Added Schema and Rankings Went Down
-
Hello -
We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
-
If you use the Schema WordPress plugin, it may be that you have breadcrumbs enabled. Martha van Berkel, a founder, helped me troubleshoot a similar issue and we resolve them by turning off breadcrumbs. It seems that some JS can cause odd behavior.
I believe it works better to add schema via the GTM.
SEMrush is tops at establishing your website's health, but cannot diagnose some of these happenings (no one service can).
Your site relies on quite a few plugins - I wish you the best. I do audits; let me know how I can help you.
-
You may need to login to Google Search Console and check and see if you have a manual action of some sort.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippet-manual-actions-increase-21600.html
I did some digging, there are some cases where WP plugins have added so much markup it is overdone and that can cause issues. I did not see the one you are using (Schema plugin v1.6.1) mentioned, but that does not mean it caused the issue.
Additional info
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippets-homepage-19205.html
http://www.thesempost.com/wordpress-recipe-plugins-causing-rich-snippet-manual-actions/
-
Hello!
When you state "website health" improved, what do you mean?
- Did you check your schema with the Google Rich Snippets tester and it validated? https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
- Did you go into Google Search Console and check for errors and validate that Google is finding the snippets? https://www.google.com/webmasters/#?modal_active=none
My suspicion is that the schema plugin is maybe doing other things you did not intend it to do. Did it add a noindex tag? Did it setup strange canonicals?
Without you specifically giving a page to look at, screen shots from any of the above (or other tools) or what is the specific plugin you are using, it is otherwise very difficult to figure out.
Cheers
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
-
Rankings Dropped to Nothing
We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next. Site: https://indoorgardening.com Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago. 1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability. 2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase. 3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. 4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. 5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary. 6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary. Results:
Technical SEO | | Jbyron
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google. At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. -John0 -
Does having no content on a mobile page have effect on the ranking.
We are about to go live with a mobile version of our webshop, mobile users will be shown an alternative version of the desktop page. At the moment we have little to no content on the mobile pages; how will this effect our ranking? (desktop and mobile page have the same URL and meta, only the "body" is different)
Technical SEO | | G.School0 -
Rankings Bouncing Weekly
I have a client who ranks well for a number of keywords. This week we have about 20 keywords in the top ten on Google that we're tracking. But every week it seems, the keywords bounce around quite a bit. This week, for example, we had at least 15 keywords out of the ~90 we're tracking jump between 30 to 40 spots. The most any keywords increased was 43, a few 42s and 41s, in one week. Next week, they'll go down a few, then bounce up again just like this. This has been happening for a while. I'm trying to figure out what the issue is.
Technical SEO | | Millermore0 -
Ranking not improving
Our site is now 3 months old (although the domain is older) but rankings don't seem to be improving at all. We've got some good quality relevant links coming into the site, and the content is unique and often updated. Is there something holding the site back? Am I being impatient? the site is www.help-my-mobility.org Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
Why is my business website site dropping down the ranking
Hi, i have a business site which is dropping down the ratings and I would like your help in understanding why. I know a business site is different from other sites such as news sites and blogs where the front page changes all the time. I would like to know what is the best way to get google to visit the site on a regular basis, should i have a page that changes all the time or should i keep changing all the pages on the site. One of the important pages was always number one in google and now we are number 11 http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy any help and advice on how to combat dropping in the rankings would be a great help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Would adding an SSL certificate help my website?
SSL certificates can obviously be a used as a ranking factor by Google, but would a site with no need for an SSL certificate notice a gain by adding one? Is it possible to demonstrate you have an SSL certificate without having some https pages on your site?
Technical SEO | | sthompson0 -
Is SEO moz ranking tool reliable?
Good afternoon from 21 degrees C hot and sunny wetherby UK with the aroma of wetherby whalers fish and chips wafting through the office window... I'm begiining to question the vailidity of SEO moz ranking tool. Specifically for this site www.davidclick.com it ranks the site zero for term "York wedding photographer" Here is the evidence: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/ranking-25-may-12copy.jpg I question it after checking this term on PC and networks ive never used before and i get the term ranking at 5th. Can anyone verify what SERP www.davicdclick.com ranks for "York wedding photographer" and indeed why SEO Moz ranking tool is scrorring in zero. Thanks in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Why do I rank so differently in Bing and Yahoo?
Howdy SEOmozers, I've noticed that I rank very differently in Bing and Yahoo compared to Google (and it’s the bad kind of different) for many of the terms that I'm targeting. Can anyone give some advice on how I can put this right or link me to some good resources about the differences in their ranking algorithms? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman1