Our Journey back to Good Rankings.
-
17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss. The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase: hair loss. Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases.
I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could: Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart. Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for.
For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along. Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down. Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic.
Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long.
Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation. The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place. Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero. By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design. We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either.
Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016:
-
Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress. (80 pages) - proper 301's.
-
News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's.
-
Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages). 301's.
-
Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's.
-
Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%. Almost zero.
-
Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs. All of these 410'd.
-
Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed. All 410'd.
-
Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc). All 301'd to new Article URL.
Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content. It was a lot of work!
-
After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us. I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to. Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us. He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda. He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday.
-
Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site
-
Cleaned up Google Search Console fully
-
Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there.
-
Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised.
-
Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts.
-
Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media.
-
Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless: "Hi! Need help!?"
**Despite this, nothing has helped. Nothing has budged. Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January. Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it. It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up. I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience. Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years.
That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers. It hasn't worked. As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss. Its simply not there. At all. And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible. But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems.
I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post. But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.
-
-
Update:
In addition to the following happening on our /shop/ subdomain (the bread and butter of the site):
1) Stupidly moving it to shop.domain.com for 2 months, redirecting everything there, then deciding to move it back to domain.com/shop/ ....
2) Developer failing to enable canonicals resulting in the new shop install having 4+ duplicate pages for every product for about 5 months.
I have now found that the default setting for Magento store software is a 302 redirect for the 'Auto-redirect base URL' option. Our base URL changed from HTTP to HTTPS. This means that probably for about the last 9 months, our store home page has been 302'd (no link juice passing, and way too long to use a temporary flag like this).
This 302 is Magento's default option, and my developer failed to point out the devastating effect it could have on rankings if we didn't change it to "301".
Not sure if this has played a role in our lost rankings, as our store is just a sub-section of our site, and I have no idea how I am going to fix this and tell Google "Wait! Here's a 301 instead! Please restore our juice!"
-
We haven't submitted the Disavow yet. Im literally about to upload it today.
Thank you for those graphs. One comment on the first graph showing the major drop in 2012. This was also about the time that Google started changing things up in search results. It was in 2012 that I began seeing the following changes:
- We were pushed from Placement 1 by new "Google Ads" at the top of the page.
- Later we were pushed further as 5-6 ads were now above us on Page 1.
- Later, sites like American Academy of Dermatology that had barely a paragraph of content on "hair loss" began appearing above ours, simply because they are recognized medical organizations.
- Still later in 2012, we began seeing random pointless "hair care" articles written by bloggers on sites like "Huffington Post", pushing us literally off Page 1 to Page 2.
By mid 2013 we were halfway down Page 2, mostly replaced with sponsored ads, empty-content (but reputable) medical sites, and random news articles that would come and go on a weekly basis.
I remember this time period well because I was so upset by the choices Google was making. They all seemed to drastically degrade the search results quality for our key search phrase. I wasn't the only site that was getting pushed away either. There were at least 4 other hair loss sites that were just outstanding content-wise. Both quality, breadth, and depth, and they all dropped like flies.
We managed to hang on to Page 2 for another year or two. But as I pointed out above: **Our Home page and core content is completely gone from Google now. 99% of our traffic is coming from the forum rankings. With that, we see about 99 users in real time. Without it, the number drops to "2". **
-
"Do you know if any link-building has been done?" Tell me if this would qualify. I also run a couple other fairly decent ranking websites on the topic of hair loss / alopecia. One has a forum with several hundred thousand URLs also. At one point I put a link to HLT in the header of the other websites forums. It was an image link, but it resulted in tens of thousands of links to HLT from that one domain. I did the same thing on another domain I own that is a little less popular. In fact when the disavow guys were looking at my current incoming links, they found that 80% of the tens of thousands of links were coming from two sites - these two. I explicitly asked them if this move on my part could've caused damage to my rankings. They didn't seem to think so, unless it was a keyword-rich anchor text link. (something like that).
_Do you think this did maybe some Penguin damage? Three days ago I removed all links to HLT from those sites. Instead I placed a single image link to HLT on both of those sites home pages, and nowhere else. _
"Is the site set up correctly in Search Console?"
The site is run on a handful of subdirectories.
