Added Schema and Rankings Went Down
-
Hello -
We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
-
If you use the Schema WordPress plugin, it may be that you have breadcrumbs enabled. Martha van Berkel, a founder, helped me troubleshoot a similar issue and we resolve them by turning off breadcrumbs. It seems that some JS can cause odd behavior.
I believe it works better to add schema via the GTM.
SEMrush is tops at establishing your website's health, but cannot diagnose some of these happenings (no one service can).
Your site relies on quite a few plugins - I wish you the best. I do audits; let me know how I can help you.
-
You may need to login to Google Search Console and check and see if you have a manual action of some sort.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippet-manual-actions-increase-21600.html
I did some digging, there are some cases where WP plugins have added so much markup it is overdone and that can cause issues. I did not see the one you are using (Schema plugin v1.6.1) mentioned, but that does not mean it caused the issue.
Additional info
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippets-homepage-19205.html
http://www.thesempost.com/wordpress-recipe-plugins-causing-rich-snippet-manual-actions/
-
Hello!
When you state "website health" improved, what do you mean?
- Did you check your schema with the Google Rich Snippets tester and it validated? https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
- Did you go into Google Search Console and check for errors and validate that Google is finding the snippets? https://www.google.com/webmasters/#?modal_active=none
My suspicion is that the schema plugin is maybe doing other things you did not intend it to do. Did it add a noindex tag? Did it setup strange canonicals?
Without you specifically giving a page to look at, screen shots from any of the above (or other tools) or what is the specific plugin you are using, it is otherwise very difficult to figure out.
Cheers
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
-
Unknown Subdomains Ranking
In spot checking some pages that I recently launched, I found subdomains ranking in place of the domain. The strange thing is, we never set up these sub-domains and they don't exist on our server. The pages, though they're indexed with the proper title and meta-description, time out when clicked. We're operating on Drupal 7, pages launched at the beginning of the month. The other pages within the series of content are ranking properly. Any thoughts or tips to resolve this?
Technical SEO | | JordanNCU1 -
New site luanched- rankings plummeted
Hi all, we just launched a new version of our site and have seen huge drops in traffic to the homepage. Url structures were changed and now include /us at the end and a lot of the content was consolidated to make the homepage a little cleaner. We kept title tags and meta data the same. Rankings have declined significantly. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice?
Technical SEO | | perfectsearch711 -
How do we maintain keyword rankings when creating a domain?
We are creating a new corporate "marketing site" on Hubspot and connecting our existing product site to that as a sub-domain. Our existing site ranks very well for all of our targeted keywords. The existing product site will now be behind a login, so how do we transfer juice to the new site in Hubspot? Or can we?
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
My site has dropped in rankings what can i do to change this
My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/ Hi, my site has always done amazing in the rankings, for a few years i have been number one for the word gastric band hypnotherapy as well as many other keywords which includes hypno band. but in the past couple of weeks i have seen some of my keywords drop and end up on pages two and three of google instead of page one. Can anyone please give me advice on what i need to do to change this situation please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Wrong Page Ranking
Higher-level page with more power getting pushed out by weaker page in the SERPs for an important keyword. I don't care about losing the weaker page. Should I: 404 the weaker page and wait for Google to (hopefully) replace it with the stronger page? 301 the weaker page to the stronger page? NOTE: Due to poor communication between content team and myself, the weak and strong pages have similar title tags (i.e, "lawsuits" and "litigation")
Technical SEO | | LCNetwork0 -
Is SEO moz ranking tool reliable?
Good afternoon from 21 degrees C hot and sunny wetherby UK with the aroma of wetherby whalers fish and chips wafting through the office window... I'm begiining to question the vailidity of SEO moz ranking tool. Specifically for this site www.davidclick.com it ranks the site zero for term "York wedding photographer" Here is the evidence: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/ranking-25-may-12copy.jpg I question it after checking this term on PC and networks ive never used before and i get the term ranking at 5th. Can anyone verify what SERP www.davicdclick.com ranks for "York wedding photographer" and indeed why SEO Moz ranking tool is scrorring in zero. Thanks in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Schema tags - Schema.org
We have rolled out Schema tags for our homepage which has been very beneficial for us. We obviously don't want to go overboard however; can you please clarify, should Schema tags be limited to the homepage location, or implemented through the site? Thanks
Technical SEO | | hickboy50 -
Pages not ranking - Linkbuilding Question
It has been about 3 months since we made some new pages, with new, unique copy, but alot of pages (even though they have been indexed) are not ranking in the SERPS I tested it by taking a long snippet of the unique copy form the page and searching for it on Google. Also I checked the ranking using http://arizonawebdevelopment.com/google-page-rank
Technical SEO | | Impact-201555
Which may no be accurate, I know, but would give some indication. The interesting thing was that for the unique copy snippets, sometimes a different page of our site, many times the home page, shows up in the SERP'sSo my questions are: Is there some issue / penalty / sandbox deal with the pages that are not indexed? How can we check that? Or has it just not been enough time? Could there be any duplicate copy issue going on? Shouldn't be, as they are all well written, completely unique copy. How can we check that? Flickr image details - Some of the pages display the same set of images from flickr. The details (filenames, alt info, titles) are getting pulled form flickr and can be seen on the source code. Its a pretty large block of words, which is the same on multiple pages, and uses alot of keywords. Could this be an issue considered duplication or keyword stuffing, causing this. If you think so , we will remove it right away. And then when do we do to improve re-indexing? The reason I started this was because we have a few good opportunities right now for links, and I was wondering what pages we should link to and try to build rankings for. I was thinking about pointing one to /cast-bronze-plaques, but the page is not ranking. The home page, obviously is the oldest page, and ranked the best. The cast bronze plaques page is very new. Would linking to pages that are not ranking well be a good idea? Would it help them to get indexed / ranking? Or would it be better to link to the pages that are already indexed / ranking? If you link to a page that does not seem to be indexed, will it help the domains link profile? Will the link juice still flow through the site0