Whitehat site suffering from drastic & negative Keyword/Phrase Shifts out of the blue!
-
I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles.
The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course.
Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect...
Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later.
However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions.
My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives?
I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site?
-
Snowflake,
When you migrate to HTTP's i believe you have to add the new protocol to Search Console. Google looks at HTTP and HTTPs as 2 different sites, which is why you might be seeing your index count going down under your HTTP account in SC. If you add the HTTPs version of your website to search console, you may see that those pages have been indexed under the HTTPs protocol. Check it out, wait a few weeks and see what happens.
Secure Your Site With HTTPS - Search Console Help
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en -
That is a very good shout!
-
Thanks Don,
I had read that article initially actually which is why I thought a few weeks was enough for it all to have settled back out but maybe I'm expecting a bit much for a 600 page site.
Many thanks for your help I'll maybe just be patient if there is nothing glaringly wrong
-
Also a quick point, if you still have your Google search console setup for HTTP, even though you use HTTPS now, I'd suggest looking at what is being reported as indexed in there. That maybe the missing link.
Cordialement,
Don
-
So I'm not seeing anything blocking crawling on your site which is good. But I did notice that you have at one time used URL types "http" and "https" which leads me to believe you may have recently switched to HTTPS. In such case you should know that it may take Google sometime to adjust. On a technical level, https and http are 2 different domains.
It is highly likely that Google has index the HTTP version of some of these pages which is why your index count maybe lower then normal for the HTTPS version.
I do see you properly 301 redirected these pages and your sitemaps are reflecting the https as well, if again this was a recent change it just looks like its going to take a bit of time for Google to catch up.
This is worth a quick look, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en (scroll to the bottom) and see the section "Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS".
I sent you additional info in PM.
Hope this helps,
Don
-
We did go from http to https about a month ago but we were careful that all the redirects and sitemaps were reflected correctly. I dont think there is an issue with the robots text (it is present and nothing weird blocking).
I'll take a look at those links and send you a pm - many thanks Don
-
Hi,
There are several reasons.
If you have recently changed your url structure. IE (went from using www to not, or https or not, or trailing / or not). In these cases Google could have indexed the pages already under the "other" version.
Google could be having a crawling error, like in a robots.txt or lack there of. Improper canonical tags, blocked access, improper redirects, or a manual penalty.
If you would like to post a link (or pm me) I will take a look and see if I can spot a potential problem for you.
Here are a couple links on Google that should help:
Why Pages Drop From Index
Overview Pages Not Being CrawledHope this helps,
Don
-
Checking Webmaster Tools it looks like Google has unindexed 500 out of our 630 pages in the last 2 weeks.
Is there any reason for why this maybe?
-
Thanks for your input Donford,
I've had a look in OSE again and I can't see any spam links (all the genuine links are rated 0 through to 3) which looks very good. So it doesn't appear to be a negative campaign against me.
I may try Majestic for peace of mind... it makes it even more the stranger that we are being penalised so much
-
Hi Snowflake,
You can use the OSE (Open Site Explorer) here on Moz to check the links they found. You can download that report to CSV to easily sort and see if you have a possible negative campaign running against you.
You could also use, Majestic, or SEMRush. to find more links. Just note there is no tool, free or paid that is going to be able to get all the links pointing to your site.
If you don't find a lot of spam links to your site, chances are there isn't somebody trying to target you with a negative campaign.
Hope it helps,
-
Thanks Eric,
There are a few languages of the site but as far as I'm aware no duplicate content in the same language but I will check with Siteliner just to be sure.
For disavowing backlinks - is this just via webmaster tools you are recommending to do that? If so we haven't done that yet but it seems sensible to try. When I last checked back links there were a few random sites that we certainly hadn't submitted to and looked spammy but when I went onto them we couldn't see our links.
Do you have a recommendation for a better backlink testing tool?
-
I know this is frustrating. There are a few areas that I would look into that could be causing this: duplicate content issues and links. First, look to see if you have any duplicate content issues on the site. There could be a duplicate copy of the site (perhaps a dev version that should not be indexed) or even certain content on your site that's causing issues. You might try Siteliner's crawler to identify if there are any issues you can fix.
Another possible reason is the links to the site. The site could have been hit by negative SEO, and a lot of "low quality" links or off-topic links could be pointing to your site. I've seen this in the past, and the only thing you can do is identify the links and disavow them. Sometimes you can get them removed, but disavowing them should work.
