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How I ruined my SEO

johnnyreilly.com

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Re: How I ruined my SEO

#31

Post by johnny_reilly »

kshay wrote: post #27
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…

I've listed all the causes I can think of. Does any strike you as "the one"?

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#32

Post by franze »

Confusing post for me.

Ad redirects? are we talking page URL redirects or just image URL redirects?

the GSC pattern looks a lot like page URLs changed. did they?

I would recommend to this kind of analysis https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/google-update

so basically

- did the page URLs change?

- 4 SEO tests

- and then winner/loser pages analysis.

Update: 4 SEO tests are better outlined here https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/seo-basics

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#33

Post by nottorp »

pwython wrote: post #5
chrismorgan wrote: post #2

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

Yea he should of phrased the title as a question. As his last paragraph goes: > I'm hoping someone will read this and tell me what I did wrong.

Spelling nazi hat on

> Yea he should of phrased the title as a question.

... he should have phrased ...

Spelling nazi hat off

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#34

Post by dazc »

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…

> Add a robots.txt

Likely not the cause but not having a robots.txt can cause weird crawling problems.

Since it takes two minutes to set up, why not. And, here's a tip, don't try and be clever, keep it simple:

  User-agent: \*
  Disallow:

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#35

Post by vgeek »

https://developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking

Your rankings tanking on/around 10/19's update looks like a strong correlation. Your GSC with congruent drops in impressions and clicks doesn't immediately look like KWs you were top 3 for suddenly dropping further down the page-- else impressions would be similar but AP/CTR would just be tanking.

If you're using GA and your traffic doesn't have tons of seasonality, look at the landing page report month over month and see which pages have had the largest drop (can also do this in GSC). Then check in GSC and see what those pages' APs have done over the same period.

What types of links is GSC showing? Google says they don't count bad links, but if they make up a large proportion of your site's backlinks, SpamBrain (their spam AI-- publicly announced more frequently) may bucket your site that way.

SEMrush, ahrefs, Majestic, Moz OSE are all decent for checking who is linking (and maybe disavowing), but LinkResearchTools is probably going to focus more on identifying suspicious backlinks, if that is in fact what is impacting your site.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#36

Post by johnny_reilly »

franze wrote: post #32

Confusing post for me. Ad redirects? are we talking page URL redirects or just image URL redirects? the GSC pattern looks a lot like page URLs changed. did they? I would recommend to this kind of analysis https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/google-update so basically - did the page URLs change? - 4 SEO tests - and then winner/loser pages analysis. Update: 4 SEO tests are better outlined here https://www.fullstack…

There's no ads.

Over time I've change page URLs, partly as a migration from Blogger to Docusaurus, partly due to just changing page URLs without thinking about it.

I've changed image URLs by switching from PNG to WebP and back again.

Thanks for the link will check it out.

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#37

Post by supermatt »

> As I've mentioned, I broke links by not implementing redirects.

Didnt implement redirects for what? The prior part of the article doesnt even mention you changed any page URLs.

But if you did, that is most definitely going to have caused problems.

Think about it - the pages are no longer there, so they will get dropped from the search index, so wont appear in search results, resulting in less impressions/opportunities for click-through, and you will receive less visitors as a consequence.

You effectively delisted your sites content. The existing inbound links will now point to non-existent pages, so they carry no "authority" to your site. The content that is on the new URLs has no inherent "authority" so its not being ranked as well as it was on the old URLs. The search engines will rank it lower (e.g. page 10 instead of page 2), so less impressions and therefore less visitors.

You will likely be able to (partially) fix this with redirects - as sites that still link will still bring authority. But you will possibly have lost any history-based authority (that which comes from being a reliable and consistent URL), which may not be able to be retrieved.

I would recommend going through old access logs to find what your old URLs were, and redirect them to the new URLs for that same content (not a wildcard redirect to homepage!)

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#38

Post by kshay »

johnny_reilly wrote: post #31
kshay wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've listed all the causes I can think of. Does any strike you as "the one"?

Honestly, the thing about other sites using your GA tag seems like the biggest red flag/potential for some Google algorithm to have actively started penalizing you. The timing doesn’t quite track, but maybe some interaction between that and the spam update?

Re: How I ruined my SEO

#39

Post by johnny_reilly »

supermatt wrote: post #37

> As I've mentioned, I broke links by not implementing redirects. Didnt implement redirects for what? The prior part of the article doesnt even mention you changed any page URLs. But if you did, that is most definitely going to have caused problems. Think about it - the pages are no longer there, so they will get dropped from the search index, so wont appear in search results, resulting in less impressions/opportunit…

at the point of the observed drop I hadn't changed any page URLs, no. Apologies for lack of clarity.

I had changed image URLs when they migrated from being PNGs to WebPs. Following that there was the SEO drop off (within 6 weeks or so)

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