/shop/ .. /interact/ .. /news/ ... /guides/ ... /profiles/
There is a property set up for each of these in Console.
Most are set up as HTTP and HTTPS even though we're on HTTPS now.
Just so I can track the old HTTP and address any issues there."Any current warnings?"
It was a mess as it had not been looked at ... ever. But the only noteworthy warning was a mass quantity of Soft 404's that we fixed about 45 days ago. Dev also submitted faulty forum sitemap resulting in 170,000 regular 404's i console. Im cleaning that out at 1,000 per day. All other issues have been fairly minor and center almost entirely about properly redirecting dead links. Site has been up for so long that its been a massive cleanup effort. I would say 99% of everything identified in console was resolved 30-45 days ago now. None of it obviously damaging aside from the soft 404s."Any dates where Google may have hit you with a penalty"
Unfortunately we only had Analytics tracking on the home page, going back roughly 5 years. From that, and apparently some tools these guys have access to, they see no major problems in traffic or ranking drops. They did note a noticeable drop after a Panda release back in mid 2012, but then a recovery immediately after the next Panda update. Aside from that, the data is limited.I know we've made some big mistakes in the meantime. When I found out that Google required mobile functionality on sites, I signed up with a service that auto-converts your site to mobile and throws it on an m.domain.com subdomain. So for roughly 4 months in 2105, my whole (mobile) site was sitting on a subdomain that never existed before, and was a train wreck visually. Broken links, bad formatting, but it worked in Mobile and Google acknowledged our mobile issues had been fixed. I believe this was a very bad move on my part, adding a random subdomain alongside the main site being at www still.
When trying to fix the store as I mentioned, my developer forgot to enable canonicals, so the whole store had 4-6 duplicate pages for everything, and that sat, undiscovered from Nov 2015 to about April 2016. In that time, the store traffic absolutely tanked.
That being said: 99.9% of our current traffic is coming into the forums. With that, we are seeing an average of 100 users in "real-time". Without that, it drops to 2. The home page and rest of the site are absolutely gone from Google.
-
It does sound like the site was legacy and the update did take too long to occur, we have seen this same thing with other business owners on legacy CMS's who have not moved over quickly enough so it is a common issue.
I guess the thing you need to think about is the following -
1. Were all the links disavowed pure spam, most of the profile looks branded, We have seen SEOs disavow quality in the past which can have an adverse impact on the domain (see attached) I presume the disavow may have been mostly legacy spam.
2. The domain may have been hit by Panda in the past (see attached) though without seeing internal data it is hard to give a more accurate analysis.
Hope this helps,
James -
Hi,
It certainly sounds like you have been through the mill with this and it is something I see a lot of. There comes a point where fixing one thing can cause issues with another and before you know it, there could be all manner of issues at play.
Google clearly indexes your site because it is cached and not blocked but as for what could be going on, this would be impossible to tell without doing an audit, but here are a few pointers / questions.
- Is the site setup correctly in Search Console? Has Google got any current warnings, of have you had any in the past? Have you verified each iteration of the site? (non-www, www & https)
- Are you aware of any dates where Google might have hit you with a penalty of some sort? My first thought was Panda when you mentioned so many pages, but could be others too
- Do you know if any link-building has been done? Perhaps you might be caught in Penguin?
As I said, it really could be so many things that are causing this and could even be something like .htaccess rules or robots.txt blocking important elements.
-Andy
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
-
Canonicals from sub-domain to main domain: How much content relevancy matters? Any back-links impact?
Hi Moz community, I have this different scenario of using canonicals to solve the duplicate content issue in our site. Our subdomain and main domain have similar landing pages of same topics with content relevancy about 50% to 70%. Both pages will be in SERP and confusing users; possibly search engine too. We would like solve this by using canonicals on subdomain pointing to main domain pages. Even our intention is to only to show main domain pages in SERP. I wonder how Google handles it? Will the canonicals will be respected with this content relevancy? What happens if they don't respect? Just ignore or penalise for trying to do this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google Custom Search Engine: Good Idea?