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
-
Seeking Site Feedback
Hello everyone! Hope you are all doing well. Long story short, I'm currently in the 30-day trial period for Moz Pro and I'm taking advantage of running a campaign for my (currently) one-man SEO/Digital Marketing company. Recently built my site using Divi. Filled out all the SEO information through the Yoast SEO plugin, tied Google Analytics, etc... Seeking feedback on the visuals of the website and whether you have any feedback on link-building in order to bring in more traffic to the site. http://fourpeaksseo.com Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Four-Peaks-SEO0 -
Competitors with duplicate sites for backlinks
Hello all, In the last few months, my company has seen some keywords we historically rank well for fall off the first page, and there are a couple competitors that have appeared that use backlinks from seemingly the same site. For fairness, our site has slow page load speeds that we are working on changing, as well as not being mobile friendly yet. The sites that are ranking are mobile friendly and load fast, but we have heaps of other words still ranking well, and I'm more curious about this methodology. For example, these two pages: http://whiteboards.com.au/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JustinBSLW
http://www.glasswhiteboards.com.au/ In OSE, glasswhiteboards has the majority of links from whiteboards, and the content between the sites is the same. My page has higher domain authority & page authority, but less backlinks. However, if you take away the backlinks from the duplicate site, they are the same. Isn't this type of content supposed to be flagged? My question is about whether this kind of similar site on different domains is a good idea to build links, as all my research shows that it's poor in the long run, but it seems to be working with these guys. Another group of sites that has been killing us uses this same method, with multiple sites that look the same that all link to each other to build up backlinks. These sites do have different content. It seems instead of building different categories within their own site, they have purchased multiple domains that act as their categories. Here's just a few: http://www.lockablenoticeboards.com.au/
http://www.snapperframes.com/
http://www.snapperdisplay.com.au/
http://www.light-box.com.au/
http://www.a-frame-signs.com.au/
http://www.posterhangers.com.au/0 -
Has our site been attacked?
Hello fellow mozers! I am having a problem you might be able to help me with and any thoughts on the issue will be greatly appreciated. Yesterday, I received an automated monthly report from Quill Engage, a tool that fetches data from Google Analytics and generates reports in a narrative format. Last month's 'referral traffic' section indicates two incredibly spammy websites driving more than 200 sessions to our website. Naturally, I checked out GWT and Open Site Explorer but couldn't find any traces of such activity. Futhermore, all our metrics seem ok. Can this possibly be a negative SEO attack that was only traced by the aforementioned tool? Can you propose any other way to test this and make sure we're not being attacked?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SMD_0 -
Is this negative SEO? Should I disavow these links?
We have been doing our own internal link building for the last year and getting nice backlinks. As of the last few days, ahrefs is showing a lot of new links that seem very spammy. We have not hired anyone to do link building for us, and these are all being created on these sites under the same user name. There is a good amount of them popping up, and I fear we will be subjected to a google pentalty for unnatural links if its not addressed. My first question is, am I correct thinking this is negative seo, and not some random sites that picked up our content and is going across their affiliate websites? If so, then should I preemptively disavow all these links? Are there any good ways to stop this? How can I track who is placing these garbage links? Here are some examples of these bad links. I know I can find the webmaster via a whois but I think that really wont get me anywhere, but I could be wrong. Here are some examples of the links that started popping up yesterday and today. http://pligg-cms.info/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-relief
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DemiGR
http://www.sharklinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://factson37.com/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-forgiveness-website
http://social-marker.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-debt-forgiveness
http://makingbookmarks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://bookmarkingforseo.com/story.php?title=top-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://jadelinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options There are quite a bit more and they don't seem to be stopping. All of them look pretty much identical to this. Thoughts?1 -
Partial match penalty & Penguin 2.1 smack
Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale. We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory. We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text. Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc. We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign. We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links. The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses. "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com. We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _ So here's the issue I need your advice on. We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name. We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines. **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has? ** Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link? Can we nofollow all those links? Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section? Should we just remove the links and cry?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Massive site-wide internal footer links to doorway pages: how bad is this?
