Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped

[NancyH]

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!

[NancyH]

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.

[KristinaKledzik]

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

[NancyH]

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.

[VERBInteractive]

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.

[NancyH]

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?

[VERBInteractive]

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,