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
-
Why i my site not ranking
I have been building my website www.ubodo.com ( its a property portal ) I have feeds coming in from nearly 200 estate agents and I have just over 26k properties listed all over the world. I have tried to make the site fast, mobile friendly and followed several SEO tutorials but I am looky If I get 10 new visitors a day !!! I have managed to get 1st page ranking for terms like " Property for sale in Hambye" ( less competitve than " Property for Sale in France " ) Can any one see anything obvious I have done wrong, I feel like there is a switch to turn on the traffic and I cant find it. Any help would be greatly appreciated Barry
On-Page Optimization | | Bazconnolly10 -
How to delete a Google My Business Account?
I am handling a client's account that has been closed for two years now. We do not have any access anymore to any of the emails that we used to create, we also forgot what were those. So what I did, I claimed it using my company email. Got the code and was able to claim it. Now it is showing up on my GMB Account. I have read the posts on here and some Youtube videos. Here are the steps I have taken: 1. Opened google.com/business 2. Clicked on the Location 3. Click on the three lines at the top left 4. Here is where I am having a problem. The Settings on here is not for the listing but for my company email. Here is a screenshot of what I am seeing: 1. https://prnt.sc/in8vsr 2. https://prnt.sc/in8wax Please help experts. Cheers,
On-Page Optimization | | webbizideas1
Patrick0 -
SEO before products on ecommerce site
Our company plans to quickly launch an e-commerce site to sell religion themed banners (religionbanners.com). We'll have our products up on the site in about a week. Should I block Google from accessing the site during this period? Is there anything wrong with starting simple SEO tasks such as submitting the site map on Google Search Console prior to us having the products on the site?
On-Page Optimization | | art_litho0 -
Strange google indexing behaviour
Hi all Looking for a second opinion on a strange issue with has occurred on my site. The site is a magento store and because I am using all the default merchant descriptions at the moment I have noindexed the product pages (there are 300k products, the plan is to rewrite the content as we go, starting with most popular sellers). The Gbot is blocked from the pages and all the products have header tag. We forgot to noindex the popular search terms page on the site and as a result google has indexed some search result pages - we may keep this open, not sure yet, We are seeing a very strange thing in the serps. Google has indexed the search result pages, as mentioned above, however, the description and title tag being used do not belong to that page, they belong to the product page the search result links to. If i do a search in google for the indexed pages i get the categories and lots of, what appears to be, product pages. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:arropa.co.uk/store&espv=2&biw=1536&bih=772&ei=LE5xVd3qA4HlUNnggKgH&start=250&sa=N One would assume that a page listed with the title of Ladies 1 Pair Young Trasparenze Mumbai Animal Print . and the description of Come on, program a little of your crazy side! Part of the edgy, sassy Young Trasparenze Medley, these soft touch, nontransparent stockings function a crazy, (along with the price) would be an entry for that individual product. However, clicking on that product opens up a search results page (very slowly as the site is processing an update still - it is not for public use thus far) which can be seen here http://arropa.co.uk/store/catalogsearch/result/?q=+ladies+1+pair+young+trasparenze+mumbai+animal+print+tights+75+off+military+l+ yes, the search result page is for that particular item but nowhere on the page is the title, description and price, nor has it ever been. Am a little puzzled about this and what it would do re duplicate content as im using the manufacturer data at present. Ideally i would like to keep the search results pages open. Any thoughts would be most welcome. Couple of things to note. Im aware the site is too slow for general public use. It will be fully cached once running, as i say, it has 300k+ products so isn't small. Also, am aware that there are no images. They exist but we are moving the images around, hence being down. Always a fun task when there are 25gb of the things!! Many thanks Carl
On-Page Optimization | | WonkyDog0 -
Google Crawl Errors from vbseo change
We have vbseo setup on our site and for some reason a setting was changed unexpectedly and was un-noticed where it changed the URL of all the pages and so none of our pages were getting indexed by google any longer due to 401 errors. Most of our SE traffic fell off. We discovered the issue a couple weeks ago and we changed the setting back so that the URLs are the same as they were originally before but in Google webmasters it's still showing crawl errors and our search engine traffic hasn't recovered at all. We have sitemaps being sent daily.
On-Page Optimization | | RudySF0 -
Google vs. Bing
We are having some really good results with our SEO strategies for local search and long tail searches for our clients on Google; however, Bing is a completely different story in a couple of cases. What is Bing looking for that Google is not? We have even noticed that something may rank well in Bing then not show up at all in Google? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | Strategexe0 -
My text does not show up in Google
Hi there. I've got an urgent question I hope someone can help me with. I've made a website (www.tonyharrismakingcents.com.au) with a few content pages. I don't get a lot of traffic. All my pages are scrawled and I don't see any errors. However, when I copy an entire paragraph and Google it, it does not show up in the search results. This makes me believe that the pages are not scrawled correctly. Only when I search for the exact paragraph by putting it between "", the website shows up on the results page. What can be the reason for this? Thanks for your help..It's much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | csrinpractice0 -
Site Structure
I'm confused about the best way for seo to set up the site structure . i understand the examples of the pyramid diagrams and how link juice flows, however does this mean that global navigation is not good? It appears the pyramid structure leads to the designated number of category pages (we'll use five) and they lead to the 5 content pages etc and some "superman pages" can be linked to from the home page but is this is global navigation or anchor text navigation and is gloval navigation acdeptable for content pages? Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | JulB0