Over the last few months my rank has dropped by around half and for the life of me I can’t see why. There are no warnings on Google Console. Am I missing something?
Website: thespacecollective.com
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Over the last few months my rank has dropped by around half and for the life of me I can’t see why. There are no warnings on Google Console. Am I missing something?
Website: thespacecollective.com
My search visibility dropped from around 13% a few weeks ago to 8.29%. I know that Google launched a bunch of updates in this past few weeks to ignore spam links, and I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the drop - some of the links to my site date back over 10 years and those links were garbage.
Confusingly, at the same time, my Domain Authority went up by 1 to 32, then back down a week later.
How can I restore my previous rank in the short term?
We're designing a new site at the moment with vastly improved page speed, but I'm not sure what effect that will have yet (thespacecollective.com).
Thank you for your help! I thought it was correct, just the Moz team not making it clear that it is a "them" problem, as opposed to a Google problem.
This is what I thought, but the Moz team provided conflicting information because a lot of my URLs are showing as duplicates in MozPro.
This was their response:
After looking into your Campaign, it seems that this issue is happening because of the way some of your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to themselves as canonicals, which basically negates the canonicals themselves. For example, 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/archive' is considered a duplicate of 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/archive' because the canonical tags for each page just points back to itself.
This means that each page is being considered as the most important page with that content, but the content is so similar that they continue to compete against each other for rankings.
Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
If A references A as canonical and B references B, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fifth example I've listed above.
Hello all,
I need to make sure I am doing this correctly; I have one website and with two stores (content is mostly identical) with the following canonical tags;
UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com
USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/
Am I right in thinking that this is incorrect and that only one site should be referencing with the canonical tag?
ie;
UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com
USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/
(please note the removed /us/ from the end of the URL)
Thank you! Hopefully this resolves my issue
I think I understand, this is going to generate a lot of tags - this could be a problem for website speed.
UK/EU Site:
USA Site:
I'll see how the above goes, I can always add an English version as you suggest, but I think I have targetted the main languages here and hopefully the x-default will resolve the rest.
Okay, I think I have it down correctly now:
UK/EU Site:
USA Site:
How does that look?
Yes, I was just using my home page as an example. Each page references its own URL, as opposed to every page referencing the home page URL - but thank you for pointing that out as it could have been easily overlooked!
This is just getting overly complicated, Google need a more elegant solution.
I will try to add each of the EU countries to the EU site and ROW to the USA site. Is this how it should look?
UK/EU Site:
USA Site:
No, that's not a correct x-default implementation. It should point to the same URL on both sites. Wherever the non-specified locales should go (pick one).
The issue here is that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are redirected to the US site, while EU countries are redirected to the UK site. If I select one of the two, then won't all countries listed above be directed to the UK site?
I have now added x-default to both sites, this is how they look:
The Space Collective UK/EU
The Space Collective USA
Does this look correct?
On the EU tags, there's not a "penalty". There's just no "Europe" locale. Since you need to specify valid locales, the only way I know of to scope "Europe" is to include all the locales (or at least the most popular ones. I generally add the primary language for each country, a few languages for countries such as Belgium, and sometime I add en-[country] for all of them if my EU site is in English only.
Also on the EU tags, you should not remove the EU tags and only tag the US site. Tags will all be ignored unless they are reciprocal.
I'm sorry, I don't completely understand what you mean here.
What are your thoughts on simply changing the UK/EU site from "gb-en" to "en"?
I will look at either finding a way to exclude Googlebot from my redirect or offering a popup to customers on which site they prefer to visit. Thank you for the advice here.
Thank you for the response.
My system only allows me to add x-default to the US site, but I can code it into both if need be, is this necessary for both?
If Google penalises you for using GB then perhaps I should just use a generic EN? I think to try and add the other EU lang tags without an actual translate option could cause annoy Google, but if I do, it would look like this, correct?
Or would I write en-DE, en-IT, etc?
