I'm stumped!
-
I'm hoping to find a real expert to help out with this.
TL;DR Our visibility in search has started tanking and I cannot figure out why.
The whole story:
In fall of 2015 I started working with Convention Nation (www.conventionnation.com). The client is trying to build a resource for convention and tradeshow attendees that would help them identify the events that will help them meet their goals (learning, networking, sales, whatever). They had a content team overseas that spent their time copy/pasting event information into our database.
At the time, I identified several opportunities to improve SEO:
- Create and submit a sitemap
- Add meaningful metas
- Fix crawl errors
- On-page content uniqueification and optimization for most visible events (largest audience likely to search)
- Regular publishing and social media
Over nine months, we did these things and saw search visibility, average rank and CTR all double or better.
There was still one problem, and that is created by our specific industry. I'll use a concrete example: MozCon. This event happens once a year and there are enough things that are the same about it every year (namely, the generalized description of the event, attendees and outcomes) that the 2015 page was getting flagged as a duplicate of 2016.
The event content for most of our events was pretty thin anyway, and much of it was duplicated from other sources, so we implemented a feature that grouped recurring events. My thinking was that this would reduce the perception of duplicate or obsolete content and links and provide a nice backlink opportunity.
I expected a dip after we deployed this grouping feature, that's been consistent with other bulk content changes we've made to the site, but we are not recovering from the dip. In fact, our search visibility and traffic are dropping every week.
So, the current state of things is this:
- Clean crawl reports: No errors reported by Moz or Google
- Moz domain authority: 20; Spam score 2/17
- We're a little thin on incoming links, but steady growth in both social media and backlinks
- Continuing to add thin/duplicate content for unique events at the rate of 200 pages/mo
- Adding solid, unique strategic content at the rate of 15 pages/mo
I just cannot figure out where we've gone astray. Is there anything other than the thin/copied content that could be causing this? It wasn't hurting us before we grouped the events...
What could possibly account for this trend?
Help me, Moz Community, you're my only hope!
Lindsay
-
Thanks, Bernadette.
The consolidation has been done, and surprisingly seems to correlate with our dropping visibility.
Do you have any experience with a "consolidation" that might shed some light?
-
Lindsay, there are so many unique issues that could be causing this that it's difficult to diagnose the problem without having a specific URL to look at. However, it sounds as if you've been looking at a lot of the on-site and on-page factors. Have you looked at the links to the site and done anything to evaluate the links to your website and make sure you don't have low quality links that need to be disavowed?
When you mention the thin or duplicate content issues, have you considered consolidating the content and removing the previous year's content (or moving it an archiving it) so that only the current content exists? Besides archiving or removing it from the site, you may want to use the canonical tag. Another way to deal with that content would be to use the robots.txt file to disallow indexing of certain older content pages.
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
-
Schema Markup Doesn't Make Any Sense!! Help Please
Hey again Moz community! I've been trying to read up on schema markup and watch videos multiple times (!) but I can't understand how it works. I would greatly appreciate it if someone can answer these questions: Do I need to ‘markup’ every part of the article? Like “this section can be FAQ snippet, and this can also FAQ etc..". So I guess my question is how detailed does the markup have to be? What are the best tools to use for schema markup for wordpress? What are the best tools to use for schema markup for react web-app? The https://search.google.com/test/rich-results shows if the markup is good for a page, but it doesn’t provide any details. For some articles it says that sitelinks searchbox is detected but that’s only one type of snippet possibility? Do I need to add additional markup for, say, list snippets and FAQ snippets if I want a chance to get those? Thanks a lot! Leo W
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leowa2 -
Why isn't www.devonshiredentalcare.co.uk ranking?
Hi, devonshiredentalcare.co.uk was hit badly by one of Google's algorithm updates due to some prior poor seo (by another company). We took this client on and followed all of Google's guidelines and after a lot of work, managed to lift the penalty. It's been almost a year since the penalty was lifted, but it seems to be impossible to get this website ranking for 'Dentist Glasgow', they are currently page 4 in the SERPs! They have 33 Google reviews, we've built good quality links and citations, they have a 'Grade A' for on page optimisation in moz, we are also about to make the website responsive due to the recent mobilegeddon update. Do you have any further suggestions to help get this website ranking? Thanks in advance, Faye
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dentaldesign0 -
Tool that can retrieve mysite URL's
Hi, Tool that can retrieve mysite URL's I am not talking about href,open explorer, Majestic etc I have a list of 1000 site URL's where my site name is mentioned. I want to get the exact URL of my site next to the URL i want to query with Example http://moz.com/community is the URL i have and if this page has mysite name then i need to get the complete URL captured. Any software or tool that can do this? I used one for sure which got me this info but now i don't remember it Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Any ideas, what i'm doing wrong?
Hi, I have done alot of work over the past few weeks to fix errors but I seem to be slding down the rankings again! I have attached a screenshot of the competitive link analysis. The 2nd competitor along is pushing past me and I just can't see why. What steps should I take and what is the priority? Thanks, T23 auAMrVT.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tekton230 -
Dynamic 301's causing duplicate content
Hi, wonder if anyone can help? We have just changed our site which was hosted on IIS and the page url's were like this ( example.co.uk/Default.aspx?pagename=About-Us ). The new page url is example.co.uk/About-Us/ and is using Apache. The 301's our developer told us to use was in this format: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/Default.aspx$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoGroup51
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^pagename=About-Us$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/About-Us/ [R=301,L] This seemed to work from a 301 point of view; however it also seemed to allow both of the below URL's to give the same page! example.co.uk/About-Us/?pagename=About-Us example.co.uk/About-Us/ Webmaster Tools has now picked up on this and is seeing it a duplicate content. Can anyone help why it would be doing this please. I'm not totally clued up and our host/ developer cant understand it too. Many Thanks0 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Don't want to lose page rank, what's the best way to restructure a url other than a 301 redirect?
Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marig0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0