My Website disappeared from Google Search Results overnight
-
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?
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Website is not indexing
Hi All, My website URL is https://thepeopeople.com and it is neither caching nor indexing in Google. Earlier the URL was https://peopeople.com. I have redirected it to https://thepeopeople.com by using 301 redirections. I have checked the redirection and everything else is fine and I have submitted all the URLs in search console also, still the website is not indexing. Its been more than 5 months now. Please suggest a solution for this. Thanks in Advance.
Technical SEO | | ResultfirstGA0 -
How to use Google search console's 'Name change' tool?
Hi There, I'm having trouble performing a 'Name change' for a new website (rebrand and domain change) in Google Search console. Because the 301 redirects are in place (a requirement of the name change tool), Google can no longer verify the site, which means I can't complete the name change? To me, step two (301 redirect) conflicts with step there (site verification) - or is there a way to perform a 301 redirect and have the tool verify the old site? Any pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated. Cheers Ben
Technical SEO | | cmscss0 -
Is my website indexed correctly in Google - www.couponshop.co.uk
Our website www.couponshop.co.uk has just had a relaunch after a change of direction.
Technical SEO | | LaurenGT
A lot of the pages were redirected. When I checked the indexing of the website on Google, I put site:couponshop.co.uk and only two pages come up, but when I put site:www.couponshop.co.uk they all show up.
Is this correct or are we doing something wrong?0 -
404 or rel="canonical" for empty search results?
We have search on our site, using the URL, so we might have: example.com/location-1/service-1, or example.com/location-2/service-2. Since we're a directory we want these pages to rank. Sometimes, there are no search results for a particular location/service combo, and when that happens we show an advanced search form that lets the user choose another location, or expand the search area, or otherwise help themselves. However, that search form still appears at the URL example.com/location/service - so there are several location/service combos on our website that show that particular form, leading to duplicate content issues. We may have search results to display on these pages in the future, so we want to keep them around, and would like Google to look at them and even index them if that happens, so what's the best option here? Should we rel="canonical" the page to the example.com/search (where the search form usually resides)? Should we serve the search form page with an HTTP 404 header? Something else? I look forward to the discussion.
Technical SEO | | 4RS_John1 -
Slow website
Hi I have just migrated from a custom written php/mysql site to a site using wordpress and woocommerce. I couldnt believe the drop in speed . I am using a few plugins for wordpress - contact forms / social sharing. and I have a few woocommerce plugins for taking payment etc. I am hosting images css's and js's on W3 Total Cache and MAXCDN hoping to speed the site up but tools at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt sometimes show that the time between browser request and reply can be between 1 and 15 secs. I have searched all day looking for a post I read about two months ago with a tool that seems to look at server responce and redirect processing etc hoping it would help but cant find it. If anyone knows what I am talking about I would appreciate them posting a link The site is http://www.synergy-health.co.uk and an example of an inner page is http://www.synergy-health.co.uk/home/shop/alacer-emergen-c-1000-mg-vitamin-c-acai-berry-30-packets-8-4-g-each/ Any suggestions please? Perhaps I have w3total cache set wrong? Also, as the has been tanked and is in freefal iin google ranking since January would this be a good time to change the structure of Url from home/shop/product to domain.name/brand/product? Thanks in advance !
Technical SEO | | StephenCallaghan0 -
How to search HTML source for an entire website
Is there a way for me to do a "view source" for an entire website without having to right-click every page and select "view source" for each of them?
Technical SEO | | SmartWebPros0 -
Google plus
With Google search plus your world, would i see results ONLY from Google plus followers ? or from someone who is my facebook friend as well.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Is this against google rules
Hi i am wanting to know if this is against google rules. I am building a website which will have lots of different sections and i wanted to know if you were allowed to have a new domain name pointing to a section of the site. so for example if i had a site with a domain name of manchester and then i wanted a section of the site to be called www.manchester.com/complimentary health I want to know if to help with traffic to the site and to have a better domain name, if it was allowed to have a new domain name pointing to that section of the site which could be called www.complimentaryhealth.com and have that pointing to the section. would love to hear your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860