Finding Cause of Google Demotion (second time around!)
-
Our website, christnotes.org has historically ranked very well in it's space. We have always been in top 3 positions for daily bible verse related searches. There have been no fluctuations in rankings until it took a hit around September 4th through October 14th with approximately 35% drop in PVs and over 60% drop in traffic from Google. The site fully recovered google traffic mid-Oct. On November 24th the site was once again hit, this time with a 50% drop in pageviews and over 75% drop in traffic from google. Google Analytics Image depicting the two drops attached.
When the first drop hit, we checked everything - bad links, broken URLs, page speed, etc. There was a slight increase in page speed so we did a little tweaking and made some improvements (8.36 second page load to 5.5)
This time around, I can find no cause and no areas that need fixed to recover our rankings and traffic. Very confused on Google dropping rank then recovering after what looks like a page speed fix and then dropping again a month later.
Any suggestions????
-
Hi David,
That looks like a tricky issue you have there. Your dates don't immediately look like matching with well known updates, but to be honest a lot of stuff was going on in the last 3-4 months of 2013 so it is easy to get confused!
You say that you traditionally ranked well for 'daily bible verse' related searches. I am not familiar with what phrases these might be, but have your rankings actually dropped on your 'main' keywords or have they remained pretty steady but you still see the traffic drop?
I would look into trying to identify better where the traffic was lost and that might help identify why. So you could look at things like landing pages and compare between the month of lost traffic with the month before. Once you have your list of landing pages that lost significant traffic you could look at any keyword data still available for those pages to try to get an idea of what kind of queries (and intent) were bring traffic to those pages and then go and have a look at what kind of serps those type of queries return now. Have some big sites (wikipedia or similar) moved into top positions? Are knowledge graph boxes answering the question without the user needing to click through to your site?
Understanding what content lost traffic (and/or tracked keywords lost rankings) should give you a better idea of what happened and be able to guide you in planning your next steps.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Homepage is deindexed in Google
Please help for some reason my website home page has disappeared, we have been working on the site but nothing that I can think of which would block it. There are no warnings in google console? Can anyone lend a hand in understanding what has gone wrong, I would really appreciate it. The site is: http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ Seems to be working again but I had to fetch the home page in google console, any idea why this has happened cannot afford a heat op at this age lol?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings. When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now. The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored. If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Breadcrumbs not displaying on Google
Hello, We have set breadcrumbs on some of our pages (example: https://www.globecar.com/en/car-rental/locations/canada/qc/montreal/airport-yul) for testing purposes and for some reasons they are still not showing up on Google: http://screencast.com/t/BSHQqkP69r6F Yet when I test the page with Google Structured Data Testing tool all is good: http://screencast.com/t/Fzlz3zae Any ideas? Thanks, Karim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeCar0 -
Apps content Google indexation ?
I read some months back that Google was indexing the apps content to display it into its SERP. Does anyone got any update on this recently ? I'll be very interesting to know more on it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoomGeek0 -
Google snippet chosen why?
We have a page about buying property in the Megeve area of the Alps in France. We are No.2 on Google.co.uk for the term "megeve property for sale" and No.1 for "megeve property". http://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/MegeveProperty/Properties.asp If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet: Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR. However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page: A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ... Does anyone know why Google would serve this particular snippet instead of the META description. Is it the number of strong and descriptive words used, or some other reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PPGUKLTD0 -
Google penalty or what???
Hi, we have a blog site xxxxxxxxxxx.es, that yesterday dissapear from google ranks all of a sudden it only appears if you write xxxxxxxxx.es I have checked gogle webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, no messages. Also, we don't have much links pointing to this site. Webmaster tools show only 319 links. We don't understand what have happenned. Never see something similar. What do you think? Any help would be appreciated. How do you proceed in this cases? It doesn't seem to be a link problem. How do you know what kind of penalty do you have? Thank you. Update: Hi, the domain is www.crearcorreoelectronico.es I have check the majestic seo, ose, and wmt and get the links. We have some links that are not good, but are automatic ones, that some portals generate. Maybe is something related with the content. I don't know Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite1 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Google indexing issue?
Hey Guys, After a lot of hard work, we finally fixed the problem on our site that didn't seem to show Meta Descriptions in Google, as well as "noindex, follow" on tags. Here's my question: In our source code, I am seeing both Meta descriptions on pages, and posts, as well as noindex, follow on tag pages, however, they are still showing the old results and tags are also still showing in Google search after about 36 hours. Is it just a matter of time now or is something else wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0