Our site dropped by April 2018 Google update about content relevance: How to recover?
-
Hi all,
After Google's confirmed core update in April 2018, we dropped globally and couldn't able to recover later. We found the update is about the content relevance as officially stated by Google later. We wonder how we are not related in-terms of content being ranking for same keywords over years. And we are expecting to find a solution to this. Are there any standard ways to measure the content relevancy? Please suggest!
Thank you
-
Hi,
Thanks a TON for all the analysis and insights. Just mind blowing info.
Unfortunately we switched to different versions of the site and the recent one will be stable for years and further changes will be handled very carefully without complete transformation.
Our open source crm page dropped from April this year; but the link from capterra was removed in 2018 only. They removed our product from the list and they no more link directly to the websites (you can see the page now). Not sure why we lost traffic for this page all of a sudden even though there is no much ranking difference for main keywords of high search volume. We are going to investigate this and bring back the page to the normal traffic.
Yes, we are trying to rank for "crm" as primary keyword. Do you think that we are not doing well for "crm" as we dropped for "open source crm" page?
Thanks
-
You kind of dropped a bit but not in a way which affects you very much (apparently, according to Ahrefs)
https://d.pr/i/HBzKpj.png (screenshot of estimated SEO keywords and traffic according to Ahrefs)
You did lose a lot of keywords, but many seem to have since recovered and it didn't seem it actually impact your SEO traffic estimates much at all
SEMRush has a neat (relatively) new tool which looks at more accurate traffic estimates across the board (not just limited to SEO):
Again it does show a bit of a dent around April 2018. If I was going to use SEMRush data to look at this, I'd use the traffic analytics tool not the 'normal' SEO estimate charts from SEMRush (which IMO aren't very good, hence using the Ahrefs one in place of that)
This is what your site looked like in Feb 2018 before the keyword drops:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180224042824/https://www.vtiger.com/
This is what your site looked like later in June 2018:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180606021616/https://www.vtiger.com/
Completely different!
This is what your site looks like now: https://www.vtiger.com/
Again radically different. Maybe you just have a bad case of 'disruptive behavior' where Google is unwilling to rank you well, because the site keeps radically changing in terms of design and content. Sometimes doing too many changes too fast can really put Google off! 3 different designs inside of 1 year is pretty crazy
After each change, your home-page's Page Title was completely different:
Feb 2018 version: Customer Relationship Management | CRM Software - Vtiger
June 2018 version: Vtiger CRM | Customer Relationship Management Software
Current version: CRM | Customer Relationship Management System - Vtiger CRM
In my opinion everything that was done around June 2018 was a huge mistake that you are suffering for now and recovering from gradually. The June 2018 design was horrible, way worse than the Feb 2018 or current one (both were better). If a designer doesn't do a good job, don't just 'go ahead' with a terrible site design just because you paid for it
In addition to that in June 2018 your page title didn't 'begin' with the term (or a synonym of the term) "CRM". In Feb 2018 and on the current version, you either opened with "CRM" or a synonym of "CRM" which is better for SEO. The June 2018 version of the site was really bad and also less well optimised as well (that seems really obvious to me)
Part of me actually feels that the Feb 2018 version of the site was best for SEO. It did a better job of making your USPs (value propositions) stand out to the user and search engines. It blended nice, app-styled UX with functionality that was more than just 'button links'
The current version isn't bad, it certainly looks nicer visually - but the June 2018 version was a bit of a house of horrors. It makes sense it would have been active within the boundaries of the times you got dented because, it's just a bit shocking to be honest. In the Feb 2018 version of your site, more of the individual product links were listed in the top-line nav. Now they are still there but 'hidden' in drop-downs, that could be affecting things too
If I look at the technical SEO of the Feb 2018 site I can see it was relatively streamlined in terms of resource deployment:
... but by June 2018, there were way too many resources for one homepage to be pulling in. Not only did it look plainer and uglier than before (and less helpful, with worse SEO) it was probably also laggier to boot:
Ugh! 89 HTTP requests!? Get outta' here
Now things seem a lot better on that front:
So I think this is more evidence that the short-lived June 2018 site was pretty sucky and you guys bailed on it at light-speed (rightly so it was terrible!)
