Dealing with a drop in your SEO juice

misterq

Hi folks

I manage a website, www.davidmcwilliams.ie.
Every month or so I take a look at the google analytics for the site and at the start of September, I noticed a drop in traffic from Mid July to August. At the time I put this down to the summer holidays (though it wasn't as if anyone was out enjoying the sun), but since then the traffic hasn't come back up, though it is slightly higher.

I recently found the cause though. It was not a seasonal thing, but rather the search result rank for the term "david mcwilliams" has absolutely tanked since the start of July. From a consistent 1-2 over the past 5 years, the site is now showing up in the mid 50's or 60's for this term.

This is a real problem as it is (or was) the no. 1 search term with which people found the site.

Now, I know google can do whatever they want with their search engine index and they do from time to time resort the results.

I have two questions:

1) Can anyone spot anything on the site that might cause this? I have checked through site edits but all that has really been done over that time is new content added and wordpress updates. Nothing more could have been done as I was travelling in Australia at the time!

2) If it is simply something that Google has done, there is nothing I can do about it except sit back and be patient? I'm working under the assumption that the website of David McWilliams should show up near the top of the search results for "david mcwilliams" and eventually Google will sort itself.

It is only when something like this happens do you realise just how reliant on the good grace of Google you are!

Thanks!

Darragh29

That's mad, I was just reading his Wednesday opinion on that site before I came here!

This isn't obviously the source of your problem but I noticed when viewing the Sunday Business Post, there isn't an active HTML link from the bottom of Davim Mc Williams page to his own website. It's just a text reference to the actual website as distinct from a clickable link. This has caused me to Bookmark his page when I would have otherwise Googled it.

EKRIUQ

Lets blame high property prices, and the recession, its a worldwide thing now!

Google doesn't like domain's with less than 1 year left when indexing, it may be renewed and just not updated but you could lose it in a month and by asking on a public forum you might

domain: davidmcwilliams.ie
descr: David McWilliams
descr: Sole Trader
descr: Personal Trading Name
admin-c: AAY640-IEDR
tech-c: CID3-IEDR
renewal: 29-August-2008

Google might not see much point in indexing a website that's expired and could match the decline in your views

misterq

cheers Namesco.

1) Virtually all .ie domains have an expiry date of less than a year since it is difficult to register for more than a year at a time (well it was when I left the .ie registration business in 2007). I don't buy this argument. Particularly as this is something that just occurred recently (July). The site has been around for 5 years with the domain being renewed each year.

2) I don't look after the domain renewal but I imagine it is renewed and just not updated by IEDR yet. Even if the domain did expire, it can't just be snapped up. For .ie's it is first of all suspended, then released for general registration, but even then, you would need have a claim to DavidMcWilliams.ie in order to register it. I think I would have it sorted out by then

PS: I like the recession reason best!

EKRIUQ

I read this guys blog a bit

Matt is a senior software engineer at Google, who currently works on the spam side of things. He is Google's main spam man. He communicates with the outside world through his blog, in which he is often very helpful and informative. Personally, I believe that he is an honest person. I have a great deal of respect for him, and I don't doubt anything that he says, but I accept that he frequently has to be economical with the truth. He may agree or disagree with some or all of the overwhelming outside opinion concerning Google's new crawl/index function, but if he agrees with any of it, he cannot voice it publically. This article isn't about Matt Cutts, or his views and opinions; it is about what Google is doing.

The thread in Matt's blog where all of this came to light is here mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/.

Google never did crawl all sites equally. The amount of PageRank in a site has always affected how often a site is crawled. But they've now added links to the criteria, and for the first time they are dumping a site's pages OUT of the index if it doesn't have a good enough score. What sense is there in dumping perfectly good and useful pages out of the index? If they are in, leave them in. Why remove them? What difference does it make if a site has only one link pointing to it or a thousand links pointing to it? Does having only one link make it a bad site that people would rather not see? If it does, why index ANY of it's pages? Nothing makes any sort of sense.

So we now have the situation where Google intentionally leaves "fine" and useful pages out of their index, simply because the sites haven't attracted enough links to them. It is grossly unfair to website owners, especially to the owners of small websites, most of whom won't even know that they are being treated so unfairly, and it short-changes Google's users, since they are being deprived of the opportunity to find many useful pages and resources.

So what now? Google has always talked against doing things to websites and pages, solely because search engines exist. But what can website owners do? Those who aren't aware of what's happening to their sites simply lose - end of story. Those who are aware of it are forced into doing something solely because search engines exist. They are forced to contrive unnatural links to their sites - something that Google is actually fighting against - just so that Google will treat them fairly.