I created a Google Custom Search Engine for our site, but I"m not sure implementing it is a good idea. When I tested it with the public URL, I noticed that ads show up on the search engine that could potentially move visitors away from our site to our competitors. Has anyone had success with implementing a Google Custom Search Engine? Do the pros outweigh the cons? Thanks, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
New Website Old Domain - Still Poor Rankings after 1 Year - Tagging & Content the culprit?
I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com Rankings remained pretty much non-existent. I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent. Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue. I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/ as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty? As SEO companies far and wide daily try to persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great. No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!
Algorithm Updates | | Shineband1 -
How important is Social Media for building domain authority / Google rankings? Are there any cases?
I really would like to know if someone tested the importance of Social Media for Google rankings.
Algorithm Updates | | Seeders
Are there some sites who build authority only by doing good social media?
Ofcourse, I know it is all about the mix (content, linkbuilding, social media, etc.) but how important is it?
I know many sites who rank good without any form of social media, but I do not know any sites who do only social media and rank high. I hope there are some good cases which give good insight. ps. I know it becomes more and more important...0 -
Page rank of 2 with zero SEO and a 2 month old domain?
Hello, I helped work on a website for a friend. We used wordpress, a theme from elegant themes and wrote the content over 4 days. Zero back links, no seo, etc. Well, a little on page optimization and that's about it. Oh, we did ONE back link from a review site. The domain was brand new; never registered before. About a week after it started getting indexed, it jump from no page rank to a page rank of 1. About a week later, it jumped to a page rank of 2. Again, zero seo (aside from above stated). The site is: trade lines review dot com A page rank of 2 is nothing to write home about, but given the circumstances, how is this even possible? Thanks you!
Algorithm Updates | | Friedman0 -
My Site PR lost to PR4 ! I worked as per SEOmoz Suggestion - No Traffic Drop, Organic Search is good and higher than referral or Direct Traffic !
My Site PR5 lost to PR4 ! I worked as per SEOmoz Suggestion - No Traffic Drop, Organic Search is good and higher than referral or Direct Traffic ! What might be the problem ? Nov 29-2012 my site was hacked very badly and google Blacklisted me for the first time and if you see now " it says, Past 90 days nearly 19 times my site was acted as medium to spread virus" Even thought we checked our FTP, Cpanel or Home Directory - Everything seems good. My domain which was hosted - has other domains in the same network and some are porn - those sites are injecting malicious code ! May be that's the reason or please give me some idea how to improve it !
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
How could Penguin kill my top ten rank and promote this garbage page to a #5 spot
Hey, Before penguin, I had a #9 rank for the term "yoga poses". So as many of us are doing, I started looking at my link profile... and yes, there were around 300 links from an old yoga news website (anchor: yoga poses)... that lead to the page on my site optimized for this term. The problem is they took the site down, but not properly... I.E. they generate a "not available" message for browsers, but underneath, I guess the bots can still index all the pages... so I guess they were interpreting these links as coming from a cloaked site. So, I was able to get them to remove the links... webmaster tools reports half of them gone now. What I don't get though... is how Google can give this garbage page a #5 spot for a competitive term like "yoga poses"... Check out http://www.ebmyoga.com/beginyoga.html and compare it to my page... http://www.yogaclassplan.com/yoga-poses/ This page leads to highly quality 100% unique yoga pose articles... in my mind we deliver so much more value than the site with a #5 rank. I don't understand. Any insight? Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | biomat0 -
Re-direct domain ranking higher than main domain 6 months later
Hello, I have a question regarding a couple of our in-house domains & rankings. We have our main site which we've had for 3+ years, moderately optimised. And our separate site for another publication, this was it's own stand-alone site but now that site has been removed off our servers & the old domain a straight forward http re-direct via 1&1 to the main website. The old site was removed & forward set up before October 2011, however when searching Google for 'specification online' the old domain appears position #1. We have many other domains which are http re-directs with 1&1 and none of these have causes us this issue. What else can I do to get the old domain to stop showing up on Google? Domains in questions: Main site: http://specificationonline.co.uk Old site: http://housingspecification.com If you need any further info I'll be happy to provide as we owned both domains & hosting from day 1 so can access anything required.
Algorithm Updates | | thestudio40