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How I ruined my SEO

johnnyreilly.com

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Re: How I ruined my SEO

#21

Post by slorber »

johnny_reilly wrote: post #14
Growtika wrote: post #10

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…

Thanks for the tips! > A cool trick to improve the result fast is by removing the lazy load effect from the LCP: https://i.imgur.com/rOOWm91.png Haha, ironically I'm responsible for wholesale lazy loading of images in Docusaurus: https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/pull/6598 Generally that's a good thing, but it's not good for title images that appear "above the fold". I wonder if there's something we could do to…

We could apply lazy loading only after the 2nd image maybe

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#22

Post by Growtika »

johnny_reilly wrote: post #14
Growtika wrote: post #10

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…

Thanks for the tips! > A cool trick to improve the result fast is by removing the lazy load effect from the LCP: https://i.imgur.com/rOOWm91.png Haha, ironically I'm responsible for wholesale lazy loading of images in Docusaurus: https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/pull/6598 Generally that's a good thing, but it's not good for title images that appear "above the fold". I wonder if there's something we could do to…

That's cool. Just for fun, try to remove the lazy load effect from the LCP, let's see how it effect the score.

As for the strategic articles, I mean that you'll increase the internal links certain articles you think can rank higher.

On October you had 3300+ keyword that were ranked 11-100 on Google

https://i.imgur.com/ZGU0Ezk.png

It dropped to 165 keyword now. That's an insane drop, but I wonder how much traffic these thousands of keywords brought you since there weren't rank too high.

I would like to dive into the keyword that ranked 4-10, on Google (50 keywords). And they keywords that ranked 1-3 (15 keywords)

By understanding on GA which pages brought you the most traffic/ranked the highest you can make them stronger by adding more internal links to these pages, look at it as kind of first aid ;)

EDIT:

Few tips:

- The 'Recent posts' widget is great. It get your article indexed faster. What about adding a widget below for 'Popular articles'? Place 5-10 articles there.

https://i.imgur.com/MBquX6M.jpg

- Make sure you implement time stamp to your articles the right way

https://i.imgur.com/b5usnJJ.png

https://i.imgur.com/0vpXdyE.png

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#23

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

luckylion wrote: post #9
orangepurple wrote: post #3

No privacy policy and no terms of service might do it

That's the first time I'm hearing of suggestions that Google will downrank sites without it. Do you have a source?

Definitely need a source.

I had a new website that had minimal text content. At first the most popular Google keywords were from privacy and terms! Had to change those pages to no robot.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#24

Post by johnny_reilly »

slorber wrote: post #21
johnny_reilly wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tips! > A cool trick to improve the result fast is by removing the lazy load effect from the LCP: https://i.imgur.com/rOOWm91.png Haha, ironically I'm responsible for wholesale lazy loading of images in Docusaurus: https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/pull/6598 Generally that's a good thing, but it's not good for title images that appear "above the fold". I wonder if there's something we could do to…

We could apply lazy loading only after the 2nd image maybe

Yeah - primitive but probably reasonable. Would be happy to experiment with that. I've also been pondering things we could do around open graph images as well, would be nice to use image CDNs like Cloudinary for open graph images in the same way we can for blog images https://johnnyreilly.com/2022/12/26/docusaurus-image-cloudin...

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#25

Post by SteveGerencser »

luckylion wrote: post #9
orangepurple wrote: post #3

No privacy policy and no terms of service might do it

That's the first time I'm hearing of suggestions that Google will downrank sites without it. Do you have a source?

It's only an ads thing. Facebook, Google, etc., all require to those pages be on a website to run ads. They say nothing about Personal websites, but the EU probably does once you start using GA.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#27

Post by kshay »

Growtika wrote: post #10

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…

> It's not one thing that cause the drop but a combination of things

Let me propose a bold generalization based on observations of sites of all sizes wrestling with Google over the last 20 years, and to which there are certainly exceptions (this case may be one):

It’s always one thing.

Of course, there are always a multitude of improvements that can be made to nibble around the edges and get incremental improvements in various metrics. And a gradual change in traffic may have several simultaneous sources.

But when the effect is an identifiable precipitous drop in search traffic, almost all the time, it turns out there was a single reason, whether a change Google made or a change the site made.

This may be a totally unhelpful observation, and feel free to ignore it. But in these situations I’ve come to find it’s more fruitful to look for A Cause than to approach it as “a little here, a little there.”

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#28

Post by yellow_lead »

johnny_reilly wrote: post #17
chrismorgan wrote: post #2

Title: > How I ruined my SEO Conclusion: > I'm not quite sure

Yup - I am not quite sure! But I reckon it's fairly likely that the post contains the "how" of how I ruined my SEO. The hope is that a knowledgeable someone can say what I did wrong.

Title suggestion: "How did I ruin my SEO?"

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#29

Post by the__alchemist »

Your site's performance, reflected on its page speed insight score, is showing 45. This is unacceptable for a blog; it should be close to 100 for text-based pages like you have. Does the site contain scripts, deep dependency trees, or analytics?

Could this have changed during the performance drop?

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#30

Post by dazc »

luckylion wrote: post #9
orangepurple wrote: post #3

No privacy policy and no terms of service might do it

That's the first time I'm hearing of suggestions that Google will downrank sites without it. Do you have a source?

Unlikely to be a source but a good benchmark is to have this stuff in place because a)It takes almost no effort, b)You don't know if it makes a difference or not, and c)There is pretty much zero chance it's going to have a negative impact.
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