June 7th, 2013 Structured Data Drop
-
On June 7th, 2013 our structured data (as reported in GWT) dropped from ~61M items on ~7M pages to ~13.5M items on ~1.5M pages. Since that time those numbers have continued to fall. We made no code changes during this time. I've searched around the web and found a few people pointing to a similar June 7th, 2013 drop in reported structured data.
Can anyone offer any insight beyond speculation? Outside of the June 7th date, what can cause such a dramatic drop in structured data? Thanks in advance.
-
That's funny Ryan as I just looked at one of our account that I know has structured data and saw the same thing, a dip then a rise.
Sounds like a bug in Google's side, which was my first guess, I only got more interested when I read the forums and people said they also had a drop in rankings. Having looked into it, it sounds like those who got a drop in traffic are likely being impacted by updates around that time which was nothing to do with the data issue.
I'm going to mark the question as resolved but I'll add any details I find out.
Craig
-
Craig,
Actually, our structured data numbers tanked on 6/7 and then bounced back on 6/21 so it isn't an issue anymore. That being said, I'm definitely curious about what happened if you have any ideas.
Thanks for the heads up.
Ryan
-
Hey Ryan,
I'm going to look into this for you, so far I've only seen the same articles that you have but I'll ask around and get back to you as soon as I can, just thought I'd drop you a note to let you know your question is being looked at.
Craig
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
-
Canonical Url Structure Vs. Google Search View
I recently set up a new site and set the "preferred" domain in Google Webmasters to show URLs WITHOUT the WWW for google search purposes. In the confirmation email from google, this confused me: "This setting defines which host - www or not - should be considered the canonical host when indexing your site." In the website, we have cononical URLS at the top of every page in the header, but still have the WWW in those. Any issues with that?
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu0 -
URL structuring / redirect question
Hi there, I have a URL structuring / redirect question. I have many pages on my site but I set each page up to fall under one of two folders as I serve two unique markets and want each side to be indexed properly. I have SIDE A: www.domain/FOLDER-A.com and SIDE B: www.domain/FOLDER-B. The problem is that I have a page for www.domain.com and www.domain/FOLDER-A/page1.com but I do NOT have a page for www.domain/FOLDER-A. The reason for this is that I've opted to make what would be www.domain/FOLDER-A be www.domain.com and act the primary landing page the site. As a result, there is no page located at www.domain/FOLDER-A. My WordPress template (Divi by Elegant Themes) forced me to create a blank page to be able to build off the FOLDER-A framework. My question is that given I am forced to have this blank page, do I leave it be or create a 302 or 307 redirect to www.domain.com? I fear using a 301 redirect given I may want to utilize this page for content at some point in the future. This isn't the easiest post to follow so please let me know if I need to restate the question. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | KurtWSEO0 -
Steady, but continous Google traffic drop. Help?
I am facing a steady, but deteriorating Google traffic drop and i am struggling to find the real reasons. The site is in the video entertainment niche. Here is some data regarding the site in general: Site redesign happened around June We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago) GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic Removal of old content during August Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure) Robots file disallows only search-generated pages No sitemap errors or warnings 2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs Thank you and appreciate your help. wyOyoA9
Technical SEO | | dimicos1 -
Lots of Pages Dropped Out of Google's Index?
Until yesterday, my website had about 1200 pages indexed in Google. I did lots of changes: removed low quality content, rewrote passable content to make it better, wrote high quality content, got lots of likes and shares on social networks, etc. Now this morning I see that out of 1252 pages submitted, only 691 are indexed. Is that a temporary situation related to the recent updates? Anyone seeing this? What should I interpret about this?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Sudden drop in rankings
Hi there, I've been working on this site for three or four months (it was a brand new site), and we were seeing some really great improvements in rankings. I've concentrated on writing lots of good quality content and building a network of links through blogging and social networks. Then, last weekend (6th October), we got completely wiped off of the results. We went from rankings 2,3 and 4 for our target terms to not being in the top 100. I assumed we'd been given a penalty from Google as we'd been SEOing too hard and removed a reciprocal links page we had and asked Google to reconsider. I just got a message back saying there hasn't been any manual penalty, so it's just down to the algorithm. I'm running am SEOMoz analysis, but so far it's just coming up with things like page titles too long and too many links on pages, which I can fix, but don't seem like something that would completely destroy us so abruptly. I think we really have the most and best content on the subject of becoming a model, which has taken a great deal of effort to put tgether, so this is crushing. If anybody can shed any light, I'll be extremely grateful, and I'd be interested to knwo if anyone else has experienced anything similar. Thanks in advance! URL: www.modellingadvice. info Kat
Technical SEO | | Katja1230 -
Sudden Ranking Drop
One of my clients websites : http://www.renta-vw.co.za experienced a sudden ranking drop on 24/08/2012 for 2 of the Keyword terms : The 2 terms are : cheap car hire cape town cheap car rental cape town. The site ranked top 3 in Googel.de, Google.com, .co.uk, .nl I'm not sure if it is just a 'Google Dance' or something else at play? I checked Webmaster tools and did not see any messages from Google... This is causing a big loss of revenue for my client and after doing extensive analysis, I'm not the wiser as to what the issue is? Please assit. Thanks, Marnus
Technical SEO | | MarnusW1 -
Help - Rank is Continually Dropping
We are aggressively optimizing one of our internal pages for SEO related terms. http://www.arnima.com/Search-Engine-Optimization.aspx Some sample search terms are: SEO Florida, Florida SEO, SEO Tampa, Tampa SEO etc Based on recent work, we find that our anchor text distribution is good, if not very good. Our PA is for the internal page is 60 and our DA is 62 yet our Google rank for the above search terms is continually dropping. We have gone from #2 to #8 in the last few weeks. We have checked the websites of all that appear above us and their PA and DA are substantially less than us. Their anchor text links do not appear to be as well structured either. We have many unique domains - websites that we built - that point directly back to our SEO page. Some of these are fairly highly ranked sites... We are totally baffled. Can someone shed some light on this? What could the reason be? Any (and all) help and insights would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | RajeevRatra0 -
Is robots.txt a must-have for 150 page well-structured site?
By looking in my logs I see dozens of 404 errors each day from different bots trying to load robots.txt. I have a small site (150 pages) with clean navigation that allows the bots to index the whole site (which they are doing). There are no secret areas I don't want the bots to find (the secret areas are behind a Login so the bots won't see them). I have used rel=nofollow for internal links that point to my Login page. Is there any reason to include a generic robots.txt file that contains "user-agent: *"? I have a minor reason: to stop getting 404 errors and clean up my error logs so I can find other issues that may exist. But I'm wondering if not having a robots.txt file is the same as some default blank file (or 1-line file giving all bots all access)?
Technical SEO | | scanlin0