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:
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.
-John
-
Thanks so much Mike. It actually turned out to be a bad plugin update causing the issue. Took a while to figure that out, but we're good now. Why these plugin authors don't test more before rolling out updates, I'll never know.
Thanks again!
John
-
Hey John,
I actually think this might be an Analytics issue, or at least it's something you might want to investigate before jumping to the SEO conclusion. Check your site using Google Tag Assistant - it looks like there are three Analytics tags competing with each other right now.
If you happen to be using a property that's been dialed back recently, you might be seeing incorrect traffic numbers.
Check that your Analytics is correct first - you might be alright on SEO right now - I'm not immediately seeing anything else that would result in such a rapid traffic loss from organic search.
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 are different in Different Geographical are with in the same country
Hello , I observed my ranking are different in same country but different geographical areas.Is this nature is common or we missing something. How long will it take to come to the same rankings.
Technical SEO | | medhahostingpr0 -
My PA and DA dropped Higest Rate
hi i got a domain with 49 DA and 36 PA and bought it through namecheap after uploading on their server with https:// after 5 days the site lost its PA and DA now it was 1 PA and 9 DA Could any one tell me what the issue behind this the links is fair and not spam but why the dropping of cause for???
Technical SEO | | gamajunova0 -
Good organic ranking/Poor local ranking
Hi, I am a local retailer with a physical store in a major US City. My website is very well ranked on major keywords related to my business from an organic result perspective (between 1st and 3rd spot). However, in terms of local results (google place), my website isn't even ranked (except for one specific long tail keyword). Anybody know why? Thank you so much for your help. This is driving me crazy:-)
Technical SEO | | larose370 -
Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO. If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Why did I drop ranking after setting up perm redirect, sitemap, and Google places??
I have a site that was ranking in the top two for my search terms. We had a funky url (it contained hyphens) and was advised to change it for SEO, so I setup a perm redirect through my web host (before it was a temporary one I think) At the same time I installed a sitemap plugin for Wordpress and also registered for a Google Places account. I can't remember the exact order I did this -- does it matter? Anyway, within a couple days of doing the above, my ranking dropped to the bottom of the second page. I would like to fix this, but I'm not sure. I need help please!
Technical SEO | | fsvatousek0 -
Site dropped after article submissions
I have a site about back pain. The name is lower back pain relief. It has a lot of content on how to treat back pain with natural remedies. I paid for botw.org and yahoo directories as well as submissions from submit edge. My site was doing well within a few months. I was floating around at the bottom of page two for "lower back pain relief" and lower back pain. I found out about Unique article wizard. I started using that to write and submit articles. Now, my website is not ranking anywhere. I submitted a request for reconsideration to Google. They said no manual action had been taken. The question: How long does this penalty last? Is that website toast now? I think it was penalized for using the anchor text too much or adding too many links at once. It has been penalized for about 6 weeks now.
Technical SEO | | Naturalhealth150 -
Importance of keyword in the content to rank well
Well, I am very beginner seo. our website is www.theprinterdepo.com and our main keyword for the moment is refurbished printers, but there might be hundreds of more keywords. I was analyzing the SERPs and found that for our keyword, the first 2 websites that come up have very different content 1.http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=PRN They rank first, but I dont see a lot of text with the keyword in their text or links 2. http://www.valstarprinters.com/ They mention the keywords lots of times in the text, probably they are doing keyword stuffing? So this makes me thing, how the 1st one ranked there? just by link builiding?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Pages plummeting in ranking
Hi all, I have a question, which i hope you can answer for me. I have a site www.betxpert.com (a danish betting site) and we have tried to do some SEO to improve conversions. One of the steps we have taken was to link to all of our bookmaker reviews in our menu (a mega menu). All of our bookmakers have an img and text link in the menu. The menu is shown on every page of the site. Since we have made this change we have been plumeting down the SERPs. For the search "betsafe" this page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe is no longer in the top 50. We also added the "stars" so that the google result will show our over all review for the bookmaker, in order to stand out in the SERPs. Can anyone explain to me what the problem might be? Over extensive internal linking or?
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang0