A Bazaar 10 Days In WMT & Moz
-
Hey All,
Just wondering if anyone else has experienced anything like this or has any idea what happen to one of my sites last week.
I have a lot of question and unanswered weirdness that seems to be occurring in the data.
It kind of plays out like this.
- Noticeable drop off in organic SE traffic
- WMT kicks out 70% of my structured schema data
- Moz drops DA to 14 from 17
- Moz MR drops from 3.50 to 2.74
- Total Indexed pages (as per SEOQuake tool bar) Drops from 500 to 224
- All the images submitted via a sitemap have been unindexed according to WMT.
This only a 3 month old web site with a minimal back linking profile, we're talking less than 100. No one has been working on the site, the only thing that has happen in the last month is blog post being posted. All unique content and well formatted.
Then at the beginning of this week I saw traffic increasing again, and this was confirmed when WMT updated and I got my Moz update.
- All schema data back in WMT, with no acknowledgement of the drop; the graph just continues in a steady rise as tho nothing happened.
- Traffic back up to normal levels, as tho nothing happened.
I have noticed a 100% increase in the amount of pages being blocked by robots.txt, I haven't changed it, nor has anyone else, it has been the same since the site was launched.
I'm hoping that Moz will put the DA and MR back to where they were, and no damage will be done.\
But my question is, What the hell happened? It nearly wiped the site of the face off the earth for 10 days, how do I find out what did it, why and stop it from happening again?
I have noticed the number of pages indexed by google, as quoted by SEOquake tool bar not WMT regularly jumps from anywhere from 200 to 500, Any ideas?
I know their are many different elements at play here, where do I start, I can't sit back and hop it never happens again.
Thank you to anyone that wants to roll their sleeves up and have ago at this one.
Best, IAn
-
Ian I don't think anyone is going to be able to help you without being able to see your site, do some checking around the SERPs, etc... If you don't want to provide that information, we understand, but I don't think anyone could provide you with a useful answer.
As far as new sites going up and then dropping down in the first few months, we used to call this the "Google Sandbox effect". Nobody talks about it anymore for various reasons, but many of us believe that there is still an amount of time for a new site where Google will give it the benefit of a doubt in order to collect metrics about it from the SERPs, such as user's reactions to it appearing in the search results for different queries. Once that data is crunched the rankings often go down. That's just a theory, but I thought I'd throw it out there. It doesn't seem to make sense in this case though, as it doesn't explain the Moz metric drops, which are not associated with Google at all.
Google recently cleaned house a bit on structured data in the SERPs, which might explain that part of it. Even if your data markup was using the correct syntax it wouldn't help if you don't have the trust metrics necessary for Google to deem the sight worthy of structured data in the SERPs.
-
Thanks for your reply,
All the pages that are blocked in robots.txt are ones I want blocked, admin; login etc. But the robots.txt hasn't been changed for over 6 weeks. What jumped out at me was; Why all of a sudden would their be a spike on WMT of blocked pages? Why didn't these show up 6 weeks ago? They have been blocked all the time. Maybe it's nothing but why did they show up at the same time the site was dropped?
No pages that shouldn't be blocked are blocked.
Thanks,
Ian
-
I see. Well first of all, the Moz Rank and Domain Authority don't actually feed information to Google and are nothing more than a slight-indicator of what's happening. If your DA went from 17 to 14 this could be for any number of reasons but even if it went back up to 17 all the sudden you wouldn't see any difference in traffic or SERPs just based on this number alone.
I'm not sure why it would disappear for 10 days and then reappear, to be honest. Could be any number of things. But I wouldn't worry about it if your placement has since returned.
I would worry about the pages being blocked by your robots.txt that you don't want blocked. Am I understanding that correctly? Do you have an example of that?
-
Hi Jesse,
Sorry, That's my fault for not clarifying myself properly. Allow me to elaborate.
What I mean by "No one is working on the site" Is no coding or backend work is going on, work which could have disturbed the site from Google's point of view, or caused a sudden change in the code, that would cause the mark up data to disappear from WMT.
The site is very much being actively optimised, onsite with blog posts and additional site pages being added almost daily, and off site through social media channels and outreach programs. Their are 100 Back links which have been picked up in WMT, their are an awful lot more than this out there.
Traffic is building nicely considering the age of the site (3 months). This is why it was such a shock when it was virtually wiped out for 10 days.
My question is not about SEO or how to do it (however I always appreciate someone else point of view and interesting spins), it's about why WMT and MOZ would have knee jerk reaction to something, and almost simultaneously drop the site. Then a week later pick it straight back up again?
When nothing was changed/done (coding/site structure/links) on site. The code/site structure/backend hasn't been touched for 6 weeks, only content has been added.
I'm trying to find a way to find out what caused this, for want of a better word 'seizure', and know how to stop it ever happening again.
I hope this clarifies my position a little, sorry for being vague before.
BEst IAn
-
Based on this quote: "This only a 3 month old web site with a minimal back linking profile, we're talking less than 100. No one has been working on the site," none of this is surprising to me. You have a young site and you're not working to market it. So yeah, you're gonna see your rankings disappear.
Why some of the pages have been de-indexed could be for any number of reasons. I think the only way to tell would be to post your URL and some of the fine folks here could take a look.
