Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Dates appear before home page description in the SERPs- HUGE drop in rankings
-
We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc.
A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap.
Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012.
This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs.
The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard.
When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything!
We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?
-
I'm seeing this same issue on a client site I consult for. The pages have images added through the WYSIWYG as a workaround to add more info. We're using ASP.net which I realize is a legacy platform. I'm betting those dates are coming from the image creation date. Any updates on this issue appreciated.
-
Did anyone find a workaround for this? Just realized all my pages are also being affected by it. I really don't want to remove the videos, but looks like I don't have a choice.
-
If it is an algo update, it means Google is deliberately sinking articles with old datestamps, or conversely favouring articles with new/no datestamps.
Otherwise there's no way to explain why changing the embedded video to a link would instantly* restore rankings.
That does not seem like sensible behaviour. I agree with QDF for new content, but an old, regularly updated page with content that meets searchers' needs should never be penalised because of its publish date.
I'm leaning towards glitch on this one.
I hope I'm correct, because I don't want to serve a terrible user experience (linked videos instead of embeds) just to maintain our rankings.
- after a Fetch and Submit in Search Console
-
Unfortunately, they're being pretty tight-lipped on this one. Seems like a glitch, but they don't seem to think it's related to the rankings drop. Possible two events co-occurred, and there was an algo update at the same time as the glitch. Honestly, though, it's not clear at all.
-
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your reply. Its great to know Google is aware of this. Upon deleting the YouTube videos of my pages, I am seeing them slowly change back to normal dates as well as no dates even showing at all.
Rankings are also slowly going back up. My theory is the old dates taken from the videos affected CTR (many searchers are probably turned off by a post from 2010), which after a few days of decreasing probably affected rankings as well.
-
We're definitely seeing similar reports about the bad dates, and it has been brought to Google's attention at reasonably high levels (i.e. I'm confident they know about it, but it's hard to say what they're doing about it).
Unfortunately, it's unclear whether this was connected to a ranking drop in some cases or was a coincidence. We did see substantial movement in the algorithm right around November 10th (the date you posted this question), but, unfortunately, we have no confirmation.
Sorry, wish I had better info right now, but I'll try to find out more.
-
Hi all,
Over here from my question about this exact problem (https://moz.com/community/q/serps-started-showing-the-incorrect-date-next-to-my-pages).
Can confirm that it is the YouTube embed date. We were going crazy as well trying to figure out where these random dates were coming from (some dated before our domain was even registered).
We've removed all YouTube videos for now (unfortunately) and are currently waiting for a recrawl as well as fetching some in the back-end of Search Console. Will report back once it's completely fixed.
-
Edward - thanks for posting this. Sitetechie - great detective work!
We are seeing the same issue:
- big drop in page 1 rankings
- old dates appearing in SERPs
- dates match exacty with YouTube vieos embedded on articles
I have changed our YouTube embeds (Wordpress site using oEmbed) to just plain links until Google resolves this issue.
If anyone else has any more information on this bug, please keep posting here.
-
Hi yes that does seem as though it is probably it. I have checked a few sites that appear to have the same issue, and they have videos on home page too. We will remove and check.
Very annoying as the substantial decline in rankings coincides direct with this, and it does appear to be a bug. Let's give Rand and the Moz comm the heads up on this. If he points it out you can bet that it will be noticed by the powers up top!
Thanks very much for your help!
Ed
-
We experienced something similar starting yesterday and after tons of digging, finally figured it out. Now, let's spread the word and get Google to fix this ASAP! Does anyone know how to get this bug in front of the right people at Google? Please help as it is causing issues with countless sites. See below for what is happening:
The issue that is causing this seems to be a Google bug. That Google bug is taking the original upload date of a YouTube video you have embedded on the page and then is placing that date in front of your meta description in SERPs for that page. We were going crazy trying to figure this out and eventually figured it out because it was only on our sites/pages with embedded YouTube videos and all of the dates inserted ahead of the description matched up perfectly with the original upload dates of the YouTube videos. I found this to be the case with your agency website date showing in the meta description matching up with the original upload date of the YouTube video embedded on your page.
Let's all work together to put the word out on this so it gets fixed ASAP. It seems to have started in the past 24-48 hours.
-
Additionally, we have already removed the blog feed from the home page to see if this would change things, and have requested a recrawl, which has happened. It did not solve the issue, and the dates still appear before the description in the SERPs for the home page, the substantial decline in ranking is still there.
Furthermore, the core pages of the site (home and services) are built in raw html, css etc, with no CMS (no Wordpress).