The question: did you see ranking drops for "CRM" related keywords in the period surrounding April 2018? Say for example, in April, May, June and July of 2018?
I'd say that you did, according to an (extremely rough) ranking movements export from Ahrefs:
Actual data export (formatted) here: https://d.pr/f/pwnrIF.xlsx
So which CRM related URL, was responsible for the most CRM related ranking losses which Ahrefs happened to pick up on?
https://d.pr/i/rCQ8LF.png (table image)
https://d.pr/i/7SJPbt.png (ugly bar chart)
Clearly the URL most responsible for all the drops was this one:
https://www.vtiger.com/open-source-crm/
... so how has this URL changed?
Infuriatingly, the Wayback Machine has barely any records of this URL, so closest I can get to ... just before the end of April 2018, is actually December 2017:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171226021957/https://www.vtiger.com/open-source-crm/
... it looks basically the same as it looks now. No major changes. But wait! On the old version of your homepage, the footer links to the open source CRM were bigger and more prominent than they are now. Another thing, those footer links used to be marked up with itemprop=url, now they are not (could that be making a difference? All I can say is that the coding is different)
Another question would be, between April and July 2018 - did you lose any CRM related links that were worth a lot?
Actually, apparently you did lose a few. Check some of these out:
https://d.pr/i/Zg5XER.png (MEGA screenshot, but first page of results only)
https://d.pr/f/NetqVM.png (full export, lost links which may be about 'CRM', April through July 2018 - raw and unformatted export, open the CSV file in Excel!)
Losing a CRM related link from Capterra, online peer review software experts? Yeah that could hit you hard. Most of the Mashable ones are still there, they are just redirected - but the Capterra one:
https://blog.capterra.com/free-and-open-source-crm/
... that could sting. You used to have a link with anchor text like this:
"for a price starting at about $700" - but now it's gone!
You might be thinking, aha Effect - you silly sausage! Clearly it was a comment link that got pushed down or removed by admins / mods, not a 'real' link Google would have been counted. But no I say, and I have proof to back up that denial:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170930101939/http://blog.capterra.com/free-and-open-source-crm/
That is the same post in April 2018, if you Ctrl+F for "for a price starting at about $700" - you will FIND the in-content link, which actually did matter, which Capterra have removed from their content
I am sure that in the link data you will find other such examples of lost quality links. Some will be duds and false-positives (like the Mashable ones) but some will be legit removals
By the way, although the Mashable links to you are still live, Mashable have 302 redirected the old URLs for the blog posts instead of 301 redirecting them. This means those posts, if they were valued and accrued a lot of backlinks - have been cut off from their own backlinks (as 302s pass no SEO juice). As such links contained inside of them are largely nullified (d'oh! Thanks Mashable)
What this illustrates is that, your site changed too much, the way links are formed changed, the design went through a really bad patch and also you've lost some high quality backlinks. An SEO legacy doesn't last forever, links get removed over time
In the end, these convergence of issues are almost assuredly leading your site through a tough spot. That's what I'd imagine, from a very very top-line look into this issue
-
Had a quick look at semrush..
-
Thanks for looking into this. We have dropped post April 18 update as per the historical data we have; and not around Jan/Feb 18.
Could you please let me know where did you get the data? So, I will look into and try to correlate with what we have.
Thank you.
-
Hi
Why do you believe a penalty in April 18. The site looks like a penalty of some sorts in the UK, in Jan/Feb 18 and the US etc. is clear.
Not clear on why April?
Regards
-
We dropped for "crm". Site is vtiger.com. Could you please give some clue on this? It'll be really grateful and helpful.