As for the redirect, I use an external service to do this automatically, and I thought it was best practice to treat Google exactly the same as you treat a customer?
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers.
thespacecollective.com (EU customers)
thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers)
We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice);
EU site (thespacecollective.com)
US site (thespacecollective.com/us/)
Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good.
This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
All UK and USA website traffic has both dropped by 70% since I made the initial change you suggested.
The georedirect section of the URL is from an external redirect service called geotargetly.com
I believe it has now been done correctly as of a week ago, and yet, my rank continues to plummet - literally plummet.
Is it a coincidence that my rank for both sites just dropped by nearly 40% each after making this change?
That is news to me! Thank you so much for this. I will remove all of the canonical tags and leave only the hreflang, and see how this effects the site rank.
Thank you so much Kate. Just to double check, are you saying that there should be no canonical tag at all on the US site? Or just one (leading to the UK or US site)?
I'm sure not what you mean by "check your crawl logs", can you please elaborate on that? Check them where exactly? I looked in the Google Search Console but there was no reference to IP addresses in any logs.
I tried looking up the linking domains in the Moz Link Explorer for "thespacecollective.com/ us/meteorite-jewellery?utm_source=georedirect" but it just says that it isn't a valid domain... so I'm not sure how to check how the URL is being linked to either.
I also noticed on the US site there are two canonical (attached), one for the UK and one for the US. This could be causing problems - I need to find out what is causing this and stop it. On that note, even the US site should still canonical to the UK site, right? Otherwise we would have two sites canonicalising to themselves respectively.
Thank you for your help thus far!
Hi Kate,
Thanks for answering. The redirect is deliberate, we do not want our customers to have a choice - if they're in the US or ROW, they go to the US site, if they're in the EU, they go to the UK site - anything else would be detrimental. So long as this doesn't negatively affect SEO, it is the perfect solution for us.
"NASA gifts" is a good example. We were 6th and now relegated to 51+, or "Meteorite Gifts", we were 2nd and not 51+.
"Meteorite Jewelry" took a nosedive too (thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery?utm_source=georedirect) and I noticed the URL is picking up the redirect, that can't be good (attached).
I have two stores (thespacecollective.com and thespacecollective.com/us) and over the past month the keyword rank for the US store had dropped by half, while the UK store is relatively the same. The content is mostly the same, except the US site uses US spelling. I assumed that this would not be flagged as duplicate content because it is the same site, just serving two locations.
I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on the reason for this drop and how I might fix it.
I use Magento 2 Multistore and have 2 stores set up with identical products, one for the EU and one for the US. The best practice is to allow Google to crawl both sites, but what about the sitemap?
Should I only include one store? The reason I ask is that Google has recently started ignoring canonicalized URLs, so even though the second store is canonicalized, it could affect my rank.
My rank did drop with the last update when this was rolled out, I stopped some canonicalized URLs from generating and my rank went back up (albeit not as high as before).
I noticed that every link on my site is being flagged up as a 302 temp redirect in Moz. The reason is because we have a multi store and use GeoIP to redirect anyone coming from their respective country.
I'm guessing a 302 is the wrong way to do this - can anyone shed advice on the best practice for redirecting customers to geo-specific stores?
I run Magento 2 and have two stores, one intended for the EU and one for the US. 99% of the products available appear on both stores, there is an automatic redirect in place to either store depending on your location. But I think Google is seeing these as duplicate products/stores.
Should I add the Index,NoFollow tag to one of the two stores?
My issue is that I want both stores to rank in their geographical locations and I am concerned that by adding the NoFollow tag is will stop that dead in its tracks for one location.
Any advice would be helpful.