My company has stuffed several hundred links into the footer of every page. Well, technically not the footer, as they're right at the end of the body tag, but basically the same thing. They are formatted as follows: [" href="http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm">" target="_blank">http://example.com/springfield_pa_real_estate.htm">](</span><a class= "http://example.com/springfield_oh_real_estate.htm")springfield, pa real estate These direct to individual pages that contain the same few images and variations the following text that just replace the town and state: _Springfield, PA Real Estate - Springfield County [images] This page features links to help you Find Listings and Homes for sale in the Springfield area MLS, Springfield Real Estate Agents, and Springfield home values. Our free real estate services feature all Springfield and Springfield suburban areas. We also have information on Springfield home selling, Springfield home buying, financing and mortgages, insurance and other realty services for anyone looking to sell a home or buy a home in Springfield. And if you are relocating to Springfield or want Springfield relocation information we can help with our Relocation Network._ The bolded text links to our internal site pages for buying, selling, relocation, etc. Like I said, this is repeated several hundred times, on every single page on our site. In our XML sitemap file, there are links to: http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BD69
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Homes/
http://www.example.com/Real_Estate/City/Springfield/Townhomes/ That direct to separate pages with a Google map result for properties for sale in Springfield. It's accompanied by the a boilerplate version of this: _Find Springfield Pennsylvania Real Estate for sale on www.example.com - your complete source for all Springfield Pennsylvania real estate. Using www.example.com, you can search the entire local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) for up to date Springfield Pennsylvania real estate for sale that may not be available elsewhere. This includes every Springfield Pennsylvania property that's currently for sale and listed on our local MLS. Example Company is a fully licensed Springfield Pennsylvania real estate provider._ Google Webmaster Tools is reporting that some of these pages have over 30,000 internal links on our site. However, GWT isn't reporting any manual actions that need to be addressed. How blatantly abusive and spammy is this? At best, Google doesn't care a spit about it , but worst case is this is actively harming our SERP rankings. What's the best way to go about dealing with this? The site did have Analytics running, but the company lost the account information years ago, otherwise I'd check the numbers to see if we were ever hit by Panda/Penguin. I just got a new Analytics account implemented 2 weeks ago. Of course it's still using deprecated object values so I don't even know how accurate it is. Thanks everyone! qrPftlf.png0 -
Rollover design & SEO
After reading this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/designing-for-seo some questions came up from my developers. In the article it says "One potential solution to this problem is a mouse-over. Initially when viewed, the panel will look as it does on the left hand side (exactly as the designer want it), yet when a user rolls over the image the panel changes into what you see on the right hand side (exactly what the SEO wants)." My developers say" Having text in the rollovers is almost like hiding text and everyone knows in SEO that you should never hide text. "In the article he explains that it is not hidden text since its visible & readable by the engines.What are everyone's thoughts on this? Completely acceptable or iffy?Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Merging four sites into one... Best way to combine content?
First of all, thank you in advance for taking the time to look at this. The law firm I work for once took a "more is better" approach and had multiple websites, with keyword rich domains. We are a family law firm, but we have a specific site for "Arizona Child Custody" as one example. We have four sites. All four of our sites rank well, although I don't know why. Only one site is in my control, the other three are managed by FindLaw. I have no idea why the FindLaw sites do well, other than being in the FindLaw directory. They have terrible spammy page titles, and using Copyscape, I realize that most of the content that FindLaw provides for it's attorneys are "spun articles." So I have a major task and I don't know how to begin. First of all, since all four sites rank well for all of the desired phrases-- will combining all of that power into one site rocket us to stardom? The sites all rank very well now, even though they are all technically terrible. Literally. I would hope that if I redirect the child custody site (as one example) to the child custody overview page on the final merged site, we would still maintain our current SERP for "arizona child custody lawyer." I have strongly encouraged my boss to merge our sites for many reasons. One of those being that it's playing havoc with our local places. On the other hand, if I take down the child custody site, redirect it, and we lose that ranking, I might be out of a job. Finally, that brings me down to my last question. As I mentioned, the child custody site is "done" very poorly. Should I actually keep the spun content and redirect each and every page to a duplicate on our "final" domain, or should I redirect each page to a better article? This is the part that I fear the most. I am considering subdomains. Like, redirecting the child custody site to childcustody.ourdomain.com-- I know, for a fact, that will work flawlessly. I've done that many times for other clients that have multiple domains. However, we have seven areas of practice and we don't have 7 nice sites. So child custody would be the only legal practice area that has it's own subdomain. Also, I wouldn't really be doing anything then, would I? We all know 301 redirects work. What I want is to harness all of this individual power to one mega-site. Between the four sites, I have 800 pages of content. I need to formulate a plan of action now, and then begin acting on it. I don't want to make the decision alone. Anybody care to chime in? Thank you in advance for your help. I really appreciate the time it took you to read this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SDSLaw0