Duplicate Content In Webmaster Tools
In wordpress on some of our blogs when we have gone to publish them wordpress has shortened the url. In Google webmaster tools the orignal url is coming up as a 404 error. This url is not indexed in Google. Is this something to worry about and can this be avoided? Thank you in advance.
Content Development | | Palmbourne0 -
Can unreliable server hurt your serps?
Hi I have a small personal blog about food and wine that I recently moved from blogger to wordpress and it is currently being hosted by the company who moved the blog over from one system to the other. This week I've noticed an 80% drop in organic traffic thanks to losing pretty much every first page SERP, there's no messages in WMT, i dont pay for links, all that's on the site is original content about food and wine that I enjoy. I've never had a previous drop in ranking/traffic like it. The one thing I can say, is that the guy who took over the hosting is hosting it himself on his own server and the website has been down more times than I would consider reasonable, often for hours at a time (this is when I catch it and I don't check often). Would the site be penalised for this? If I move servers to a reliable co i normally use, how long will it take to recover?
Content Development | | xoffie0 -
Google+ Authorship Penalties for Past Posts?
Our blog has recently been updated to allocate past posts from 2011 and on to link to one of our recent writers who just came on board in 2013. Our writer set up a new Google+ profile for our blog last month, and has tagged all of the past posts with his Google+ authorship code. Is there a possibility that this could actually hurt our writer's authorship authority and our blog's authority, since the blog posts and the Google+ profile activation dates will not match up?
Content Development | | eugeneku0 -
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 -
Canonicle Help
Hey everyone, Hoping someone can shed some light on canonicle links for me. Have read as many articles and tutorials as possible but am still unsure about how to use them in my situation. I'm about to sign a content syndication agreement with a large newspaper for 3-4 of my articles per week. It's great because this national newspaper has a PR of 8, to my recently reduced PR of 3. The newspaper are providing attribution links back to my website, both to the homepage and original article on every article. Nice, but worried their size will make their copies of the article list above mine. Can anyone tell me, IF the newspaper agreed to making canonicle part of attribution, where exactly would it go? On my article? On their article? In their document ? Or in the link that directs back to me? Thanks.
Content Development | | Luc-W0 -
Please Explain "Rel Canonical"
I have a travel blog that ranks well for lots of keywords. In my "Notices" section of this site, I found that every page has a rel canonical issue sort of flagged. What does this mean? How can it be fixed? It doesn't seem to bother my traffic, but it'd be nice to have it tidied up. Thanks! The site is www.journeybeyondtravel.com/news
Content Development | | journeybeyondtravel0 -
How does google react to duplicate shops on ecommerce sites
Surely shopping cart sites are going to have a lot of duplicate content? Does google recognise this? Is there anything I can do let google know?
Content Development | | borderbound0