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Has anyone else noticed a huge increase over the past couple weeks in crawl issues in their dashboards? Without being able to see historical data week over week, I can't tell what's been added. Is this some update with the tool? I'm not seeing any health issues with this feature on the Moz Health page, it just seems strange that I'm seeing this across all our accounts.

Hey Matt! Hmm, I don't think I've used Keyword Explorer for that purpose, yet. I still need to go back and really dive into the tool. I'll check it out! Thanks!

Good point on the disavowed/backlinks! I think it's so easy to get sucked into the nitty gritty details and lose sight of those bigger picture initiatives that will have a bigger impact in the long run. At least, I know that's something I struggle with.

Right. Like I said, I'm sure it's not just a simple tweak to metadata or copy, and I've looked at their link profile compared to ours, authority, etc. I've noticed that their internal linking is kind of insane (10+ links within a short paragraph plus additional "popular links" at the bottom), but none of this is new for them, even of this year. It doesn't look like they have made any updates recently that would have boosted their performance all of a sudden, which is why I'm dumbfounded as to what happened.

Ah, my bad, I didn't specify that I'm actually referring to competitor landing pages rather than our own. It's strange because the landing pages we had ranking were optimized for specific terms, have on-page copy, etc., but over the last couple weeks, a few competitors overtook our sites and their pages aren't optimized at all and I've looked through archived versions and there haven't been any changes.

Has anyone else noticed their rank positions falling to competitor sites that aren't optimized and are less relevant? I've noticed that we've lost some rankings or have dropped over the past few weeks and the competitor pages that have replaced us haven't been optimized, aren't as relevant, and it doesn't look like there has been any updates (looking through archived versions). For example, their main "shoes" gallery is ranking for more specific shoe types, like "sandals", and "sandals" isn't even mentioned in their metadata and they have no on-page copy. Their DA is slightly higher, but our sites have a denser link profile (although, yes, I do need to go through and see what kind of links, exactly, we've gained).

Has anyone else seen this happen recently, or have any ideas of why or what we could do to get our rank positions back? My main initiatives have been to create and implement fresh on-page copy, metadata, and manage 404s/301 redirects, but I'm thinking this issue is beyond a quick copywriting tweak.

Hi Trenton -

Sure. Here are the 2 that I'm most waiting to anniversary the platform launch for: http://bit.ly/1XgbhtZ and http://bit.ly/1Xvikzl.

I've also seen http://bit.ly/1XvivuF take a hit in homepage traffic (mobile traffic to the homepage is down more than desktop. The desktop vs. mobile performance is kind of a case by case situation, since I haven't really seen any patterns that encompass all brands).

Thanks!

Hey Matt! I'm still trying to figure this out. I'm wondering if it's in part a tracking "issue" or inconsistency. I was looking through both desktop and mobile traffic and they are both down, so it's not like one or the other is the main driver. Organic traffic contribution continues to be down year over year.

Before we moved our sites over to the new platform, some traffic had been directed to a Country Selection page (I can't remember all the details behind this at the moment). When comparing year over year data (we use Omniture), we're including traffic that came through the Country Selection page and went through to the US site. I don't know if there's something with this particular page, or if we are indeed comparing apples to apples by leaving it in (without it, homepage is up. Category pages are generally up across all brands).

Still a lot of digging to do and I keep coming up at dead ends, it seems.

I can take a closer look into competitors and see what's going on there. The way our meta descriptions are structured is first a call out of "official site" (we've noticed a better CTR by calling this out in both organic and paid), action verb, targeted keywords, and "Free shipping". In more of a consumer-friendly flow, but that's the basic structure of call outs.

Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits).

What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too.

Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?

Ha! I know, I wasn't sure how much information was needed to help explain the situation, so I just included whatever I could think of.

So, yes, we expected a time frame where the site would drop in rank, the new pages would need to be indexed and the old pages would need to be de-indexed, etc. But none of the other sites that were moved over have taken this long to recover. Granted, I think most of them had an easier transition since there were many more landing pages that continued to have the same URLs. In some cases, once Google had figured out which pages to index and which no longer existed, I saw an instant switch out and the new page was ranking at the same spot the old one was.

On-page SEO isn't looking okay. We've made edits to it, we're trying to avoid cannibalization, so each page has a specific target, etc. We're working on writing body copy for any pages that are lacking, but the old sites didn't have any, so I'm thinking that's probably not the main issue (although I'm sure it'll definitely help once it's up).

Existing URLs were mapped to new pages and 301s put in place (we also used OSE and Search Console to identify pages that are being linked to and set up 301s for those). Any pages that weren't mapped (old products, for example), had a catch-all 301 rule applied that redirects those to the homepage (I'll go in to Search Console and see which pages are throwing soft 404s and clean those up. We'll be adding 404 pages in the near future). A small handful of these pages kept the same URL if it was SEO-friendly, but the majority of the dual gender pages we kept used some kind of filter, so those ended up being changed. Though, the majority of the site is completely new pages.

As far the migrating the sites, I believe once one site was done, the dev team basically made copies of that site and edited images/text/styles for each brand (these are all brand eCommerce sites).

Does that help?

We've been moving all our sites over to a new platform (Demandware) this year. In the process, they've all gotten updated designs (from the same template), on-page optimizations, etc. Since they're all on the same platform and are essentially copies from one template, any technical issues found have been fixed across all sites.

The problem I'm seeing is there are a few sites that haven't really seen much/any recovery from the site launch, and these are sites that were done 4-5 months ago. There's one in particular that's especially concerning, since it's showing issues that none of the other sites seem to have. In my Moz reports, it looks like of all the keywords that are ranking, they're only ranking the https version of the homepage (and from what I'm seeing, the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October, which was also the time that WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions).

I've crawled the site (ScreamingFrog), done a site search in Google (all pages look to be indexed), etc. and I haven't come across any specific problems there that would suggest a technical issue. We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem, since this site had the most dramatic change in navigation. The navigation used to be product based (Boots, Shoes, etc.) and is now broken up by gender. I've noticed that a few other pages that are ranking are dual gender pages that also existed on the old site, whereas all of these new categories aren't ranking at all and I'm not seeing this happen with any of our other sites.

I've gone down a bunch of different paths trying to figure this out, but I haven't come up with any concrete answers as to why this is happening and how to fix it. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into or try for this?