It's a penalty. There is no other way to see it. If a site is put on the Web, and the owner doesn't go in for search engine manipulation by doing unnatural link-building, the site gets penalised by not having all of its pages indexed. It can't be seen as anything other than a penalty.

Is that the way to run a decent search engine? Not in my opinion it isn't. Do Google's users want them to leave useful pages and resources out of the index, just because they haven't got enough links pointing to them? I don't think so. As a Google user, I certainly don't want to be short-changed like that. It is sheer madness to do it. The only winners are those who manipulate Google by contriving unnatural links to their sites. The filthy linking rich get richer, and the link-poor get poorer - and pushed by Google towards spam methods.

Google's new crawling/indexing system is lunacy. It is grossly unfair to many websites that have never even tried to manipulate the engine by building unnatural links to their sites, and it is very bad for Google's users, who are intentionally deprived of the opportunity to find many useful pages and resources. Google people always talk about improving the user's experience, but now they are intentionally depriving their users. It is sheer madness!

What's wrong with Google indexing decent pages, just because they are there? Doesn't Google want to index all the good pages for their users any more? It's what a search engine is supposed to do, it's what Google's users expect it to do, and it's what Google's users trust it to do, but it's not what Google is doing.

At the time of writing, the dropping of pages is continuing with a vengeance, and more and more perfectly good sites are being affected.


Still doesn't help you but an interesting read, I now blame the bankers as well as the recession:)

mneylon

Google's domain renewal penalty only really applies to .com
Google has never been able to glean as much info on cctld domains as they cannot get the level of access to the data that they might like

handbraker

a sitemap would help. google cant click on a dropdown menu to index content

jmcc

misterq wrote: »

I recently found the cause though. It was not a seasonal thing, but rather the search result rank for the term "david mcwilliams" has absolutely tanked since the start of July. From a consistent 1-2 over the past 5 years, the site is now showing up in the mid 50's or 60's for this term.

Did you count how many times the phrase 'David McWilliams' actually occurs in the index page? There is also no meta data from what I can see. One of the occurances of 'David McWilliams' has a typo - TigerDavid.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Namesco wrote: »

Google doesn't like domain's with less than 1 year left when indexing, it may be renewed and just not updated but you could lose it in a month and by asking on a public forum you might

Google has problems with ccTLDs and renewals. Most ccTLDs rate limit queries on their WHOIS servers and Google does not, as far as I know, mine the .ie WHOIS. Therefore attributing it to domain expiry is wrong. ccTLD whois data is often irregularly updated so the whois for a domain that has been paid for may not be updated for weeks.

Also davidmcwilliams.ie was active when checked on 01/October/2008. The history for the domain is below:
http://www.hosterstats.com/historicaldns.php?domain=davidmcwilliams.ie

The 01/October/2008 updates are being applied to the database at the moment. The classic example of how Google fails to deal well with ccTLDs is the local.ie domain. It was a rather famous directory run by Nua. It dropped and was reregistered and it maintained the same PR - for a while. I'm sure that other ccTLDs would have had similar cases.

Regards...jmcc

RedCardinal

Namesco wrote: »

Google doesn't like domain's with less than 1 year left when indexing

Sorry - politeness aside - that is just complete rubbish.

misterq

handbraker wrote: »

a sitemap would help. google cant click on a dropdown menu to index content

Google doesn't have to click on a dropdown menu to index content: the menu is constructed in a perfectly spider friendly way.

I have added a sitemap though as it certainly won't do any harm.

I think (to borrow one of David's catchphrases) the crux of the issue is that though the site has had the same layout (and basic homepage) since Nov. 2006, there has been a real loss of seo juice and indeed page rank since about March on, which really began to bite with Google index updates since June.

There seems to be something on the site that Google specifically does not like and is thus penalising it for. Not just the search term I mentioned initially, but lots of other McWilliams-specific ones like book titles, phrases etc.

My two current theories are:
1) It could have been the comments from the 2nd most recent article that were leeching on to the homepage in an invisible div. (now removed)

2) The fact that the site posts up his articles from the Indo and Sunday business post verbatim. He is of course entitled to do so since he is the author, but google might just see this as some sort of spammy site that is simply robbing content from the more authoritative newspaper sites. In which case we have a tricky problem.

Right now I am looking at any changes made to the site and where possible, rolling them back to the last point in time where there was no issue.

The real difficulty is that it could take months of patient action before any result is seen.

The net effect of all this is that traffic sources from search engines has dropped by 50%. It is just fortunate in our case that the site is not commercial. If you were an online store and something like this happened, you could be in real trouble.

RedCardinal

BTW - I replied to your thread on the Google Webmaster Group.

My feeling is that you're under some sort of penalty. Check out your thread to see my thoughts there.

Rgds
Richard