Seem to have dropped completely out of the rankings
-
Hello there,
I have a site that seems to have totally dropped out of the rankings i.e. it is now not even ranking for the name, at which it has been number 2 forever! In Moz Pro it is at 0% visibility and no keywords being ranked. No big changes in terms of the site, the pages appear to be being indexed and as far as I'm aware no dodgy backlinks.
The only change lately is that we have linked it to Google Console, added 2 content pages and done a Google Adwords campaign. These pages have been used as the landing pages for this campaign - could that have had this effect?
Could this be a RAG (Random Act of Google) or something else???
The site is homefarmlogs.co.uk. The is also a homefarmlogs.com - could this be causing a problem???
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best wishes,
Sarah.
-
Hi Sarah,
Related to the hosting provider. It is not a very useful answer, but if the price is great... The important thing here is that you are fully aware of the issue now.
Due to your website is a - co.uk - somehow it "compensates" the hosting provider issue.
Regarding the Moz tool that I used - the greatest SEO tool for quick check - is the MozBar for Chrome. https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar
You have to be logged in and set up; choosing the "dark" option.Some WP themes offer advice on how to deal with the glitches. You can use the WP website for contact, close to the review option.
About SEO Consultancy, yes, I do.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Mª Verónica
Note: Dec 23.
Did you set up your Google My Business profile? https://support.google.com/business/answer/2911778/ Miariam's article is a great guide for this: https://moz.com/blog/rank-beyond-location
-
Hi Veronica - thanks so much for your comprehensive response.
I have contacted hosting re the location and they said:
'The data center in which your website is hosted is located in London, UK. Our Head Quarters are located in Bulgaria and the IP network is owned by us so it may show the owner to be in Bulgaria in some checkers. However, the server is located in the UK.'
What do you think? Does this sound credible? I'm not overly impressed with them tbh but I can't face moving all my sites!
I also submitted a whole new sitemap following the https change but you are right - the homepage wasn't being indexed. It seems there was a soft 404 and when I went on to the site it looks like someone had inadvertently removed a section which meant there was barely any content. So I have replaced it and asked Google to reindex it. I think this has improved the speed issue as well.
The only issue I see now is that for some reason it doesn't see the mobile version in the same way it loads... any ideas?
Re the meta descriptions I'm wondering if the theme is also trying to add meta tags. I will take a look at this. How did you get that Moz report btw?
Also do you do any SEO consultancy?
Best wishes,
Sarah.
-
Hi Sarah,
-
I can see a few issues. First, if you check in Google
" site:homefarmlogs.co.uk " the website is there, but not the homepage. -
Did you include the new website, i. e. after the migration from http to https into Google Search Console? Also, check into the GSC if you have a manual penalisation.
-
I can see multiple meta descriptions. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vvsh9BdiG5NsOZaXY0tgdSgvUa1KQ_04/view?usp=sharing
-
Maybe, you might use the Yoast plugin for write down the meta tags and the images alt tags.
-
The website appears located in Roumania, you might need to contact your host provider.
-
The speed of the homepage is over 3 sec. Into Google Search Console you will find accurate data on that regard.
Hope these helps. Good luck!
Mª Verónica
-
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
-
Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more. Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us. I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape. What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetBit0 -
Drop in Indexed pages
Hope everyone is having an Awesome December! I first noticed a drop in my index in the beginnings of November. My site drop in indexed pages from 1400 to 600 in the past 3-4 weeks. I don't know the cause of it, and would like the community to help me figure out why my indexing has dropped. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to read this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BSC0 -
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
How to rank for difficult terms
I am helping launch a new business venture that sells oak furniture in the UK. The key product terms are along the lines of; oak bed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pretige12
oak dining table
oak chairs etc which are very popular search terms. Im used to being able to hang of local or branded search which arent available in this project. The domain is around 12 months old, it has few inbound links which we are working on now with an overseas freelancer (keeping an eye on them). The pages of the site are unique-content rich and the titles and other meta boxes are ticked. What else would the experts recommend?0 -
Traffic has dropped off a cliff
I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why? www.UltimateBasicTraining.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports1 -
Could this URL issue be affecting our rankings?
Hi everyone, I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back. The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page: www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404: www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404] I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include: www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website. This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering... Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gmorgan0