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
-
My site is showing indexed in search console but not appearing in Serps
hi, i have recently made sites.google site and submitted to search console but when I copy paste in google , its not appearing
Algorithm Updates | | alan-shultis0 -
About porn sites and ranking
Hello, I'm thinking to extend my website into porn. At the moment there is no pornography on it, although we do talk about sex related topics and products (from dating to tutorials, to toys etc.) Would it be dangerous to keep the porn section on the same domain as the rest? Would this negatively affect my non-porn content as Googlebot would "flag" my website as being pornographic (although only a few pages would be)? Or simply Googlebot would leave the current non-porn pages ranking as they are now, just fine, and plus it would rank the porn pages if they "deserve" to? I hope my question is clear. I don't want to create a subdomain.
Algorithm Updates | | fabx0 -
How often should I update the content on my pages?
I have started dropping on my rankings - due to lack of time after having a baby. I'm still managing to blog but I'm wondering if I update the content on my pages will that help? All my Meta tags and page descriptions were updated over a year ago - do I need to update these too? We were ranking in the top spots for a good few years, but we're slowly falling 😞 Please give me any advice to keep us from falling even further. I have claimed all my listings, and try to add new links once a month. I share my blog to all social sites and work hard to get Google reviews, we have 53 which is higher than any of our competitors. Any other ideas? Have I missed something that Google is looking for nowadays? Many thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | Lauren16890 -
Is user engagement a ranking signal?
Read something about user engagement might be a signal that Google uses, along with links and on-site optimisation, to decide if a search result goes up or down. What should I believe and what are the developments in this field?
Algorithm Updates | | MozzieJr0 -
How much link juice does a sites homepage pass to inner pages and influence inner page rankings?
Hi, I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions. If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites. Scenario 1 It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text. So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog. The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings? I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages. It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings... Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text? Scenario 2 Does internal linking work both ways? Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage. For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage? And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger? I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's... Look forward to your replies on this....
Algorithm Updates | | sanj50500 -
Sudden drop after 301 redirection
Hi Experts We did a 301 redirect from an old site to a new site to get rid of any bad link juice. We recently found a big drop in rankings and traffic after google last indexed the new web pages. We did 301 using asp at page level coding. The website had 4000 approx. pages and we did 301 section by section. This is how we did as per one of the blog post in seomoz. Create a sitemap for your old domain. Create content (contact information, description of your company, indication of future plans) and something link worthy for the new domain. (You should start trying to build links early) Setup the new domain and make it live. Register and verify your old domain and new domain with Google Webmaster Tools. Create a custom 404 page for old domain which suggests visiting new domain. Old Domain error checking and fixing In a development environment, test the redirects from the old domain to the new domain. Ideally, this will be a 1:1 redirect. (www.example-old-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html to www.example-new-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html) 301 redirect your old domain to your new domain. Submit your old sitemap to Google and Bing. The submission pages are within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center (This step will make the engines crawl your old URLs, see that they are 301 redirects and change their index accordingly.) Fill out the Change of Address form in Google Webmaster Tools. Create a new sitemap and submit it to the engines. (This will tell them about any new URLs that were not present on the old domain) Wait until Google Webmaster Tools updates and fix any errors it is indicated in the Diagnostics section. Monitor search engine results to make sure new domain is being properly indexed. We also did a press release with prweb to announce the new launch. We followed the steps recommended in one of the I am not sure what to do next. Can anyone suggest if its normal to see a drop and we should wait for some time or if we did something wrong? We are loosing business with every single day. Please help !
Algorithm Updates | | ITRIX0 -
Winning The New SERP Battle
I run a niche website (www.picnic-basket.com) that is approaching 10 years old. I have consistently added new content, performed redesigns, etc and WAS rewarded with a #1 placement on Google for my main keyword phrase for quite a long time. All our links are natural, no link-farms and I don't do exchanges either. I blog, write articles about our niche, have free cookbooks, delicious recipes and are always finding cool new products. FB & Twitter are also maintained. After Panda I'm now below the fold with amazon.com, bedbathandbeyond.com, worldmarket.com, overstock.com and brookstone.com all above me. These sites don't have anything to do with my niche other than just selling some items. ROI is horrible for me with PPC on this keyword phrase. I'm sure Googles' revenue has increased quite a bit in this category because users only see relevant websites up in the paid area. Through years of hard work I was finally able to beat my old niche competitors but I'm left wondering, How do I beat the "Big Boys"? Any advice for someone like me?
Algorithm Updates | | sunriseb0 -
Decline in traffic but no change in rankings
I'm comparing our best search traffic month in 2011 (March) with our current traffic (April)and have seen significant declines in traffic, despite no change in our rankings or even improved rankings for the same terms. Trying to sort out an explanation. We have been a white-hat SEO site since our inception over 10 years ago. Our SEO consultant doesn't think we've been affected by any algo changes, at least not to any significant degree. My only explanation for this possibly anomaly is: decrease in the use of the KW terms in search over time (how to determine?) generalized increase in PPC instead of organic search driving traffic possibility that Adv Web Rankings is no longer accurately collecting SERP rankings Does anyone have any other thoughts or considerations that might explain the decline in traffic, despite maintenance or improvement in rankings? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | ahw0