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!
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
-
Moving to a new domain for second time - critical, help needed fast!
Hello, Important: please do not ask why we need to change the domain, its not the matter at all, thank you for understanding. Over a month ago we successfully changed our domain name, 301 redirected, did GWT 'change of address' and all. The old domain was 2 years old, ranking very well, the new domain change of address was a success and traffic back on the new domain after a week. Today we need to change the domain name again, unfortunately, for some reasons, we have to, however we are not sure what to do in GWT, when I went to 'change of address' in the domain (the new first domain), i saw the following message (screenshot attached too): This site is undergoing a move Old URL | New URL If any URL on the left should not be moved, you can withdraw its move request. To do this, click the URL and then Withdraw. Now our questions: 1. For second time moving to a new domain, we should move from the old first domain (301 from the first old domain) or from the second domain (301 from the second domain)? 2. If from the old first domain, should we Withdraw from the first domain (lift up the first change of address in GWT) and then redirect the old first domain to the second new domain (the one we want to move now)? If yes, what to do with the first new domain (the one which we moved to a month ago) 3. If we should move from the first new domain, then what to do? The situation is clear but confusing what to do? It's just that we need to change the domain name again, move to a new one, for the second time, now we should redirect from the first old domain or first new domain? I purchased MOZ just to get help from you guys here, the only place i thought I could be helped. Of course gonna use Moz service too now that i have puurchased it 🙂 Awaiting your quick help guys. Thank you! 8csVpOZ2QoiYCoTR1t_SnQ.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mdmoz0 -
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Change of Address in Google Search Console
I have merged domains before and it went rather smoothly following the Moz Guide - https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects . I've got a new challenge ahead of me though in that a client is buying the blog subdirectory associated with another domain. So it's the blog only, not the complete domain therefore a change of address for a site section doesn't exist. I believe the course of action will be the same except we'll just skip the change of address step since the original owner wants to maintain the TLD. Part of the contract is that we'll get the content which will be ported over to our domain and he'll maintain the 301's as requested and into perpetuity. Our domain is not brand new and has some credible links. Anyone encounter a transition of a partial domain before? Thanks for your help/suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
How to Find Competitors Traffic Sources
Is it possible to find out where traffic is coming from on someone else website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael0 -
How to make Google index your site? (Blocked with robots.txt for a long time)
The problem is the for the long time we had a website m.imones.lt but it was blocked with robots.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
But after a long time we want Google to index it. We unblocked it 1 week or 8 days ago. But Google still does not recognize it. I type site:m.imones.lt and it says it is still blocked with robots.txt What should be the process to make Google crawl this mobile version faster? Thanks!0 -
Are links that are disavowed with Google Webmaster Tools removed from the Google Webmaster Profile for the domain?
Hi, Two part question - First, are links that you disavow using google webmaster tools ever removed from the webmaster tools account profile ? Second, when you upload a file to disavow links they ask if you'd like to replace the previously uploaded file. Does that mean if you don't replace the file with a new file that contains the previously uploaded urls those urls are no longer considered disavowed? So, should we download the previous disavow file first then append the new disavow urls to the file before uploading or should we just upload a new file that contains only the new disavow urls? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgs0 -
Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?
Hello there SEOMOZ'ers, Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened? My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered. I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered. I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed. I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten. I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened. If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland! 🙂 Thanks, Shane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaneod0 -
Optimisation change caused a drop
We are a web design company and SEO has never been our main thing but we can do it for clients quite well. We were ranking under web design and our location quite well up until 3 months ago. We didn't really have much on our page for web design but targetted website design instead. Our SEO guy who has proved himself for getting some of our clients to the top of Google under very generic search terms recommended we focus on Web Design, so I changed the site accordingly. 2 days later Google has seen our changes and now we've changed our H1 and copy. However, our ranking has dropped 1 place yet again. Obviously I've now panicked and am stressing (even feeling sick) about what to do. He is away until next week so I can't ask him. Could it be that Google has seen we're targetting the word and pushed us down? Shall I wait for the link building he's doing? My own link building lately seems to knock us down a place with every new link I'm doing (and I'm only adding the odd link - not spamming at all). What's odd is that we're still doing extremely well for keywords that aren't even mentioned in our copy at all really. If you could help or offer advice I'd be very grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchez19600