Did any one else notice rankings drops since 14th-21st Feb this year?

[Teepee_Digital]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some guidance please. Our website saw a drop in rankings on around 14th - 21st Feb 2019 and the rankings haven't really recovered. I can't see anything significant in Search Console, there was a possible unconfirmed algorithm update during early Feb but I can't really find anything factual to determine if this was the cause.

The ranking drop seems to be across different keywords.

What else should I check?

Did anyone experience such a drop around this time and if so found out why this happened and how to recover?

Thanks for your help

Caroline

[MrWhippy]

Hi Caroline,

it would really help us to help you if you could share more information, such as the topic of the site(s), URLs if you can (we understand this is not always possible) but if you could give us an idea as to the topic this will really help us.

Otherwise, we can only provide generic information and guestimates.

Some things to check

1. Did you make any significant changes to the site - implementing HTTPS for instance
2. Has someone changed your sitemap, robots.txt or htaccess files
3. Are you having redirect issues?
4. Are you getting more 4xx errors in Google analytics

Steve

[Teepee_Digital]

Hi Steve,

Many thanks for your reply

The website is for a leisure company, their site has been live for over 18 months

1. The site has been on https for a couple of years

2. The only change to robots.txt was made by myself in Dec where I added the below, no other changes have been made as far as I can think:

Disallow: /basket/
Noindex: /basket/

3. What is the best way of detecting redirect issues? Is there a particular tool you recommend?

4.  We have 1 x 404 which I've just corrected and I've just created 2 x custom 404 reports in Google Analytics for future reference.

Is there anything else I can check please?

Thanks again, Caroline

[MrWhippy]

Hi Caroline,

Apologies for the delay in replying it's been a busy day.

1. ok that's good
2. The change looks good and was made a few months before the drop in traffic so it should not be related
3. you can use MOZ on demand crawl, SEO power tools or if you are using any SEO tools they should pick it up.
4. Good work

Did you check the sitemap.xml and the htaccess files to see if there had been any changes?

When you look at Google Analytics is there any particular traffic source or keyword that has suddenly dropped or is it roughly the same across the board?

Again if you let me know the answers to these questions I will try my best to help further.

unfortunately, I do not have any websites in the leisure market so cannot compare there.

Steve

[Teepee_Digital]

Hi Steve,

So sorry for the delay, I've been manic. Amazing thank you for the info!

I don't think any changes have been made to sitemap.xml or the htaccess files. Sitemap.xml is automatically updated when we create new pages on the site. However, I have asked our developer if he has access to a change log just to be sure, so will let you know.

I've used Moz's On Demand Crawl and there are 73 crawler warnings (no critical crawler issues), please see a breakdown below...

• Meta Noindex (50 total) - these are all blog category or blog tag urls
• URL Too Long (12 total) - these are all blog URLs which I will improve and create 301s to the new url
• Title Too Long (5 total) - I will update these
• Missing Description (5 total) - I will update these
• Missing or Invalid H1 (1 total) - this is sitemap page on the website

I'm guessing none of the above would have affected rankings, the Meta Noindex warning has been visible in Moz for over 18 months, its not a recent warning.

I've looked in GA and I have compared the second half of the month, including the week where we saw a drop in rankings (14/02 - 21/02) with the first half of the month (14/02 - 28/02 vs 30/01 - 13/02) and below are the results:

• Organic: 2%
• Direct: -14%
• Referral: 12%
• Social: -61%

The keywords are pretty static and the vast majority are higher during the second half of the month. If I should be using different dates for comparison please let me know and I'll take another look.

I've looked to see if there is a particular site that stopped driving traffic to us but there isn't one really. Facebook and Instagram traffic reduced due to a change with campaigns but all other referrers' figures increased.

The site speed according to Google's Page Speed Insights is 37/100 (mobile) and 77/100 (desktop). We are currently working on some of the recommendations but we haven't seen a huge improvement so far. The report suggested we would benefit from around 7 seconds by serving images in next gen format (WebP). We implemented this change last night and the mobile score only increased from 33 to 37. We have also properly sized a couple of images and ensured text remains visible during webfont load.

Is there anywhere else you recommend I look into?

Thanks very much for your help

Caroline

[MrWhippy]

Hi Caroline,

thanks for the response. It appears that you haven't made any changes that would have this sort of impact.

You have checked everything I would look at and found nothing to show that the site may be "broken" which is good.

Here are some links which show minor changes around the dates you have asked about, take a look and see if they may relate to your site. If they do please let us know. If not again let us know and we can keep on investigating.

https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-update-valentines/293451/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-february-march-2019-updates/297493/#close

https://www.thewebmaster.com/google-updates/google-update-12-february-2019/

https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-27077.html

Hopefully this will help you.

If not as I say let me know.

Steve

[Teepee_Digital]

Hi Steve,

Many thanks for sending the links over. I've reviewed them and there seems to be some suggestions that algorithm updates happened around the time mentioned (14th - 21st).

There are few posts on here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-27131.html and here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-27077.html mentioning updates around this time.

There's the Valentine's Day update: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-update-valentines/293451/ which talks about the algorithm focusing on relevance.

https://www.thewebmaster.com/google-updates/google-update-12-february-2019/ talks about the relevancy of content, E-A-T and how we should look at the keywords each page is targeting.

So it looks like there have been algorithm updates that may have affected our site? Some of the above links talk about how people saw their rankings recover shortly after the update. Ours dropped (our rankings practically halved around 14th - 21st Feb) and remained at this level until around 18th April where they have improved very slightly.

What would your advice be? Maybe review the keywords & pages that have dropped in rankings and check if we are utilising the most suitable keywords for those pages?

Thanks again for your help

Caroline

[MrWhippy]

Hi Caroline,

Recommendations would be to do as you have suggested review keywords, & pages.

Make sure you have a robust About us section that proves you are experts, look to introduce new high quality and relevant content.

Start actively searching for relevant and quality backlinks.

Steve