Our site dropped by April 2018 Google update about content relevance: How to recover?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

After Google's confirmed core update in April 2018, we dropped globally and couldn't able to recover later. We found the update is about the content relevance as officially stated by Google later. We wonder how we are not related in-terms of content being ranking for same keywords over years. And we are expecting to find a solution to this. Are there any standard ways to measure the content relevancy?  Please suggest!

Thank you

[vtmoz]

Hi,

Thanks a TON for all the analysis and insights. Just mind blowing info.

Unfortunately we switched to different versions of the site and the recent one will be stable for years and further changes will be handled very carefully without complete transformation.

Our open source crm  page dropped from April this year; but the link from capterra was removed in 2018 only. They removed our product from the list and they no more link directly to the websites (you can see the page now). Not sure why we lost traffic for this page all of a sudden even though there is no much ranking difference for main keywords of high search volume. We are going to investigate this and bring back the page to the normal traffic.

Yes, we are trying to rank for "crm" as primary keyword. Do you think that we are not doing well for "crm" as we dropped for "open source crm" page?

Thanks

[effectdigital]

You kind of dropped a bit but not in a way which affects you very much (apparently, according to Ahrefs)

https://d.pr/i/HBzKpj.png (screenshot of estimated SEO keywords and traffic according to Ahrefs)

You did lose a lot of keywords, but many seem to have since recovered and it didn't seem it actually impact your SEO traffic estimates much at all

SEMRush has a neat (relatively) new tool which looks at more accurate traffic estimates across the board (not just limited to SEO):

https://d.pr/i/x41GvK.png

Again it does show a bit of a dent around April 2018. If I was going to use SEMRush data to look at this, I'd use the traffic analytics tool not the 'normal' SEO estimate charts from SEMRush (which IMO aren't very good, hence using the Ahrefs one in place of that)

This is what your site looked like in Feb 2018 before the keyword drops:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180224042824/https://www.vtiger.com/

This is what your site looked like later in June 2018:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180606021616/https://www.vtiger.com/

Completely different!

This is what your site looks like now: https://www.vtiger.com/

Again radically different. Maybe you just have a bad case of 'disruptive behavior' where Google is unwilling to rank you well, because the site keeps radically changing in terms of design and content. Sometimes doing too many changes too fast can really put Google off! 3 different designs inside of 1 year is pretty crazy

After each change, your home-page's Page Title was completely different:

Feb 2018 version: Customer Relationship Management | CRM Software - Vtiger

June 2018 version: Vtiger CRM | Customer Relationship Management Software

Current version: CRM | Customer Relationship Management System - Vtiger CRM

In my opinion everything that was done around June 2018 was a huge mistake that you are suffering for now and recovering from gradually. The June 2018 design was horrible, way worse than the Feb 2018 or current one (both were better). If a designer doesn't do a good job, don't just 'go ahead' with a terrible site design just because you paid for it

In addition to that in June 2018 your page title didn't 'begin' with the term (or a synonym of the term) "CRM". In Feb 2018 and on the current version, you either opened with "CRM" or a synonym of "CRM" which is better for SEO. The June 2018 version of the site was really bad and also less well optimised as well (that seems really obvious to me)

Part of me actually feels that the Feb 2018 version of the site was best for SEO. It did a better job of making your USPs (value propositions) stand out to the user and search engines. It blended nice, app-styled UX with functionality that was more than just 'button links'

The current version isn't bad, it certainly looks nicer visually - but the June 2018 version was a bit of a house of horrors. It makes sense it would have been active within the boundaries of the times you got dented because, it's just a bit shocking to be honest. In the Feb 2018 version of your site, more of the individual product links were listed in the top-line nav. Now they are still there but 'hidden' in drop-downs, that could be affecting things too

If I look at the technical SEO of the Feb 2018 site I can see it was relatively streamlined in terms of resource deployment:

https://d.pr/i/957ZjP.png

... but by June 2018, there were way too many resources for one homepage to be pulling in. Not only did it look plainer and uglier than before (and less helpful, with worse SEO) it was probably also laggier to boot:

https://d.pr/i/hGjfCW.png

Ugh! 89 HTTP requests!? Get outta' here

Now things seem a lot better on that front:

https://d.pr/i/7olDcI.png

So I think this is more evidence that the short-lived June 2018 site was pretty sucky and you guys bailed on it at light-speed (rightly so it was terrible!)

The question: did you see ranking drops for "CRM" related keywords in the period surrounding April 2018? Say for example, in April, May, June and July of 2018?

I'd say that you did, according to an (extremely rough) ranking movements export from Ahrefs:

https://d.pr/i/CuGsRT.png

Actual data export (formatted) here: https://d.pr/f/pwnrIF.xlsx

So which CRM related URL, was responsible for the most CRM related ranking losses which Ahrefs happened to pick up on?

https://d.pr/i/rCQ8LF.png (table image)

https://d.pr/i/7SJPbt.png (ugly bar chart)

Clearly the URL most responsible for all the drops was this one:

https://www.vtiger.com/open-source-crm/

... so how has this URL changed?

