Organic listings disappeared I don't know why!
-
Brief history:
I am MD of a medium sized health organisation in the UK. We have one of the leading websites in the world for our industry. We were hit by a Google algorithm update last year (Penguin or Panda, I can't remember, but that's not relevant here I don't think) and our daily visits went down from around 10,000 to around 5,000 in two separate hits over a couple of months. Then there was a steady decrease to about 3,000-4,000 visits a day until we totally updated the design of the site and did some good work on the content. We have always been white-hat and the site has around 3,000 pages with unique content added daily.
So things have really been on the up for the past couple of months. We have been receiving around 6,000 visits a day in recent weeks (a slow incline over the past few months), until Sunday. Sunday morning around 10am all of our organic listings pretty much disappear, including for our brand name. Monday morning a few come back, including our brand name and our main, most competitive keyword, which we were showing up on the third page for and we returned to this page. Then Tuesday morning another few of our most competitive keywords show up, back where they were before. This includes images which had disappeared from Google images.
Our PPC and business listings were not really affected at all.
My developer submitted a site map through webmaster tools on Monday morning and I'm not sure if this is the reason pages started to show up again. In our Webmaster tools the indexed pages are about a quarter of all of the ones on the site - all pages were indexed before. I just don't know what has happened! It doesn't make any sense as 1. Google don't seem to have rolled out any algorithm updates on that day 2. we do not have any messages in Webmaster Tools 3. a number of our main keywords have re-appeared - why would that happen if we had been hit by a Google update?!
Our organic hits, which previously made up about 80% of all our hits, have gone down by 80% and this is drastically affecting business. If this continues it is likely we will have to downsize the business and I'm not sure what to do.
When I saw that the 'indexed pages' in Webmaster tools started to increase (they were around 600 on Monday, around 900 yesterday and then this morning, around 1,300), I thought that we were on our way up and maybe this problem would just resolve itself and our listings would re-appear, but now our indexed pages have reduced slightly since this morning, back down to around 1,100 so the increase has stalled.
Can anybody help?! Do you have any idea what could be causing this? Apparently there have been no changes made to robots.txt and my developer says that no changes were made that could have affected our listings.
ANY ADVICE WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED.
-
Interesting situation...and very frustrating for you, I'm sure.
You mentioned this below:
"I checked 'cached snapshot of page' in Google Toolbar for the pages that weren't being indexed, and it showed up as a 404 error. "
This sounds like you had some sort of technical error. But some things still don't add up for me. It kind of sounds like your pages were not resolving for Google. But, the odd thing is that if Google sees a 404 error, they keep trying for days, weeks or even months before they conclude that the pages should be removed from the index.
I don't have an answer for you but the first place I'd look is to make sure that your robots.txt file is not blocking Googlebot in some way. I'd also check server logs and perhaps check with your host to see if there was some significant down time for the site.
If there was a technical glitch, and the problem is now fixed, then your pages should come back into the index without you doing anything.
I'm pretty certain this isn't a penalty issue though.
-
Thank you. I will look into this, although I don't think the pages are set to no follow because there has been a further development. I checked 'cached snapshot of page' in Google Toolbar for the pages that weren't being indexed, and it showed up as a 404 error. These are pages that have always been cached before this problem occurred. I then went to 'submit URL to Google' and submitted a couple of URLs. They instantly showed up in Google's listings in the same spot as they were before and the cached snapshot of page then showed up correctly. I could do that for every page but 1. that would be a HUGE job and 2. would that look spammy or suspicious to Google? 3. is there a way of doing that for multiple pages at a time?! I feel like this problem is very close to being solved but I just don't quite know how to solve it.
-
The only time I've seen this type of thing happen - all of the pages in a site are no longer indexed, yet PPC still works, is when something on the site has been set to no-index / no-follow.
If you had a manual penalty from Google, that would show up in Google Webmaster Tools. Plus, the site would still be indexed, just ranked really, really low. If everything was missing from Google's cache, then the most likely explanation is that it was set accidentally to no-index / no-follow.
This is a very easy thing to mess up, and it's possible that someone might have hit the wrong button by accident, or updated the robots.txt file.
