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How I ruined my SEO

johnnyreilly.com

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Re: How I ruined my SEO

#4

Post by jwie »

Google claims they don’t use GA for ranking signal. Though in your case it could be interpreted as mischief, maybe something is going on there. You might try recreating a GA4 instance and starting fresh. It might be the least painful road to redemption if that’s the issue.

Without knowing much about docusarus, if the upgrade touched the pages’ markup in some big way, something like not having h1 tags on the pages that would hurt.

The most likely culprit is a ranking algorithm change. I recall there was one around in October that wrecked more than a few sites.

The good news is you probably didn’t wreck your SEO. The bad news is you probably can’t do anything about it.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#7

Post by dceddia »

Of the things on the list, the redirects jumped out to me as the most likely culprit. Second guess would be the algorithm change. You could look at individual pages before & after - mainly the top performing few, looking at what queries they ranked for before and now, and what their average position was. Hopefully the fix to the redirects will kick in soon!

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#8

Post by cseleborg »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #6
orangepurple wrote: post #3

No privacy policy and no terms of service might do it

What a sad state of affairs when even personal blogs are expected to be laden with legal documents.

I agree with the sentiment, but if a personal blog tracks users and sends data on them to someone else, as with GA, then it absolutely needs a privacy policy.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#10

Post by Growtika »

With your approach I'm sure you'll get back to normal traffic very soon.

I think your conclusion is right. It's not one thing that cause the drop but a combination of things.

Let's forget one sec about the traffic you had before and focus on the current situation.

- Page speed: It's one of the most important ranking factor. You don't have to get 100 score, but passing the core web vitals score and having higher score on mobile is recommended.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjohnnyrei...

A cool trick to improve the result fast is by removing the lazy load effect from the LCP: https://i.imgur.com/rOOWm91.png

- Add a robots.txt You have plenty of pages in the site, it might be good to make sure only things you want to be indexed are getting crawled. https://i.imgur.com/ONSiQjQ.png

- Add bio (one liner) here: https://i.imgur.com/SXbWVwU.jpg Great smile. The bio should show your readers your expertise in the topic. If you want to take it to the next level, Quora is a great inspiration. In every Quora answer you can write a different On-liner/byline.

- Internal linking: I love your blog archive. It's a great idea. Try to make more strategic articles stronger. More internal links to the article will signal search engines this page is indeed important.

- Add Privacy policy & Terms of use pages

I can help you with analyzing the traffic drop if I'll understand which pages were your largest traffic generators. Let's try to understand what happened to those pages, and how it's possible to make them stronger.

I worked with several large companies who had traffic drop after migration. Sometimes companies spend so much time and effort looking for the reason for the drop instead of just focus on recovering.

I'm up for analyzing the drop but if the reason is not obvious (Google Penalty for example), I recommend to focus on the future rather than the past.

I would love to help you (As a case study) with analyzing what caused the issue, and to give tips on how to move forward and get more traffic.

Edit: We wrote a SaaS SEO guide that cover several related topics: https://growtika.com/saas-seo/

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