My Website disappeared from Google Search Results overnight
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Hello there,
I'm the owner of the Website https://cours-toujours.com/, dedicated to reviewing running shoes. My Website is pretty young and I'm currently focused on building new reviews (so I keep adding new articles, week after week, I did not really focus on the rest of the website for now).Until a few days ago, I saw growing traffic on my Website, everything seemed good and I kept adding new reviews to my website.And then suddently traffic dropped and went to 0 in 2 days (I went from 550 impressions/day to 49 impressions/day in 2 days :/)When I look in the Google Search Console, I don't see any issue:
- my sitemaps are submitted and the correct number of URLs are reported
- I don't have any Manual Action or Security Issue
- I don't have any Removal Request
Everything seems fine...
But I can barely find my website in Google Search Results.When I do a site search (site:cours-toujours.com), I find only 2 pages of results, mostly non-important pages (categories, etc.).I asked in Google Community Forums, and i got this reply about my pages being too similar to one another (https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/44880689?hl=en). But I'm not really happy with this answer, as all my pages have ~1000 words of unique content (even if of course they have the same structure as they are all dedicatd to reviewing a running shoe...)Any idea where this might come from/how I can fix the issue?
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I agree with Chris, focus on a smaller segment and get it ranking. At the same time, think of Google spending money processing your website, so whatever you have them processed, should be high quality, unique content, having the user in mind, and being well inter-linked within your site structure.
Content not being indexed is often a sign of poor site architecture or huge amounts of low-value content.
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Thanks guys for the replies.
Actually I have 1000 word review on a bit more than 100 pairs of shoes at this point. I'm working on adding more, but I did not create 1000 reviews in ~8 months. I'm writing them myself so it takes time. And the review quality is good!
Anyway, link quality or content quality does not seem to explain the extremely sudden drop in impressions and clics (from 500 impressions/day to 0 in 2 days). I'm attaching the screenshot so that you can see how sudden this was.
Also I found a lot of webmasters complaining about this phenomenon over the past months, this article explains pretty well what's going on: https://www.seotool.ee/indexed-not-submitted-in-sitemap
I've spent hours looking, I found dozens of threads in Google Community with webmasters complaining about the exact same problem, but I don't seem to find any solution/explanation to this sudden extreme drop. So I'll keep making my website better and wait, hoping that things will get back to normal at some point...
If you have any other idea/hint on what could be triggering the issue... Thanks again!
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Simon,
I've yet to run into someone who is happy with google's reason for their reduced traffic. : ) At least you got a reply and something to work with going forward.
You have a 1000 word review on each of over 1000 a pairs of running shoes. I gotta wonder how unique each of those reviews are. Sure, the order of the words may be different but how what about the variety of words on each page. How authoritative are those reviews and are they of caliber of an expert review by someone who's really put some time into running in them and then gave a thoroughly thoughtful expert review?
You are up against a lot of competition on this market and just throwing up a basic, rehashed review for each one is not going to cut it against the heavy hitters. I often tell new website marketers to REDUCE the number of products on the site and focus on developing fully developing the content and defining a niche audience for that subset. It is far better to do that than trying to start with a warehouse full of products.
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