Hi Martijn,
The solution didn't work, I'm not sure if there is a conflict here but this is what my htaccess currently looks like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
#RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
#RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://thespacecollective.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://www.thespacecollective.com/$1 [L,R=301]
<ifmodule pagespeed_module="">ModPagespeed off</ifmodule>
RewriteRule .* - [E=noabort:1]
RewriteRule .* - [E=noconntimeout:1]
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^interstellarstore.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.interstellarstore.com$</ifmodule>
RewriteRule (.*)$ https://www.thespacecollective.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I use ScreamingFrog to generate sitemaps for my Magento 2 multistore, but I recently noticed two issues.
The URLs are canonicalised, but this is still a problem and I'm not sure exactly how to execute this in the htaccess file.
So I need to:
How do I do this en mass in the htaccess file?
So I recently switched from an Opencart website to a Magento 2 website and my rank has dropped by 35% two weeks later, this is bad news. My old Magento website was 5 years old and was in desperate need of an upgrade, hence the Magento 2 site.
I realised today that the canonical URLs on my stores were set to the individual stores as opposed to one store, thus I expect resulting in duplicate content issues (even though Google Webmaster Tools didn't show it).
I'm just wondering if anyone else can see something I may be missing? My sites are:
thespacecollective.com (primary)
thespacecollective.com/us/ (canonical to primary)
Thank you!
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond so eloquently.
If all the products would be visible in the base, non-modified source code (right click page, then click "view source" - is the data there?) then there is a high likelihood that Google will see and crawl it.
I can confirm that each product does in fact appear in the source data, so as you say, Google will crawl it which is somewhat of a relief.
Does this then mean that regardless of which page the products appear on, Google will simply ignore this factor and treat each product the same regardless?
The thing I am trying to avoid is products on page 2, 3 and so on from being valued less.
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s).
Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first.
The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1.
I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it?
Is there anything I'm missing?
This is quite technical but I'm hoping a Magento expert can clear this up for me. Currently my company has two websites on separate Opencart platforms. What I'm doing now is building a Magento website and using the multi store function as well as a few modules to combine the two sites, the aim being that the link juice is shared and I can focus my SEO efforts on the one site instead of two, thus reducing my workload while maintaining the benefits.
This is the intended layout:
I have created a sub-folder (not a subdomain) as this seems to be the best way to share link juice between the new, combined sites (as well as 301s from the old, redundant site).
At the moment I have created 2 separate websites, stores and store views (see attached) and have configured it according to the Magento guide, so I know that technically this is correct but I need to make sure that I have done it correctly in relation to SEO.
Is the sub-folder set up correctly for instance? Currently the only files to populate that sub-folder are a htaccess, error log and index.php (see attached). Also, is there anything I could be missing in relation to SEO within the parameters of what I am trying to achieve?
Additionally, only one store view appears in the "change store view" section of the home page. This is causing me to question if I have set it up correctly, because I had assumed both store views would appear even if they were under different websites (attached). OR do I simply use the same website and create two stores and store views?
Do I also need to create a separate database for each website/store/store view?
I would very much appreciate if someone could help out here. Thank you.
A little bit too advanced I think... well, trial and error it is.
Meta keywords have not been a ranking factor in Google for quite some time. They also provide your competitors with a knowledge of the keywords you're targeting, so in essence by using them you're giving your game away. My advice is don't use them.
So I am merging two ecommerce brands together and have decided to do so either under a Subdirectory or gTLD.
My aim here is to increase the quality of my SEO for the weaker site (this would be the second italic domain shown in A and B below), thus taking domain authority from the dominant site, while 301 redirecting all pages from the old domain which will hopefully boost the authority and rank for the merged site).
My options for the merged site are:
A. www.website.com & www.website.com/hreflang=en
B. www.website.com & www.website.com/us
Or a combination of A & B (below):
C. www.website.com & www.website.com/us/hreflang=en
Factors:
Here are my questions:
I know this is quite an advanced series of questions, so I would appreciate the opinions of others so I can make the most informed choice.
Thank you
Hello D,
Option 2 would undoubtedly result in a change in rank. That change could be positive or negative depending on the content of the new pages, so if you're going to use this method you need to make sure that the content is on par.
