The other issue you may need pay attention to is your backlink profile. I ran an quick audit, 19% of your ahrefs links are bad. You probably need disavow them.
How I ruined my SEO
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#82Your 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?
Whilst it still should be fixed, Google isn't tanking a site for its PageSpeed score.
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#83Of the possibilities you listed in the article, my money is on the failure to do the redirects. Luckily, it may not be too late to fix that, if you haven't already.
If you're interested, email me at tobes@longtaildragon.com, and I'll pull a report of every URL that needs a redirect.
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#84No privacy policy and no terms of service might do it
This is definitely not a thing.
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#85It's your redirects causing duplicate content and/or indexing issues.
Google's index of your old site (excluding tags): https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.johnnyreilly.com...
Shows your blog posts were indexed with no trailing slash: https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/page/155
Your current 301 sends this to: https://johnnyreilly.com/page/155
Which doesn't have a canonical tag, or 301 redirect, to the correct blog post: https://johnnyreilly.com/2017/05/20/typescript-spare-rod-spo...
Once that's fixed, I would also jump into GSC and run their Change of Address tool (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=en).
LMK if you need a hand with this.
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#86Johnny is correct and this most likely has to do with the 404 backlinks and accidental misuse of Google Analytics. I recently did a comprehensive SEO audit for a web3 brand that saw a similar drastic drop in traffic. Here are some other things to keep in mind to rank better on Google. 1. One H1 per page SEO experts agree the best practice is to use one H1 per page. Headers help keep content structured for both Google…
One H1 per page is a myth dispelled directly by John Mueller at Google[0].
[0] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/h1-headings-for-google/4...
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#87Screw Google. Optimize your website for real humans. Then advertise it outside of Google, for example: have a link to your website in your profile.
Ironically, this is exactly what Google recommends you do in most cases. This isn’t empty, feel-good marketing either. It’s in their best interest for you to do so.
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which pages or queries in GSC specifically lost traffic? Was there a handful of keywords that drove most of your traffic that you’ve lost? Or is it down across the board for all articles?
I still get traffic, but for things like a webpack define plugin post I wrote in 2017 and for 2 CSharp posts. "eslint for c#" and "build props" All my Azure / TypeScript / React / Bicep traffic dried up. No idea what replaced me.
The people that mirror your content would have replaced you. Try searching for a few page titles in quotes, you will easily find the culprits then. The problem is that now they will now have "older" content than you, so search engines may think you are copying content and penalise accordingly.
EDIT:
Heres a random example from a title taken from your blog archive: https://laptrinhx.com/using-bootstrap-tooltips-to-display-jq...
Heres another from some recent content: https://blog.logrocket.com/docusaurus-using-fontaine-reduce-...
Both mark themselves as canonical (the original source of the content) in the head.
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still get traffic, but for things like a webpack define plugin post I wrote in 2017 and for 2 CSharp posts. "eslint for c#" and "build props" All my Azure / TypeScript / React / Bicep traffic dried up. No idea what replaced me.
The people that mirror your content would have replaced you. Try searching for a few page titles in quotes, you will easily find the culprits then. The problem is that now they will now have "older" content than you, so search engines may think you are copying content and penalise accordingly. EDIT: Heres a random example from a title taken from your blog archive: https://laptrinhx.com/using-bootstrap-tooltips-to-dis…
Fascinating - in the case of LogRocket, they are the canonical and my blog reflects that too. The other is clearly not...
Re: How I ruined my SEO
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why?
I had a blog and regularly commented on dozens of blogs from 2005-2015. Just about all of them used Google Analytics and in the early days many, including mine, were hosted on Google's Blogspot.
There wasn't any legalese on any of the smaller/medium sized ones and I really haven't once regretted that there wasn't.