Ranking all but lost after new content pushed
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Okay, I thought I was following best practices. In our industry, electronic hardware, we were ranking well for a particular product line (/spacers) but we wanted to do better. We addressed several concerns that Moz found first; duplicate page titles, lack of meta-descriptions and overall lack of targeted keywords. We also took a new approach to add a better structure to our site. Instead of being presented with a list of part numbers we wanted the user to learn more about our products with content. So we added a /products page with content and a product specific page (/spacers) that is almost a definitive buyers guide.
We are attempting to answer the questions that we think our customers find most relevant. Well our customers might find it relevant but Google sure didn't. After our deployment of new content our rankings for targeted keywords in Google fell from 10-15 to 80-95
As an open ended question, could somebody explain to me why our ranks fell off a cliff?
Homepage: https://www.lyntron.com
New catalog summary page: https://www.lyntron.com/products
New content with focus to rank high: https://www.lyntron.com/spacers -
- Let's talk you can call me here?
- https://moz.com/community/users/383525
- On the right side under "Additional Contact Info"
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Thomas,
Thank you so much for taking the time to evaluate our current situation. Let me see if I can address some things that you brought up.
Have we moved to Shopify?
No. The stakeholders wanted a look and feel that of Amazon.com and McMasterCarr.com
Fix your robots.txt & make a sitemap index.
Robots.txt - I'm not sure what I need to fix in the file given your statement.
Sitemap Index - I made an index file and submitted that to google. But over time I found that single file more difficult to correct crawl errors. By creating individual sitemaps for the relevant part types I felt that was easier to manage. Is there a direct benefit from Google to have a single sitemap index covering the whole site? Am I getting penalized for doing sitemaps the way I am?Rel="canonical"
You are correct that /spacer is being canonicalized by /spacers. That was my intent. I was under the impression that if multiple pages, of similar content, was serving the same purpose I should pick one and tell the engines to focus on that. When /spacers was created we thought that page really answered the questions that people tend to ask about our product. Thus the creation of /spacers and pointing heavily to it.
Meta Descriptions too long
Agreed. I'll have to figure out how to deal with that working along side the content writer. Programmatically it's fun because every page is template driven.
301 /spacer to /spacers
I'm not sure why that is. Could you explain to me the benefit of that? I don't want /spacer to go away and it hasn't moved. We haven't rebranded the site nor changed URLs.
I'm also up for a phone conversation if you'd like to continue that way.
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Hi I am happy to cover this with you here is the crawl of https://www.lyntron.com_
| 25,908 | Pages with Duplicate Body |
| 27,326 | Pages with Duplicate Titles |
| 13,117 | Max Fetch Time |
| 24,160 | Thin Pages |
| 6,044 | Failed URLs |
| 1,410 | Duplicate Body Sets |This will work for 30 days:
Photo (big): https://imgur.com/FmVJbAU.png
Please let me know you see this I will be happy to help.
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
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**I am going to be done by Tomorrow **
Fix you robots.txt & make a sitemap index
- https://www.lyntron.com/robots.txt
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en
- https://moz.com/blog/xml-sitemaps
** I want to get the full crawl don't want to drop the conclusions but**
https://www.lyntron.com/spacer** is no index Because**
https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
Address https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
URL Encoded Address https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
Content text/html; charset=UTF-8
Status Code 200
Status
Indelibility Non-Indexable
Indelibility Status Canonicalized
Size 992.8 KB
Title 1 Spacers & Unthreaded Standoffs | Lyn-Tron
Title 1 Length 41
Meta Description 1 Spacers are used to create space between 2 objects in an assembly. In the world of Electronic Hardware and Electronic Components, spacers are most often found spacing circuit boards, motherboards, panels and doors. Lyn-Tron Spacers are unthreaded and come in Steel, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Brass and Nylon. All Lyn-Tron Electronic Hardware is made in the USA and held to the highest quality standards.
Meta Description 1 Length **404 (is way to long) **
Meta Description 1 Pixel Width 2408Tomany H1's https://youtu.be/i_xnKznRNCc
"How Many Headings Should You Use? Does the Order of Heading Tags Matter?"
Question: “Can the H1 Tag appear below the h2 tag in the code does the spider still know what’s going on?”
Answer: “yeah I wouldn’t worry about it we handle h1s and h2s very well but don’t make your entire page h1 or h2” Matt Cutts, GoogleH1-1 Spacers
H1-1 length 7
H2-1 1/8" Spacers
H2-1 length 12
H2-2 3/16" Spacers
H2-2 length 13
Canonical Link Element 1 https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
Canonical Link Element 1 Indexability Non-Indexable
Canonical Link Status 1 Indexability Status Not crawled
Word Count 4745
Text Ratio 3.63
Crawl Depth 2
Link Score
Inlinks 4
Unique Inlinks 4
% of Total 0.13
Outlinks 242
Unique Outlinks 230
External Outlinks 4
Unique External Outlinks 4
Hash 4411485c90296d40616747de3f7f40ae
Response Time 0.42
Last ModifiedYou should use a 301 from https://www.lyntron.com/spacer to https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
https://www.lyntron.com/spacers
drop the link below & site: in Google search
site:https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
- https://i.imgur.com/7lyO4JG.png Running two crawls now
- https://i.imgur.com/QdtuT8E.png Faceted navigation needs noindex is some urls
- https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lyntron.com%2F1-4in-aluminum-round-spacer-unplated%2Fpn%2FAA6341-04-0.187-00
- This might not open on your computer use The preview from URLAbove to see what I'm showing below:
- https://www.google.com/search?prvw=AHHjJUNRLFS9wnmyla4BGJzI4EXHUc3Y4w&q=previewid%3Afaf9a71c-5d30-401f-b3e6-f7eacfd09dd1&useragent=Mozilla%2F5.0+%28Linux%3B+Android+7.1.1%3B+Nexus+6+Build%2FN6F27M%29+AppleWebKit%2F537.36+%28KHTML%2C+like+Gecko%29+Chrome%2F66.0.3359.106+Mobile+Safari%2F537.36&filter=0&gws_rd=cr&newwindow=1&igu=1
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
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running deep crawl now
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Thomas,
Have you had a moment to review our situation?
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Happy to help!
When you answer a question for Google, you should make each page the answer to the question asked by the audience.
I am guessing you moved to Shopify?
I have not really had the opportunity to look at the site yet about to jump on a flight.
But I do find what you mean by spacer
https://www.lyntron.com/spacer
Or
https://www.lyntron.com/swage-spacer
I Will get you a lot more information by tomorrow night
Sincerely,
Thomas Zickell
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@ThomasZickell -
Thanks for hopping on this thread and taking a peek at our site. The site structure wasn't changed from my perspective. So I'm not sure that 301s are the primary culprit. We added a main "catalog" page (/products) and a product type page of (/spacers). The original pages and URL mapping stayed the same.
I'm interested in what your test shows.
One theory in the office is that the term 'spacers' is to broad for what we actually sell. Things like 'wheel spacers', 'dental spacers', 'tile spacers', 'inhaler spacers', etc... are more popular in searches. Our niche is very specific. So.... Perhaps our content change now informed Google what we are and they're correctly weeding us out from a search term like 'spacer'
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I am guessing you did not make page to page 301 redirects to the have you updated site structure and left the old URLs with out a without the redirect ?
I am guessing that is what happened
I can tell you what happened when I test domain just give me 48 hours.
Sincerely,
Tom
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