-
Difficult to say without seeing the site, the content and the keywords. Because different query-spaces and search entities are thematically different, the ways to 'become relevant' to each of them can be highly variable in nature. If I could just see an example, it would be much easier to assess why Google has changed its mind in terms of your site's perceived relevance
What you should know about Google is that they truly believe, all of their updates make Google's search results generally more accurate (and better for users) on average, so a roll-back is extremely unlikely. If you have been pinned by a certain algorithm change, it's likely to keep hurting you until you adhere to Google's 'new standards' (which you might argue are lower in your particular niche, but regardless they're not listening)
Sometimes fairy-tales come true and 'Google glitches' get 'undone', resulting in some sites regaining their lost rankings. This is 0.001% of most situations. Usually what happens is, people get red in the face and angry with Google, argue the toss and see their sites disintegrate as a result. Mathematical algorithms don't care if you're mad or not, they don't care what you expect
With an example, I could give an un-biased 3rd party opinion on why Google is 'doing this' to your site, but it won't result in a quick fix. It will likely result in some weeks of hard graft and further investment
All of the 'standard' ways to measure content relevancy are things like, see how many times your keyword(s) are mentioned in your content. But the highest relevancy you can demonstrate is nothing to do with keyword deployment, it's matching your site's unique 'value proposition' with Google's perception of the values which the searchers (within your query-space) hold
Maybe there's been a shift and they suddenly value price over service, thus Google shakes up their results to suit. I'm not saying keyword deployment isn't part of the issue, what I'm saying is that the most 'relevant' site is the one which the largest proportion of connected searches, wish to find. It's more than just linguistic semantics and keyword-play (hope that makes sense)
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
-
How long does Google indexes the website after algorithm update?
I've noticed that the page ranks for some queries were improved unexpectedly, without any actions from my side. Is it possible that this improvement is connected with with Google algorithm update Sep, 4-5?
Algorithm Updates | | AurigaPR0 -
Our Sites Organic Traffic Went Down Significantly After The June Core Algorithm Update, What Can I Do?
After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady, or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?
Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM2 -
Any PR Lose? Google Made a Update ! Heavy Traffic, Followed SEOmoz Tips - Dropped to PR4 ?
I followed the rules to minimize the links in the page. Getting Same Traffic to my blog and increased only. But my PR5 to PR4 ? why even 404 Error was reduced o 5 or 6 which i updated now ! not accepting any Text Link ads ! too past 6 months also !
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
80-90% drop in visits after Panda/EMD update - now what?
Hi everyone, Had my first wonderful experience with an algorithm update. Business was doing great - about 90-100 visitors a day down to about 12-15 from Sept 29th to current. Our domain is www.hamiltonscarservice.com which I don't think exactly qualifies for an exact match but may be close enough (car service is one of our keywords). I am more likely to think its related to the Panda 20 update. I haven't changed the site at all lately so I was wondering what tips you guys may have going forward. The site isn't perfectly optimized (which is where you guys come in) but when I first set it up it worked great so I mainly focused on backlinks from that point on. Now evidently this has caught up with me. Any suggestions are appreciated - thanks! 09cSe.png
Algorithm Updates | | kabledesigns0 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0 -
Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years. Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products. The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed. The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable. Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
Algorithm Updates | | DavidWilsonSEO0 -
Data on Google Vs Bing, et al and changes to sites.
I am curious to know if anyone has any data that correlates site/page changes like content or Title Tag, H1, etc. and subsequent movement in rankings on Google and Bing and Yahoo? The equation is for example: ABCSite.com/home-page/ makes a change to the H1 and H2 and one paragraph of content is changed. Over next 6 to 12 weeks changes in page rank for the 3 engines is tracked to see where it started and where it "stopped." Obviously, there are more factors than individual algorithms in play here. An example of that would be that a significant number of sites will be indexed in Google by a dev and not in the others. We see this regularly. So, at least from a timing standpoint, different sites are entering/leaving the fray at different rates. We are going to begin to track this but I would love to see any data already around or speak with anyone involved in such a study about what they found. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | RobertFisher0 -
What do i need to do to drive more traffic to my site
Hi i built a site around ten months ago but at the moment i am only receiving around 3 visitors a a day. it is a travel site that i write new content for but because i am still learning seo i am not sure what i have been doing wrong. I am not sure of the basics from getting people to the site or the correct way of generating free links or if i should be submitting my site to all these free site submitters which includes to lycos and other free services that you can find on google. If anyone can please explain what i am doing wrong and how to generate more traffic for free then that would be great. also can anyone recommend any free service that would help with increasing traffic and links
Algorithm Updates | | ClaireH-1848860