I'm stumped!

[LindsayDayton]

I'm hoping to find a real expert to help out with this.

TL;DR Our visibility in search has started tanking and I cannot figure out why.

The whole story:

In fall of 2015 I started working with Convention Nation (www.conventionnation.com). The client is trying to build a resource for convention and tradeshow attendees that would help them identify the events that will help them meet their goals (learning, networking, sales, whatever). They had a content team overseas that spent their time copy/pasting event information into our database.

At the time, I identified several opportunities to improve SEO:

1. Create and submit a sitemap
2. Add meaningful metas
3. Fix crawl errors
4. On-page content uniqueification and optimization for most visible events (largest audience likely to search)
5. Regular publishing and social media

Over nine months, we did these things and saw search visibility, average rank and CTR all double or better.

There was still one problem, and that is created by our specific industry. I'll use a concrete example: MozCon. This event happens once a year and there are enough things that are the same about it every year (namely, the generalized description of the event, attendees and outcomes) that the 2015 page was getting flagged as a duplicate of 2016.

The event content for most of our events was pretty thin anyway, and much of it was duplicated from other sources, so we implemented a feature that grouped recurring events. My thinking was that this would reduce the perception of duplicate or obsolete content and links and provide a nice backlink opportunity.

I expected a dip after we deployed this grouping feature, that's been consistent with other bulk content changes we've made to the site, but we are not recovering from the dip. In fact, our search visibility and traffic are dropping every week.

So, the current state of things is this:

• Clean crawl reports: No errors reported by Moz or Google
• Moz domain authority: 20; Spam score 2/17
• We're a little thin on incoming links, but steady growth in both social media and backlinks
• Continuing to add thin/duplicate content for unique events at the rate of 200 pages/mo
• Adding solid, unique strategic content at the rate of 15 pages/mo

I just cannot figure out where we've gone astray. Is there anything other than the thin/copied content that could be causing this? It wasn't hurting us before we grouped the events...

What could possibly account for this trend?

Help me, Moz Community, you're my only hope!

Lindsay

[becole]

Lindsay, there are so many unique issues that could be causing this that it's difficult to diagnose the problem without having a specific URL to look at. However, it sounds as if you've been looking at a lot of the on-site and on-page factors. Have you looked at the links to the site and done anything to evaluate the links to your website and make sure you don't have low quality links that need to be disavowed?

When you mention the thin or duplicate content issues, have you considered consolidating the content and removing the previous year's content (or moving it an archiving it) so that only the current content exists? Besides archiving or removing it from the site, you may want to use the canonical tag. Another way to deal with that content would be to use the robots.txt file to disallow indexing of certain older content pages.

[LindsayDayton]

Thanks, Bernadette.

The consolidation has been done, and surprisingly seems to correlate with our dropping visibility.

Do you have any experience with a "consolidation" that might shed some light?