In the past, I had a project manager who messed this up for a client while doing a content update on the site, and it was about a week before anyone noticed. She's no longer here (not due just to that issue). But this is so critical for me and my company that we've put an automated and human testing check in place each day:
For our company, we have an automated script that runs through all of our sites (and client's sites) each day to make sure that the site is set to index / follow, both on the pages and in the robot.txt file. We also check the title tag and make sure that the name servers haven't changed.
I also pay someone on my team to run through a 12 step checklist each and every day to make sure that things like the site search are working, contact forms go through properly, and that pages are set to index / follow.
I hope this helps...
Thanks,
-- Jeff
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
-
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Hello, We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com. We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks. Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl. Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_p
Eugene0 -
Should I redirect a domain we control but which has been labeled 'toxic' or just shut it down?
Hi Mozzers: We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.' Thanks in advance, dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Homepage only has disappeared from SERPs
I have a website that has been ranking really well with the home page for our most important keywords. 2nd position. A few days ago I noticed the home page was nowhere to be found in the SERPs. Not really knowing what to do I republished my Rapidweaver site and got the message that there were two index files. An index.html and index.php file which could cause problems. The home page has always been a html page so I have no idea how this was created. I deleted the php file from the file directory and resubmitted the homepage in webmaster tools for indexing. Within about half an hour the page was appearing in the SERPs again in my original position for the important keywords. Two days later and it's gone again. I've tried everything I can think of and resubmitted the page to Google for indexing. I can see it is being indexed as it comes up when I type the URL into the search bar but it will not come up in the search results either for my two keywords or the actual name of my business. When I type in business name it brings up lots of other pages from the site but not the home page. I've spoken to 3 SEO companies and nobody knows what is causing it. Please help with any suggestions this will definitely impact our business if we can't figure it out. Has this happened to anyone else? My website is NSFW but is www.aprilnites.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GemmaApril0 -
Duplicate Content That Isn't Duplicated
In Moz, I am receiving multiple messages saying that there is duplicate page content on my website. For example, these pages are being highlighted as duplicated: https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/pop-art-graffiti/farm-with-barn-and-animals-wall-mural-3824 and https://www.ohpopsi.com/photo-wallpaper/made-to-measure/animals-wildlife/little-elephants-garden-seamless-pattern-wall-mural-3614. As you can see, both pages are different products, therefore I can't apply a 301 redirect or canonical tag. What do you suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | e3creative0 -
Pages Disappearing from Search
Hi, We have had a strongly ranking site since 2004. Over the past couple of days, our Google traffic has dropped by around 20% and some of our strong pages are completely disappearing from the rankings. They are still indexed, but having ranked number 1 are nowhere to be found. A number of pages still remain intact, but it seems they are increasingly disappearing. Where should we start to try and find out what is happening? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Traffic from organic grew significantly. But why?
Hello, In our e-commerce business we saw significant growth in organic traffic during the summer months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ETonnard
This is a period we sell a lot of custom made photobooks. The weird thing is that we didn't do any changes to our photobook pages since 2013, where we didn't have these peaks.
So this is good news, but... What would be a good way to start investigating the reason of this increase?
I have a hard time answering the 'why' question. Thank you very much for your help! With kind regards, Yannick TiWWKX9.png0 -
Googlebot Can't Access My Sites After I Repair My Robots File
Hello Mozzers, A colleague and I have been collectively managing about 12 brands for the past several months and we have recently received a number of messages in the sites' webmaster tools instructing us that 'Googlebot was not able to access our site due to some errors with our robots.txt file' My colleague and I, in turn, created new robots.txt files with the intention of preventing the spider from crawling our 'cgi-bin' directory as follows: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ After creating the robots and manually re-submitting it in Webmaster Tools (and receiving the green checkbox), I received the same message about Googlebot not being able to access the site, only difference being that this time it was for a different site that I manage. I repeated the process and everything, aesthetically looked correct, however, I continued receiving these messages for each of the other sites I manage on a daily-basis for roughly a 10-day period. Do any of you know why I may be receiving this error? is it not possible for me to block the Googlebot from crawling the 'cgi-bin'? Any and all advice/insight is very much welcome, I hope I'm being descriptive enough!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith1 -
Does a 'Certified Domain' help SEO?
I see that GoDaddy offer a 'Certified Domain' option. Does this help SEO at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy0