Very strange, inconsistent and unpredictable Google ranking

[fenixbazaar]

I have been searching through these forums and haven't come across someone that faces the same issue I am. The folks on the Google forums are certain this is an algorithm issue, but I just can't see the logic in that because this appears to be an issue fairly unique to me.

I'll take you through what I've gone through. Sorry for it being long.

Website URL: https://fenixbazaar.com

1. In early February, I made the switch to https with some small hiccups. Overall however the move was smooth, had redirects all in place, sitemap, indexing was all fine.

2. One night, my organic traffic dropped by almost 100%. All of my top-ranking articles completely disappeared from rank. Top keyword searches were no longer yielding my best performing articles on the front page of results, nor on the last page of results. My pages were still being indexed, but keyword searches weren't delivering my pages in results. I went from 70-100 active users to 0.

3. The next morning, everything was fine. Traffic back up. Top keywords yielding results for my site on the front page. All was back to normal. Traffic shot up. Only problem was the same issue happened that night, and again for the next three nights. Up and down.

4. I had a developer and SEO guy look into my backend to make sure everything was okay. He said there were some redirection issues but nothing that would cause such a significant drop. No errors in Search Console. No warnings.

5. Eventually, the issue stopped and my traffic improved back to where it was. Then everything went great: the site was accepted into Google News, I installed AMP pages perfectly and my traffic boomed for almost 2 weeks.

6. At this point numerous issues with my host provider, price increases, and incredibly outdated cpanel forced me to change hosts. I did without any issues, although I lost a number of articles albeit low-traffic ones in the move. These now deliver 404s and are no longer indexed in the sitemap.

7. After the move there were a number of AMP errors, which I resolved and now I sit at 0 errors. Perfect...or so it seems.

8. Last week I applied for hsts preload and am awaiting submission. My site was in working order and appeared set to get submitted. I applied after I changed hosts.

9. The past 5 days or so has seen good traffic, fantastic traffic to my AMP pages, great Google News tracking, linking from high-authority sites. Good performance all round.

10. I wake up this morning to find 0 active people on my site. I do a Google search and notice my site isn't even the first result whenever I do an actual search for my name. The site doesn't even rank for its own name! My site is still indexed but search results do not yield results for my actual sites. Check Search Console and realised the sitemap had been "processed" yesterday with most pages indexed, which is weird because it was submitted and processed about a week earlier. I resubmitted the sitemap and it appears to have been processed and approved immediately. No changes to search results.

11. All top-ranking content that previously placed in carousal or "Top Stories" in Google News have gone. Top-ranking keywords no longer bring back results with my site: I went through the top 10 ranking keywords for my site, my pages don't appear anywhere in the results, going as far back as page 20 (last page). The pages are still indexed when I check, but simply don't appear in search results. It's happening all over again!

Is this an issue any of you have heard of before? Where a site is still being indexed, but has been completely removed from search results, only to return within a few hours? Up and down? I suspect it may be a technical issue, first with the move to https, and now with changing hosts. The fact the sitemap says processed yesterday, suggests maybe it updated and removed the 404s (there were maybe 10), and now Google is attempting to reindexed? Could this be viable?

The reason I am skeptical of it being an algorithm issue is because within a matter of hours my articles are ranking again for certain keywords. And this issue has only happened after a change to the site has been applied.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

All sounds very strange - when you look in GSC and refine down to the page level looking at a few individiual pages such as the ones you know havnt been showing up in results (over the time period this has been going on) are you seeing massive drops in impressions and clicks ? I think worth checking this just to double check that Google is dropping them out of the index for sure rather than it being simply a ranking position drop.

Thanks for commenting on my thread too

All BEst

Dan

[fenixbazaar]

Hi Donald. Thanks for your response!

I see what you're saying, but my issue is a little different. I always check my site's ranking while either signed out or incognito. Even when doing this, particular keywords and articles rank really well: there's really no difference between being signed in and incognito and where these top-ranking articles place in search results.

Organic traffic makes up around 85% of my traffic, so there's no doubt that my traffic is healthy, but the problem is actually that over the span of anywhere between 5 and 18 hours at random times, my site completely disappears from rank. This is noticeable in both GA -- where my traffic falls to essentially zero and organic traffic is non-existent -- and in search itself, with keywords and even the site name itself not yielding a result for the site.

Yesterday, for example, a search for "Fenix Bazaar" yielded zero results for the site itself, only articles that quoted the site. It's returned as the top result now although I'm waiting for Google to rebuild a structured result of my site. Top keyword searches now see my site back on the homepage.

My concern is that this happens at all. What could possibly be causing such a significant swing? I am looking into javascript errors as per Sally's request.

[donsilvernail]

FenixBazaar,

When you are searching for your website on google, are you logged in to google? If you are logged in google will show you personally results you want to see. Like rich snippets for your articles. When you log out and do the same searches you rankings will all disappear.

Try using a private web browser when testing search results.

A search for your domain at SEMrush shows very healthy traffic since Novemeber. How are you testing your articles rank?

[Sally94]

Hi FenixBazaar,

This does seem to be a strange issue and I can't seem to find anything obvious.

• Appears when searching site:"URL" in google

• Renders properly in screaming frog.

-seems to load fine and should realistically rank

My only thought is that there is a Javascript error that Google isn't liking. When I load the page there is a lot of issues in the console. Maybe look into clearing some of these.

See image with console errors for https://fenixbazaar.com/2017/02/15/for-honor-factions-guide-best-faction-to-choose/

iQg16

[fenixbazaar]

A tl;dr summary of the above.

1. Searching for "fenix bazaar" doesn't return a result for the actual site, only sites where the site is referenced or sourced.

2. All top-performing keyword searches for every article no long yields a result for the site. "For Honor factions" for example once yielded a "Top Story" rank in google, and a rich snippet for this article: https://fenixbazaar.com/2017/02/15/for-honor-factions-guide-best-faction-to-choose/

Overnight, that story has gone from being one of if not the top-ranked article in Google, to not appearing in search results at all for "For Honor factions".

3. No warnings in Search Console. Resubmitted sitemap. Not robots file issues or blocking.