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thanks Donna, much appreciated.

We're having a meeting about it on Wednesday with developers and marketing. We know the site is slow, we're working on a new back end to the site that will increase speed significantly, but it's still 6 months away. I think it will need to be brought up in the Wednesday meeting.

The one caveat is that the site as always been slow (even slower!). Maybe google have lost patience.

Thanks Donna

To your question about whether the dropped pages have healthy link profiles, do you know how to identify the pages that were indexed that are no longer indexed?

Thanks very much for your feedback Donna.

We've identified a strong correlation between a sharp drop in indexed pages around 18 September and our drop in organic search traffic. We're stumped as to why google sharply reduced the number of indexed pages. There was a similar drop around the end of April but this had little influence on our organic search traffic.

Does anyone know why this would occur for a reason other than removing the pages or no-indexing pages?

Thanks for your response. It hasn't been a gradual drop off of organic search traffic. It can be pinpointed to 18 September. That's why I was wondering if anything happened around that time to cause the sudden drop.

Organic traffic to our website has dropped 35% since 18 September 2017 to date. From 1 January to 18 September 2017 organic traffic was up by just under 1% over all (Google up by 1.32%). Paid search traffic over the same time has remained steady. There is nothing we can think of that we've done that has caused the drop. We had an issue with Google page speed test failing when running a test but we resolved this issue on 20 November and in that time we've seen an even greater drop (44% in the last week).

The drop is seen across the 3 main search engines, not just Google, which points toward something we've done, but as mentioned, we can't think of any significant change we made in September that would have such negative effects. There is little difference across devices.

Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic?

Any help gratefully received.

Hi Nigel

Thanks for your response, much appreciated. We're aware it's a mess. We're currently rebuilding the back end from scratch, which will solve the structural problems but completion is 6 months away.

We've checked htaccess, it's not that. We have rel canonical on almost everything to fix the issue where pages show for the wrong URLs etc, it’s not ideal but fixing it is a massive job given we just need to keep it going another 6 months. We want to avoid work we will be throwing away, unless there are big wins.

Whilst communicating this to you my developer has found a fix. He said 'I’ve had to regenerate some of the SVGs, looks like someone got creative with now they built the SVG, I’ve now taken out all the creativity and hard coded the data into them.'

So it sounds very site specific.

thanks again Nigel - I've now clocked Carousel Projects UK.

Mat

When running our domain through google's page speed insights I'm getting the error message 'An error occurred while fetching or analyzing the page' at around 65% load. I'm concerned it's affecting our organic rankings. The domain is https://www.scottscastles.com/

When testing in https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/ it is also failing at around 70% with the message 'It's taking longer than expected. You can leave this tab open and check back in a little while. We'll have your results soon.' but the results never come.

I've tried testing on a few different speed testing sites without failures (https://tools.pingdom.com, https://gtmetrix.com, https://www.webpagetest.org and a few others). We’re stumped as everything appears correct and was working but now isn't. Is this Google or us, or a combination of the two?

Any help greatly appreciated!