But besides that mystery, the best thing for you to do is roll up your own sleeves and get a good SEM campaign going for this domain. That's the name of the game!
Good luck!
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
-
Webmaster sitemap how to tell Google to recheck and no of times to check a day?
Webmaster sitemap how to tell Google to recheck and no of times to check a day? But how often google check if the sitemap version changed and how to notify google about the change happened
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Magento Canonical & Default Robots Settings
Hello! I'm working with Magento 1.9 for an eCommerce site with several hundred products. Currently I understand it is best practices to use the Canonical tag, however I also have my default robots set to "Index, Follow". Will this cause an issue having product pages set to index, follow but also having a canonical tag included? What are some best practices regarding Magento default robots & canonical tags? Any help is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | BretDarby0 -
New to MOZ and so far love tools but need some quick tips on title, keywords and descriptions
First of all:
On-Page Optimization | | nickcargill
I am excited about using all the MOZ tools! I just got back my webcrawl and have found
a lot of issues that I am working on. I am a Vacation Rental Property Manager with 150 properties, all different. 90% of my pages have the same keywords and descriptions and a lot of same page titles
too. I can change all of these by adding a few fields in my database and then
populating the meta information dynamically. For Example: <title>Big Bear Cabins | Big Bear Cabin Rentals - Chateau Alta Vista Cabin</title>
Chateau Alta Vista, Big Bear Cabins, Big Bear Cabin Rentals
Chateau ALta vista is a Big Bear Cabin with four bedrooms, three
bathrooms, it is Big Bear Luxury Property. If you notice the Title, keyword are dynamically populated from the database using the
property name of Chateau Alta Vista. The description is an extra field in the database that I just implemented that I can customize per property. I have a few questions, but here is more information: I also have 5 or 6 related pages
to each property. Pages Like general information, photos, calendars, book
Question 1): Is the best way of doing my titles, keywords and descriptions. Any concerns or recommendations. I have read, do not even use keywords anymore. Question 2) I have other pages that show maybe 8 or 10 photos. So is it ok to do the following; Title <photos of="" big="" bear="" cabin="" chateu="" alta="" vista<="" title="">Meta Keywords <photos of="" big="" bear="" cabins="" chateu="" alta="" vista="">Meta Description <check out="" photos="" of="" big="" bear="" cabin="" rentals,="" chateua="" <br="">Alta Vista, etc Currently, I have some archaic page naming with database driven url parameters such as</check></photos></photos> http://destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=669 and at worse http://destinationbigbear.com/Property_detail_v.aspx?propid=669&rate= $1,127.10&checkoutdate=07/13/2014&beds=4&firstnight=07/11/2014&nights=2 I do not have he ability to to full url encoding such as http://destinationbigbear.com/cabins/chateau-alta-vista but I can do http:/www.destinationbigbear.com/big-bear-cabin-info.aspx?cabin=chateau%alta%vista Question is what do I do... If I do change the page names I will lose the history of property_detail_V.aspx which only has a Page Authority of 21, but if I change the page name and dynamic navigation of my website will I not lose all my authorities, if so, is it worth doing it? My highest keyword ranking is 30 which is terrible. Nick0 -
To Many Links & Long Titles
One of our clients currently has a number of pages that "Too many on page links", Now her menu in itself has the majority. With it being an eComerce website it has quite a few categories. How harmfull is this to search rankings. The other side of thing's, Currently the client has a large number of pages where the title of the page is the product, However her products for example could be "The pink fluffy bear 2x4 with extendable arm and voice activation ( batteries not included )" Again, how Harmfull is having a large volume of pages named like this.
On-Page Optimization | | bmkdigital0 -
Using product prices in title tags & other ways to improve CTR
I'm about to launch a new website and was just wondering if anyone had tried this before; On product pages i thought it may be a good idea to include prices, with a message to save more when the customer buys more. Something along the lines of this; [Product name] at/from [Brand name] - Only [Price] [Buy # to save] Etc. Does anyone have any experience with using this in title tags (along with some variation of offering a saving when bulk buying) etc? Any comments would be hugely appreciated! Thanks! [EDIT] Should also just note that we are very competitive on pricing - Looked at more than 70 competitors and we're offering better quality products (than the ones from [supposedly top] competitors we've sampled) for lower prices.
On-Page Optimization | | tea0 -
Duplicate content and the Moz bot
Hi Does our little friend at SEOmoz follow the same rules as the search engine bots when he crawls my site? He has sent thousands of errors back to me with duplicate content issues, but I thought I had removed these with nofollow etc. Can you advise please.
On-Page Optimization | | JamieHibbert0 -
URL STRUCTURE & RE-WRITING
1.) I need a suggestion from you, please help. How should be the Directory/URL structure if I am offering servicves in many cities of UK/US. /<service>/
On-Page Optimization | | younus
/<service>/<state>/
/<service>/<state>/<city>/ OR /<service>/
/<state>/<service>/
/<state>/<city>/<service>/ Thanks for your time.</service></city></state></service></state></service></city></state></service></state></service></service> What exactly mean by 'URL enforce writer' to rewrite the URL.0 -
Wordpress: Should I NO INDEX Categories & Archives Pages?
I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site. The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with? In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type? Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.
On-Page Optimization | | KMack2