Ecommerce site impressions and clicks drop
-
Hello,
A new client came to me with their ecommerce kids clothes website 6 weeks ago. I installed Yoast SEO plugin and set to work changing all their products to proper words rather than codes and optimising titles and descriptions. I did no link building. The domain is new- about 2- 3 months only so has very few links. I added it to webmaster tools and submitted the sitemap. Traffic was good during this time and infact the impressions in webmaster tools and clicks were increasing. It seemed to be punching beyond its weight actually with some keywords on page 1 which I thought odd for such a new domain in such a competitive arena. Then on the 4th October the impressions and clicks fell drastically. The traffic is about a third of what it was.
Now I don't think this was anything Penguin-ish as the domain is so new with no links yet. I know there was a Panda update on the 25th September. Could it be that? All I have done is changed the titles to something more human and I thought Google appeared to like that as traffic was increasing. Could it be that now everything is indexed that it has settled down to its proper position in the rankings which is currently low? We added another way of categorising the products by brand as on the site their USP is their designer brands. I have checked for duplication but as far as I can see this isn't an issue.
Anyone seens this before?
-
Thank you Bruce.
-
Everything points to the first flush of youth. New site, lots of new content and google loves this. Now time as started to balance as your rightly say, to settle the site to where it naturally sits as a new kid on the block, but not that new.
What-ever you do, do not tweak, if Moz page rank scores are good for your keywords etc, as this will end up with you being totally confused about the stats you are starting to see.
Make sure each main page scores well for your keywords and build good content and update regularly to your main category pages. Products pages are static, so use your entry pages to add fresh content. Improve each page where you can.
Penguin is cannot penalise sites without spammy links, so this is not the problem if you don't have any.
Remember Google is about quality end user content, fresh and unique.
Hope this helps on the journey. Look forwar to many more questions in due course I am sure.
Bruce
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
-
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
Ecommerce site product reviews, canonicals – which option to choose?
Recently, I discovered that only the first 4 reviews on our product pages are crawled and indexed. Example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432 I'm assuming it's due to the canonical that's on the product page http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432" />. When you click on page 2 of the reviews, the url does not change, but the next batch of reviews appears on the product page. Same with page 3, etc… The problem is the additional pages are not being crawled and indexed. We have to have the canonical on the product page because our platform creates multiple urls for each product page by including each category where the product resides, related link parameters, etc in the product url (example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/patio-furniture/outdoor-furniture/253432) – trust me, it gets ugly! I've researched other Moz answers and I've found that there appears to be a couple of ways to fix the issue. Any ideas/help/guidance/examples on the below options is greatly appreciated!!!! Show only 4 reviews on the first page and place the remaining reviews on a new page by themselves (similar to how Amazon does it). However, I would rather keep all of the reviews on the product page if possible. Add page 2, page 3, etc parameters to the url to display the remaining reviews and adding rel=prev/next. If we chose option 2, would each product page have a different canonical? If so, would it create a duplicate content issue since the above-the-fold content, title tag and meta descriptions would all be the same? Also, would you include each additional page in the sitemap? We had a similar issue with our category pages and we implemented the "viewall" in the canonical. Would that work for our reviews? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | Improvements0 -
How to remove a thin site penalty
Wondering if anyone could help out. A while back I made an affiliate store using wordpress and merchants products feeds. I didn't get found to adding any unique content to the site and, as was to be expected, I gained a penalty and my search traffic died. A few months back I redesigned the store, still using merchant csv but now with 98% unique content on each page. However, try as I may I still cannot get anywhere in the engines. The domain doesn't even rank for it's own name!! I have submitted reconsideration request but they have replied saying no penalty on the site. The domain is www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk. While the domain isn't massively strong I would prefer not to have to start again as I feel it is a very good domain name. Any advise would be most gratefully received. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
What happens if my site was down for 10 hours?
Hello, We have a fairly large site. Due to an attack it was taken down for about 10 hours. We have finally been able to resolve the security issues, restore the code and put everything back online. Now, we are a little bit worried about what GoogleBot will think of us. We have been working hard during the past months to get a better SEO. Should we be worried?
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Why Did Domain Authority On Our 2 Sites Drop 10 Points?
Greetings, I am new to the community and am checking out Pro. The domain authority for two of our sites www.lumber2.com and www.americasworkclothes.com has dropped 10 points each respectively. I've worked on getting our lumber 2 site on registries from getlisted.org (i think there are 5 or 6 of them). Our page authority has improved significantly along with mosrank and moztrust. However, at the same time our domain authorities just tanked 10 points each. Since each site dropped 10 points, I'm wondering if its the ros links affecting them. Here's the domain data: Lumber 2 site: DA 21: 50,489 links from 12 domains
Technical SEO | | AWCthreads
America's Work Clothes: DA 20: 33,839 links from 5 domains We have left nav run of site links between our two sites and have had them in place for a couple of years with steady domain authority progression. Suddenly DA tanked. Is there a chance there is too much run of site linking? I already removed a few links, so you won't see all of them. Can anyone help? Thank you. Steve0 -
How to turn WP site into Ecom site?
I have a couple of old wordpress sites that are old affiliate blogs. I currently sell products that are on amazon on these sites and sell quite a bit of volume. I have found a source and can afford the inventory to replace Amazon with my own product. So the dilema is how to turn these wordpress sites into ecommerce sites. The thing I am worried most about is that each site gets about 100-200 visitors a day for great buying keywords. I obviously don't want to lose my rankings. What are the options of turning a wordpress site into a store. I am not interested in plugins or some of the other solutions that make the store look very cheap and I would assume horribly convert. If you have inner pages ranking for keywords how does that work? Do the post pages become product pages? So to sum up I guess I am asking, what are the options that are of the higher quality that will also help me keep my rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
My site has vanished from google
Hi my site has vanished from google. We have been for a very long time. for example if you put in gastric band hypnotherapy then we would be first page number two and also lots of other keywords but now we have vanished from google and i do not know why or how to solve this. can anyone please help me and help me understand what i need to do to solve this please My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk I am not sure if i have been banned or why i have dropped out of google
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860