Infuriatingly, the Wayback Machine has barely any records of this URL, so closest I can get to ... just before the end of April 2018, is actually December 2017:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171226021957/https://www.vtiger.com/open-source-crm/

... it looks basically the same as it looks now. No major changes. But wait! On the old version of your homepage,  the footer links to the open source CRM were bigger and more prominent than they are now. Another thing, those footer links used to be marked up with itemprop=url, now they are not (could that be making a difference? All I can say is that the coding is different)

Another question would be, between April and July 2018 - did you lose any CRM related links that were worth a lot?

Actually, apparently you did lose a few.  Check some of these out:

https://d.pr/i/Zg5XER.png (MEGA screenshot, but first page of results only)

https://d.pr/f/NetqVM.png (full export, lost links which may be about 'CRM', April through July 2018 - raw and unformatted export, open the CSV file in Excel!)

Losing a CRM related link from Capterra, online peer review software experts? Yeah that could hit you hard. Most of the Mashable ones are still there, they are just redirected - but the Capterra one:

https://blog.capterra.com/free-and-open-source-crm/

... that could sting. You used to have a link with anchor text like this:

"for a price starting at about $700" - but now it's gone!

You might be thinking, aha Effect - you silly sausage! Clearly it was a comment link that got pushed down or removed by admins / mods, not a 'real' link Google would have been counted. But no I say, and I have proof to back up that denial:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170930101939/http://blog.capterra.com/free-and-open-source-crm/

That is the same post in April 2018, if you Ctrl+F for "for a price starting at about $700" - you will FIND the in-content link, which actually did matter, which Capterra have removed from their content

I am sure that in the link data you will find other such examples of lost quality links. Some will be duds and false-positives (like the Mashable ones) but some will be legit removals

By the way, although the Mashable links to you are still live, Mashable have 302 redirected the old URLs for the blog posts instead of 301 redirecting them. This means those posts, if they were valued and accrued a lot of backlinks - have been cut off from their own backlinks (as 302s pass no SEO juice). As such links contained inside of them are largely nullified (d'oh! Thanks Mashable)

What this illustrates is that, your site changed too much, the way links are formed changed, the design went  through a really bad patch and also you've lost some high quality backlinks. An SEO legacy doesn't last forever, links get removed over time

In the end, these convergence of issues are almost assuredly leading your site through a tough spot. That's what I'd imagine, from a very very top-line look into this issue

[ClaytonJ]

Had a quick look at semrush..

[vtmoz]

Thanks for looking into this. We have dropped post April 18 update as per the historical data we have; and not around Jan/Feb 18.

Could you please let me know where did you get the data? So, I will look into and try to correlate with what we have.

Thank you.

[ClaytonJ]

Hi

Why do you believe a penalty in April 18.  The site looks like a penalty of some sorts in the UK, in Jan/Feb 18 and the US etc. is clear.

Not clear on why April?

Regards

[vtmoz]

We dropped for "crm". Site is vtiger.com. Could you please give some clue on this? It'll be really grateful and helpful.

[effectdigital]

Difficult to say without seeing the site, the content and the keywords. Because different query-spaces and search entities are thematically different, the ways to 'become relevant' to each of them can be highly variable in nature. If I could just see an example, it would be much easier to assess why Google has changed its mind in terms of your site's perceived relevance

What you should know about Google is that they truly believe, all of their updates make Google's search results generally more accurate (and better for users) on average, so a roll-back is extremely unlikely. If you have been pinned by a certain algorithm change, it's likely to keep hurting you until you adhere to Google's 'new standards' (which you might argue are lower in your particular niche, but regardless they're not listening)

Sometimes fairy-tales come true and 'Google glitches' get 'undone', resulting in some sites regaining their lost rankings. This is 0.001% of most situations. Usually what happens is, people get red in the face and angry with Google, argue the toss and see their sites disintegrate as a result. Mathematical algorithms don't care if you're mad or not, they don't care what you expect

With an example, I could give an un-biased 3rd party opinion on why Google is 'doing this' to your site, but it won't result in a quick fix. It will likely result in some weeks of hard graft and further investment

All of the 'standard' ways to measure content relevancy are things like, see how many times your keyword(s) are mentioned in your content. But the highest relevancy you can demonstrate is nothing to do with keyword deployment, it's matching your site's unique 'value proposition' with Google's perception of the values which the searchers (within your query-space) hold

Maybe there's been a shift and they suddenly value price over service, thus Google shakes up their results to suit. I'm not saying keyword deployment isn't part of the issue, what I'm saying is that the most 'relevant' site is the one which the largest proportion of connected searches, wish to find. It's more than just linguistic semantics and keyword-play (hope that makes sense)