Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
-
Hello,
We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
-
Hi Kristina,
Thank you very much for taking the time to review our site.
These 15000 pages were basically Layered Navigation pages. We did not feel that they were useful for Google, so we used to block them through robots.txt. However the Google bots got them somehow into their index. So then we added canonical tags on our pages and removed the block from robots.txt (In June 2015). Finally Google bots removed those pages from the index due to the canonical tags. We have around 2000 "real" pages on our website. Therefore right now it seems to us that Google's Index is showing the right number of pages. This has been the case since Sept 2015, but our rankings have stayed low.
-
Hi Nancy,
To be clear, when you say that there were 15,000 blocked pages, do you mean that Google reported that its crawler was blocked from crawling them? Or that Google was blocking them itself, thinking that they're malware or something like that?
The term "blocked" makes me think there's a technical issue here, not a penalty. Were these 15,000 pages important pages? I see that Google still has around 1,950 of your sites' pages in its index. How many should it have?
Best,
Kristina
-
Thanks for your insight and help Once Again!
Yes, at that time we dropped because we were attacked with tons of links from foreign countries. At that time we reviewed all of our back-links and used the disavow feature of Google Search Console.
-
Hi NancyH, I wouldn't use ebay.com as a comparison, with a DA of 95 any page speed issues are trumped by the backlink portfolio. I'm not seeing anything else that sticks out as an issue, I did notice that the peak of first page results was in Mar 2014, during the summer of 2014 there seems to have been the biggest dip and you have rebounded a bit since this summer of this year, sitting at about 769 first page results. Do you remember if anything changed with the site in the spring/summer of 2014? Have you dug into your analytics to see if any of those metrics changed around the same time? That is about all of the insight I can give without doing a full audit of the site. Maybe someone else in the forums can offer additional insight.
-
Hi VERBInteractive,
Thanks for looking into our issue and responding. I agree with you but improving our page speed over mobile devices is a challenge. Our development team is working this issue. We noticed many other ecommerce website (for instance ebay.com ) are still doing well over search although their page speed on Mobile devices are poor. Could you look further and see if you notice any other issue on our website?
-
Hi Nancy,
Have you explored your page speed on mobile devices? I noticed a big drop in the spring of this year (although it does look like you are slowly regaining a lot of first page results). This would have been right around google's algorithm change to favor mobile ready sites. If you look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thecpapshop.com%2F&tab=mobile you will see that although the user experience score is pretty good the speed score is pretty low. See what opportunities there you can fix.
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
-
SEMrush vs GA rankings drop since February and December 2018?
I am wondering if someone can help me understand what's going on with our site. We had a 50% drop in the number of keywords ranking from February 2018 to October in SEMrush. Looking at SEMrush, I am actually seeing a drop after 2/208 with many competitor's sites as well. We saw moderate improvement in November, but around December 6th, we started seeing a decline the number of keywords ranking again. In Google Analytics, there was a 10-15% drop in traffic after February 2018, which recovered September to December, but since early December, there is a drop again. In GWT, I am seeing something similar to analytics with impressions and clicks. We have done some SEO the past couple of years, but we have taken care to do things white-hat so as not to incur a penalty. We have also invested in writing content for our blog on a regular basis. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Competitor link profile shocking - yet still out ranking!
Howdy fellow Mozzer's,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TimHolmes
I have been doing some background seo checking on a competitor in my small "insurance niche" to try and see why they have recently shot up the listings and are now consistently out ranking us.
We have quality content on our site and have always taken an approach of trying to be whiter than white when it comes to developing out SEO plans. The site in question has recently moved ahead of us (along with some aggregators e.g. confused.com) possibly due to shifting patterns from possible algorithm changes favouring brand or could it be a case that Google has dropped a ball when it comes to checking back links as the competitors site is 99% linked to link farms, link submission sites, directories and lots of other spammy/poor quality sites. We do not feel they are doing anything from a content stand to justify their sudden propulsion up the ranks. I am reluctant to pursue dodgy tactics to help get out site back in position as I feel it could then contribute and hurt us down the line. Does anyone know how I can combat against their poor QUANTITY over QUALITY banklink profile that is surely helping them at the minute? At a bit of a loss so any help would be greatly appreciated. aRTu4cT0 -
Whay are low-quality exact match domains still ranking well for our biggest term?
There are a number of low-quality “exact-match” domains that are ranking well for the term “locum tenens”. I don’t want to specifically mention any sites, but there are some with poor content and very few quality backlinks that are on page one. The only reason I can see for them ranking so well is the fact that “locum” and/or “tenens” are in the URL. It’s very frustrating because we have worked hard to do all the right things (regular blogging, high-quality content, quality backlinks, etc.) to build our domain authority and page authority so they are better than these sites, yet they still out-rank us. Our site is www.bartonassociates.com. Could it have something to do with the term “locum tenens”, which is a latin phrase? Is it possible that because it is a latin term that it somehow slipped through the cracks and avoided the update that was supposed to eliminate this? If so, what can we do to get some justice?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ba_seomoz0 -
Google places VS position one ranking above the places.
Hi Guys, Will creating a new Google places listing for a business have any effect their current position one spot for their major geo location keyword? I.e restaurants perth - say they are ranking no 1 above all the places listings if they set up a places listing would they lose that position and merge with all the other places accounts? Or would they have that listing as well as the places listing? I have been advised it could be detrimental to set up the places account if this is the case does anyone know any ways around this issue as the business really needs a places page for google maps etc. Appreciate some guidance Thanks. BC
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bodie0 -
Why does Google recommend schema for local business/ organizations?
Why does Google recommend schema for local business/ organizations? The reason I ask is I was in Structed Data Testing Tool, and I was running some businesses and organizations through it. Yet every time, it says this "information will not appear as a rich snippet in search results, because it seems to describe an organization. Google does not currently display organization information in rich snippets". Additionally, many of times when you do search the restaurant or a related query it will still show telephone number and reviews and location. Would it be better to list it as a place, since I want to have its reviews and location show up thanks? I would be interested to hear what everyone else opinions are on this thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterRota0 -
Video & Image Spam?
We have 50 product videos and 100 product images to distribute. For the sake of increasing nofollow Linking Root Domains, my manager wants to distribute them in the following manner: 10 Company profiles on 10 video sites, each with 5 videos. The sites to be used are sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc. 10 Company profiles on 10 image sites, each with 10 images. The sites to be used are sites like Photobucket, Flickr, imageshack, Imgur, etc. My thoughts are that we should stick to one service for video (YouTube) and one service for images (Flickr). We can increase nofollow LRD's by doing some quality blog commenting. Keep in mind that the product images look great, but the videos are amateur and consist of someone holding the product and discussing it's features. Each vid is around one minute in length. What do you think of the two approaches and which do you prefer? Do you think creating many profiles will come off too spammy? We are also weathering a Panda penalty and submitting a Reinclusion Request to Google within the next two weeks. Your thoughts are very welcomed and appreciated. Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Google Places
My client offers training from many locations within the UK. These locations/venues are not owned by them, however I see no problem in setting up a different listing for each location in Google Places. At the end of the day if a user searched for “Training London” they are looking for somewhere that they can book a course that would be in their local area. As my client has a “venue” there I think there is a good argument to say that your listing would be valid. What are your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cottamg0