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
-
If my blog is on Wordpress, and I've installed the AMP plug-in, what do I need to do to get Google to start indexing all my posts as AMP pages?
If I add /amp to the end of any of my posts, I can see that the plug-in is working. It's been months since I installed it, though, and Google hasn't indexed any of the AMP pages. Am I missing a step?
Content Development | | DeanRamadan0 -
What's brewing on YouMoz? (And how you can Help)
In the last year, we've searched for ways to make YouMoz more interesting, more exciting and more inviting for the Moz community. The blog really does belong to the community, for it's the place where many novel ideas are shared, discussed, and further developed. Aside from being a great place to share ideas, though, YouMoz is also the primary vehicle by which many now-household names in online marketing were discovered. (Many of the top posts on YouMoz eventually find their way onto the main Moz Blog.) YouMoz belongs to the community. The blog was created as a place for the community to share and engage around bright ideas, in addition to being a vehicle for provoking thought around new concepts, strategies and tactics. For both aspiring and established authors, YouMoz has become a popular destination in the online marketing space. In the quest to make YouMoz even better, we’ve come with a few ideas to ensure that everyone continues to feel as though they can contribute to the blog. Beginning today, we’re introducing what we hope becomes four common formats for YouMoz: My Story, Headsmacking Tips, Problem Solved and Here’s How: My Story: The name pretty much says it all. Share with the community an interesting story related to online marketing. The story could be funny, personal or informational. As long as it’s interesting, well-written, and a benefit to the community, we’d love to hear it. A great example of the type of post we’re looking for is Mike Ramsey’s From Zero to a Million: 20 Lessons for Starting an Internet Marketing Agency. Headsmacking Tip: We’re bringing this format, first shared by Rand years ago on the main blog, out of the mothballs. Simply share with the audience an awesome online marketing-related tip that could make their jobs easier. (Example:Headsmacking Tip #21: Write Better Headlines Than Anyone Else.) Problem Solved: Tell the audience how you solved a significant marketing problem, making it easier for you to do your job. Share the nitty-gritty details, and include any graphics or tips needed for the community to solve the problem for themselves. (Example: A Simple Guide to Overcoming Ad Blindness for Publishers.) Here’s How: This style of post is meant to be a little more wide-ranging, allowing you to share with the audience ways they can successfully deploy a technique, tactic, strategy, tool or anything else you’ve gleaned that might be of value to marketers. (Examples: How to Write Emails That Get Opened Every Time and The 10 Tools I Use to Monitor Social Media More Effectively. A big shout out to Katy Katz for the inaugural post in this category: Here’s How to Write an Email That Throws off a Whole Room’s Productivity.) Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Don’t overthink it. Read our guidelines, then dive in and get started. Also, we’d love to hear what you think about these new formats. Plus, we welcome your comments or questions. Feel free to share your thoughts below
Content Development | | ronell-smith7 -
How can we dynamically populate content on our website based on a visitor's web history?
Recently, I have tried looking into options that would allow us to dynamically populate content (specifically images to be used at CTAs on our blog in wordpress) to different users based on their web history on our website. We would want to be able to dynamically populate images based on the number of visits in the past 60 days and the inferred industry based on pages hit. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find anything as a standalone tool - I believe HubSpot may have something like this but it is rolled into their blogging platform. Does anyone know of one?
Content Development | | SMPoulton0 -
Can I get Google to re-evaluate my comany's website?
For the last few months I've been rewriting website descriptions for the company I work for, trying to comply with the Panda algorithm as best I could. There are about 400 items. Today I am going to begin working on titles and descriptions. Question: Once I'm finished and have run the site through SEOMoz's pro tools, I would like to have Google look at the site _**in toto **_once the changes have been made so that maybe we can procure some decent organic rankings. Can the site be resubmitted, and what is the procedure? Ps. Today I am asking my fellow employees to help me proofread each description for grammar, spelling, accuracy, and keyword placement. I am also asking for suggestions from them.
Content Development | | RScime250 -
Does Google really ignore Noindex pages?
Assume I may have some pages of my site that don't have a lot of text on them, and I have to keep them on the site. Let's say there are no more than 50 like this out of 400 great pages, and the ratio of great-to-short pages continues to increase. If I no index the short ones, will Google really ignore them in search? Will they ignore them enough to not downrank my site due to the short, noindexed pages? I know, theoretically, they are supposed to ignore them, but I don't always trust all the rules.
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Where can I find places to guest blog?
I have done a couple of guest blogs but I have come up dry as of late. Any tips on where to find blogs interested in linking for content?
Content Development | | ibex0 -
Google : Bad positioning of my new articles for 2 months
For one or two months my new questions / Answers have a bad positioning and competitors who have a contents of inferior quality are classified in front of dismoicomment.fr. Recently I had + of 1000 errors of exploitation in webmasters tools because there was an url in the code of every page which was untraceable. Do you think that it can come from there? Nevertheless since the passage of Google panda, I have more traffic. I don't Understand... Furthermore my old posts have same positioning. My website : www.dismoicomment.fr Thank you. Sorry for my bad level in english.
Content Development | | elitepronostic0 -
Our blog is indexed by "google web" but does not show up in "google blogs". Why not and how can I fix this?
We have a pretty simple blog http://www.aviawest.com/blog I've noticed our articles arn't showing up in Google blogs on "web", we've submitted to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping a month ago. Anyone have some insight here?
Content Development | | Aviawest0