Why does Google no longer like our site?
-
Hey guys,
I'm trying to figure out why the traffic and rankings have been plummeting on www.readprint.com. It's a collection of both public domain books and books on Amazon's store. If anyone can offer any pointers as to if it's duplicate content or ???
It used to get 300K visits/mo but has slowly been dropping over the last year.
I appreciate anyone's expertise!
-
Thanks for helping out, guys.
The homepage took the biggest hit (54% drop), but most pages took big hits from a year ago. So I'm assuming it was a site-wide drop in rankings.
When I look at the OSE metrics, it looks like readprint.com should be crushing the competition, but they're now crushing us. That's why I'm so baffled.
Perhaps the competition has more unique content, better layout, better pagespeed? I'll keep looking, but I'm hoping it's something reversible.
Thanks!
-
I had a brief look at your site and the design is very impressive indeed. I do agree with Alan that a lot of the inner pages such as author pages do lack 'unique content'.
For example, I did a Copyscape for the page: http://www.readprint.com/work-439/The-Origin-of-Species-Charles-Darwin and it found 15 same/duplicate copies on the web. I think you could introduce some sort of 'gamification' similarly to SEOMoz's Q&A forum, to get your users/members to write unique relevant content, rather than just asking them to email you.
Also I had a quick look at your website speed, and the 'first load time' is quite long. Is it on a dedicated server? Maybe you should have a look into your hosting provider. Also, you should cache the homepage, as it will improve the load time of your site.
Another question I want to ask is, the drop in traffic, I assume there were many keywords which have dropped in rankings. Were most of these rankings associated with the homepage or inner pages?
Thanks
-
Nice looking site, Colin.
And interesting information.
I really don't know what to make of the "you have stuff that I can find in other places"
A lot of people say that these days, but I think its a copout
If this was valid, then all search engines, other than google should just pack up and dig holes for a living. All book sites should close up and leave it to Amazon. All guitar makers should shut down and leave it to Gibson. Nike should be the only running shoes. All small phone companies should give up.
And Google Plus should close, because, compared to Facebook, it is weak, and a ghost town.
If your site was a perfect clone of another site, it would be a valid argument, but I doubt that is the case (I don't know your niche well enough)
You have GREAT social signals. You even have 82 G+ on the front page. That in itself is huge.
Have you thought about allowing readers to comment? you can use facebook comments. I have no idea if that helps. You really need someone here to comment who has live comments (not facebook )
Do you have internal duplicate pages?
Are you linking out to bad sites?
What does SEOMoz tell you about the site?
It looks like you have no incoming links, but that probably means SEO moz didn't know about you - or my Mozbar is broken
What do Google and Bing Webmaster Tools say?
What do your pages look like to a robot?
-
That's really helpful, Alan.
Thanks!
-
I had a quick look at your Mark Twain page, there is not much on the page that can not be found on many other web sites
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22was+born+in+Florida%2C+Missouri%2C+of+a+Virginian+family%22&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=%22was+born+in+florida%2C+missouri%2C+of+a+virginian+family%22&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=This is what is called thin content. you need to have plenty of original content to outwiegh the duplicate
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
Redirecting pages (old site to new site)
I have a question- there is one location, one set of pages for both the old and new site on the same host environment so when I did the redirect it get into a loop trying to redirect from itself to itself Not sure how its gonna affect SEO. Will pages get hit for duplicate content?
On-Page Optimization | | Yanez0 -
"Turning off" content to a site
One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar? This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind: “Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.” What are your thoughts? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour0 -
Google Index Report
Hi, I have just checked my google webmaster tools account and viewed the index status of my website and it produced the attached graph, which show quite a big spike in indexing during July and August 2012. Does this look normal or does it reveal anything peculiar? We did have a new website launched in June 2012 and I re-submitted the sites URL's to google as part of the re-launch and so I am unsure if this may account for the spike. Any advice appreciated. Thanks indexing.png
On-Page Optimization | | UnderMe0 -
Should I Remove This Subdirectory From Google?
On my site, I have a subdirectory. It posts articles from a bunch of websites that my readers are interested in & links back to all of those sites. There is no original content in it. There are over 1700 indexed pages in this subdirectory. The rest of my site has about 500 (all original content). The search engine traffic for this subdirectory only accounts for 3.9% of my sites overall visits. Should I consider removing this subdirectory? Could all the duplicate content be hurting the rankings of my legit pages? What do you all think?
On-Page Optimization | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site
My client has an ecommerce site with over 1,000 products. We have a ton of duplicates because of how their ecommerce system handles product pages. Each time a new product is added, there is a default product page created (/product/12345-product-name.aspx). Each time that product is added to a specific product category, another, separate URL is created (/product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx). The site has over 1,000 duplicates (at least one for each product) because of how the ecommerce system structures URLs. We are unable to have unique content on /products/12345-product-name.aspx and /product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx because both pages pull from the same database. Their webteam informed me that they can't implement canonical tags on individual pages, they must be dynamically added to the site all at once. Thus forcing me to choose all of the default product pages as primary URLs. Both types of URLs are getting indexed and the product URLs that were added to the categories are SEO friendly so I'm leary to eliminate one or the other with a canonical tag or a no index. Suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | DynoSaur0 -
Is there any benefit in on-site duplicate content?
I have about 50 internal pages on my site that I want to add a "Do it yourself tutorial" to in an effort to build the quality of the pages. Is this going to de-value the content if I put it on all 50 pages? It's difficult to write similar content 50 different ways.
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0