As for Option 1, so long as you 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones and add copy, you shouldn't see a fall in rank. If anything, the added content may boost your rank depending on the quality.
Either way, so long as you do so carefully and correctly, both methods could work. Personally I would opt for Option 1 as it seems to be the least labour intensive and has a more predictable outcome on your rank.
I hope that helps!
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the reply.
We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).
The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).
Hi Jeff,
So long as you compile the list of 301 redirects and add them into your htaccess file (or plugin) before making the Shopify site live you shouldn't have a problem. Google announced some time ago that they preferred https as opposed to http and it was hinted that https was a ranking factor (or would soon become one), so you're making the right decision in that respect.
Lastly, Moz actually has a pretty good site migration guide which I would suggest reading: https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide
If I have understood your question correctly, you have set up redirects from the old site to the new site, but old links are still appearing in Google search results. It is in my experience that old links tend to remain for some time, but when clicked and assuming a redirect is correctly set up, the user will be redirected to the new page. It can take some time for Google to update the old page to show the new one instead.
I hope that helps.
Richard
Hello Neik,
It is considered best practice to optimise the link structure as you propose, about-us as opposed to aboutus. But that is only a minor change and may not have all too much of an effect in terms of SEO. There is a wonderful Moz guide on URL best practice here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/url
It is also worth considering that 301 redirects in the htaccess file can potentially slow down the load speed of your website, albeit by a small amount, but this may negate any positive effect from the changes you're suggesting.
I hope that helps.
Richard
Also, if I am using hreflag tags, am I still able to have both sites on different servers with their own localised IPs? This is necessary for SEO.
Then when you click through to a product:
I have encountered no problems doing this in Opencart. No 301 redirects were needed because the plugin takes care of this itself.
I want to make sure that you're aware of the different internal structures in URL depth. That's probably why most people would advise you not to go this way.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean in respect to different internal structures or why the above would be an issue.
Does anyone have experience removing /product/ and /product-category/, etc. from URLs in wordpress? I found this link from Wordpress which explains that this shouldn't be done, but I would like some opinions of those who have tried it please.
https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/
Thank you for the response, Nigel. A few follow up questions:
Using the lang tag in a link, i.e. www.website.com/?lang=en, isn't that a detractor for SEO? I was under the impression that the route to the product should be as short as possible for SEO, i.e. www.website.com/product, as opposed to www.website.com/?lang=en/product. Or will google ignore the ?lang in terms of SEO?
Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD.
My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu.
Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this.
Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.
Thank you for the response. I use Wordfence on my Wordpress sites and also use Sucuri, is this not sufficient security?
I also have no interest in hosted platforms such as Shopify. I like to control my own hosting, security, etc.
There are two issues facing me today. One is that my two e-commerce stores need updating after some 4 years, but I am seriously considering switching from Opencart to Wordpress/Woo.
Opencart is a nightmare to work with at the best of times. Whenever I try to edit the footer of my current sites for instance nothing changes, the customisation of pages is sloppy and although the site works fine for perhaps the first 6 months, anytime after that it just slowly falls apart.
Wordpress however features incredible customisation, is easy to edit the code but it lacks the backend functionality that Opencart is good at.
Does anyone know the downsides of changing to Wordpress/Woo in respect to SEO?
I am currently developing a website which will have a multi-store function, i.e. one for US & ROW customers and one for UK & EU customers. The domain names will be along the lines of:
Original domain: www.website.com
UK & EU domain: eu.website.com
US & ROW domain: us.website.com
When a customer visits the website they will be redirected to one or the other depending on their location. Can anyone see any problems which this may cause in respect to SEO? I know there may be a duplicate content issue here also, how should I best deal with this?
Do product tags for ecommerce sites have any benefit to SEO? Or are they redundant?
i.e. thespacecollective.com/astronaut-moldavite-pendant (tags appear below the product name on the right)