Site appears then disappears from Google
-
Hi, This is my first post to the Moz community. I hope someone can help me, as I'm at my wits end
Since mid to late April, my client's home page keeps dropping from Google rankings on and off on the desktop in incognito and non-incognito browsing. It seems to always be visible on mobile phones though. One day it's on page 4, the next day it's not anywhere to be found (even though some of her other pages rank). The site is here: evgeniaribinik.com
I have done some blog writing (just text) for this client over the last few months, and recently she asked for some SEO help. After looking at her website, I noticed that she had a plugin called WordPress SEO on her site. She wasn't using this for the blogs, however. I don't think she did much of anything with SEO, but she did say that for the last few years, she was always on page 3 or 4 of Google.
In mid/late April, she saw that she wasn't ranking at all for the keyword "boudoir photography nyc" anymore, despite a few years of ranking for it. I told her Yoast would be good to use. However, after she installed it, the same issues keep happening. Right now, she has Yoast and WordPress SEO plugins installed (I'm not sure if this is causing an issue as well). But I really can't figure out why she keeps going on and off page 4.
She also asked me to optimize older blogs that she wrote herself for SEO. When I look at them, they don't have meta descriptions, good titles or good keywords. I realize this is hurting her, but why would her site be fine for years and all of a sudden not now? Thank you in advance for any help you can give me!
Jill
-
In terms of why things might have changed - if nothing has changed technically on the site, then the most likely reason is simply that one of the sequence of Google algorithm updates targeting quality has impacted the site: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
I wouldn't spend too long trying to work out why it might have changed - and instead would put the energy into improving what you can.
Good luck!
-
Hi Jill,
I do not think you have to remove the plugin, it should not have an impact on the site's organic performance.
Best,
Joe
-
Hi Joel,
Thank you so much for responding to me, and for this great information! I am going to try all of your suggestions. That error you showed me is a plugin that enables her Instagram feed to display. Is this something that I should remove for better SEO?
Thank you very much again!
Jill -
Quick follow up, I did also notice that all the alt= tags on the page are empty, I would suggest optimizing each of these. This way Google will have more insight into the content on this page.
-
Hi Jill,
Certainly sounds frustrating. I would recommend finding a way to add text-content to the homepage. With the way this page is set up (all images and no text), Google most likely views this as a blank or thin content page. Here is how Google views the site's homepage.
I did see this snippet of text at the bottom of the 'text-only' version of this page which seems to indicate there is an error, may want to have the dev team take a look. Also, given the very limited amount of crawl-able text on the page, this is not going to help optimize this page for 'photography' related terms.
Text I am seeing on this page "Something is wrong. Response takes too long or there is JS error. Press Ctrl+Shift+J or Cmd+Shift+J on a Mac."
Hope this helps, feel free to follow up with any questions!
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
-
Have you changed 100's of links on your site? Tell me the why's, the how's and what's!
Hello there. If you've changed 100's of links, then I'd like for you to contribute to this thread. I've created a new URL structure for a website with 500+ posts in an effort to make it more user friendly, and more accessible to crawlers. I was just about to pull the trigger, when I started reading up on the subject and found that I might have a few surprises waiting for me around the corner. The status of my site. 500 posts 10 different categories 50+ tags No Backlinks No recent hits (according to Google Analytics) No rankings. I'm going to keep roughly 75% of the posts, and put them in different (new) categories to strengthen SEO for the topic which I'd like to rank multiple categories for, and also sorted a list with content which I'd like to 410. Created new structure created new categories Compiled list of old URLs, and new URLs New H1, Meta Title & Descriptions New tags It looks simple on paper, but I've got problems executing it. **Question 1. **What do I need to keep in mind when deleting posts, categories, and tags - besides 410, Google URL removal? Question 2. What do I do with all the old posts that I am going to re-direct? Each post has between 10-15 internal links. I've started manually removing each link in old posts before 301'ing them. The reason I'm doing this is control the UX, as well as internal link juice to strengthen main categories. Am I on the right path? On a side note, I've prepared for the 301'ing by changing the H1's, meta data and adding alt text to images. But I can't help but to think that just deleting the old posts, and copying over the content to the new url (with the original dates set) would be a better alternative. Any contribution to this thread would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | Dan-Louis1 -
Conversion drop after site move
Have just migrated current and active site to Magento 1.9 and a new hosting package (dedicated and reasonably powerful for what we need). But we seem to have had a drop in conversion rate. I don't really know whether it's anything to be concerned about the moment. I've set up extensive server level 301 redirects for old pages. Would be glad of any thoughts? Thanks you
Web Design | | seoman100 -
Moving to new site. Should I take old blog posts with me?
Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live. We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items. (That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.) So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts. I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts? All, handful, none? Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it. As far as quality of content goes, it's poor. Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting. Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | codyfrew0 -
Site structure and Visual Sitemaps
Aside from mind mapping software are there any tools ( recommended) to build a visual sitemap of the internal linking structure of a URL? I've been trying to 'show' clients the structure of a website as it pertains to internal and external links. Here is one I've tried it's "Close" - http://site-visualizer.com/ . I've been using the excel export function, import into mind meister and building it. It's a teeny bit time consuming for large websites. Site structure I feel is a valuable portion of SEO and a down and dirty visual explanation would be great. Don't get me wrong, it offers other benefits as well- it's just I'd like to free up the time it takes. Thank you in advance. Screen shots are available on the website of the organization.
Web Design | | TammyWood0 -
Is it okay to design different mobile site for different browsers
Hi, Is it okay to design different mobile site for different browsers on same url. The content of the site will also be different on different browsers. Will it be treated as black hat by Google. The mobile site & desktop site has same url across devices & browsers. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Parameters - Google Web Master Tools
In Google Web Mastertools you can stipulate which paramters you want the Googlebots to ignore when crawling your site. This is common place on pages that add some form of parameterisaton to the end of the link when a web user filters the information on a page (eg. on a clothes website someone may filter the products so they only see 'blue' jumpers, rather than 'all') This is meant to be beneficial as it means Google trawls through less duplicate content. Having now set this up, what impact will this have on my search results, if any? Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting to shoot up to no.1, but will it benefit me in any way?
Web Design | | DHS_SH0 -
Development site accidentally crawled - Will this cause problems?
We are currently developing a new version of our website and to make it easy to access for all team members, we just set it up on a server accessible via a publicly accessible domain name (ie devsite.com). There has been no SEO and no links created to this site, or so I thought. Recently, I found out that Google somehow found its way to this development site and has been indexing the pages! I was a little alarmed, as there are no links to the domain and we'll soon be transitioning all the content over to our primary production domain. I immediately created a robots.txt file to disallow access to the entire development domain. My fear is that there may be some duplicate content penalty if Google sees that the content that is on our new site (once it goes live and is pushed to our REAL domain name) was previously indexed on our test domain. We're slated to launch in 2-3 weeks. Is there anything else I should do? Should I even be worried? I'm probably a bit paranoid, but given the amount of time and effort that has gone into this new site, I love any advice or thoughts. Thank You!
Web Design | | AndrewY0 -
How to serve a Mobile & Full Site using one URL?
Hello, Does anyone know of any resources or tutorials that outline how to serve a smartphone-formatted website using the same URL as the full site? I know that one solution is using media-queries to serve a seperate CSS stylesheet, but you still have the full HTML source code. In other words, I might want to serve a smartphone & desktop user different content, but under one URL. WP Touch (Wordpress Plugin) is a perfect example of what I mean, but how is it technically achieved? It serves two different sets of HTML for smartphone & full, but using one URL http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch-pro/
Web Design | | petecampbell-bmi0