Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That very much sounds like, for some reason Google has gone from viewing that particular page template as "decent, worthy of rankings" to "ok, will rank if I can't find something better". One thing I am wondering, if you have been hit by this: https://moz.com/blog/google-review-stars-drop-by-14-percent

... which is also related to this:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html

Specifically where they say "Self-serving reviews aren't allowed for LocalBusiness and Organization. Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren't in the best interest of users. We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A - either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. That’s why, with this change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types LocalBusiness and Organization"

It seems as if 'something' existed on your product detail pages which Google was valuing highly, which they no longer value at all. Thus you aren't seeing complete drop-off, but a high correlation between declining (or removed) results and pages utilising that feature

Basically self-hosted reviews and some embedded reviews 'no longer count' towards Google rankings (at all). The news broke in September 2019, but I wouldn't be surprised if the roll-out was more recent. Moz posted that they noticed movements on Sept 24, which is very nearly November. As we know, these types of updates tend to slowly crawl across Google's query-spaces, it's not often true that everyone gets hit at once

Maybe your site is just in the late batch

PageSpeed insights is cool but I find GTMetrix often gives more useful info. If you sign up for a free account you get access to a cool waterfall tab

Here's the complete waterfall for your homepage:

• https://d.pr/i/a6OUZb.png (screenshot)

In blue I highlighted some images which are over 50KB which could be compressed a little more. In red I highlighted all the calls which your site / page makes to YouTube.com. As Greg Painter specifically said, all of these calls to YT do seem to be slowing things down and causing you problems! Any chance you can embed those resources (which your page is calling for) natively on your site? It would be faster than keep calling out to YT which has to satisfy enormous amounts of traffic as it is

You're not competitive enough. For very difficult keywords, sometimes it takes whole teams of digital professionals (SEO people, Digital PR people, creatives and devs to execute design concept of 10x content, R&I dept) to secure such keywords. Trying to solo such a thing sounds like madness to me

Your best bet is to be honest with yourself. Google the keyword and see what comes up in positions 1, 2 and 3. What do they have that you don't? For example if the keyword was "car insurance" you'd see sites like Money Supermarket, Go Compare and Confused.com at the top. If you were a single car insurance company, you might say "but my page looks so much nicer! It has better design and SEO!" - newsflash, Google isn't looking to rank the pages with the best SEO

Sites like Money Supermarket and Confused.com are bound to rank at the top. By using them, a user can compare deals from hundreds or thousands of insurance companies and brokers. Sometimes the technology is the content, and no matter what words you write or what images you use you'll never ever beat it without significant investment

If you're struggling away alone, you might have to rethink what keywords you are going for. In 2020 SEO isn't just about links and bits of writing. It's about coming up with a unique product that no one else has, which users would prefer to the current industry norms. If you can't do that, you can't win

I mean really, your whole article should be 'about' one topic (thematically speaking). H2s (sub-headings) should be used to explore different facets of the same topic. Are you confusing topics with keywords?

Just a note. If you robots.txt block Google from crawling the pages, how do you expect them to find the no-index tag? They can only find the tag if they can crawl the pages! You only apply the robots.txt block (which you should do, at the end) **after **Google have removed the offending URLs from their index

If Google are robots.txt blocked, they can't crawl the pages' coding. If they can't crawl the coding, they can't find the noindex. Simple

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177

"Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location.

• Suite numbers, floors, building numbers and so on may also be included"

"Don’t create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts"

"If your business rents a temporary, 'virtual' office at a different address from your primary business, don’t create a page for that location"

Sounds like you are ok to create multiple GMB pages. Your pages will be assigned to physical (non-virtual / temporary) real-world locations. You won't be creating 'more than one page' for each location, you will only be creating one page for each location. If you stick to  Google's guidelines, you should be ok

This post from Bounteous also seems quite helpful: https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2016/04/07/managing-multiple-locations-google-my-business/

According to Moz there haven't been any significant algorithm updates since October 2019 - https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change. If you check Algoroo (https://algoroo.com/) there's some noise on Dec 20th but it's not 'out of this world' or crazy. Looking at SERPMetrics Flux it doesn't look like a time of major changes on Google: https://serpmetrics.com/flux/

It must be something specifically related to your website or your website's presence (backlinks etc). It could also be a factor of operating in a competitive query-space. Maybe your results didn't go down, maybe the rankings of other sites went 'up'

I wouldn't expect the problem to 'just go away on its own', that almost never happens

Usually this happens when Google genuinely can't work out, which page is best to rank. Usually it happens on pages which have similar themes and SEO authority levels. You could use a canonical tag on the pages which you don't want to rank, and point them to the page you want to see in Google's results. Be aware though, that this won't necessarily make the canonical URL rank all the time (in place of the 'bad' URLs)

If Google decides one of your other URLs is better, but you de-index it via canonicalisation, you may just end up with no ranking at all - instead of the correct ranking URL. Google's algorithm wants to be free to decide which page it thinks is best, when you give it directives they often don't work out as intended. It can seem 'messy' to have a ranking URL which jumps around a lot, the best you can do is put prominent CTAs (Call to Action) in the ranking URL, leading people to the 'true' landing page (the one you wanted). It's not perfect but it puts rankings less at risk

You need to pay for Moz to bulk fetch Moz-created metrics. If you have an active Moz subscription with API access, I believe you just have to visit this URL: https://moz.com/products/mozscape/access to get your "Access ID" and "Secret Key". Without these most tools will fail all Moz-related bulk metric fetches. Such tools just provide automation, they don't provide 'free' access to Moz's data

Basically, if you identify a data anomaly you shouldn't trust any of the stats (as a group). Generally GSC (Google Search Console) can be trusted, but if you have identified an issue you should question the whole dataset

Thanks for your response EGOL, I always really value your comments. I think this makes a lot of sense. How many times have people tried to game the SERPs with minor tactical deployments, only to see Google drop it all within 6 months? Focusing on delivering that which Google's algorithms attempt to seek (high quality content), can only be positive

I think there's a lot to be said for this approach, in general for content production. If you yourself can't 'get out there', there's always the option of temporarily hiring the services of someone who has been out that way

Ah I see what you are saying, sorry! Maybe try a different tool like this one: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1n03BfU2iS7eanuRwKWUDGrncRHOx7nkZpLSCB0V_F6E/copy (Google Sheets)

There are various tools you can use for keyword grouping, this is one which I sometimes make use of. It won't do a perfect job, but if you use it you can fix the 'noisy' data manually. It's still faster than doing everything manually from scratch, even though it will require some manual actions

Actually I think that GSC still reports on granular keywords. The reason I think this is that, some keywords which Google's keyword planner merges (as they are similar) still show as distinct in Search Console. What you are saying is possible, but I don't think there's enough evidence to conclusively state such an opinion at this juncture. If your rank tracker starts to mirror what GSC is seeing, I would be more concerned. GSC is known to regularly experience bugs for its performance-related metrics, e.g: https://searchengineland.com/bug-in-google-search-console-performance-reports-impact-google-discover-reporting-326487

You can also check here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211453?hl=en#search_analytics

Basically, don't link to the insecure web (HTTP) from HTTPS. I'm uncertain as to how external links will be evaluated, but it does seems as if Google are taking a hard stance on this. I'm expecting the main issue to be stuff like, embedding images on HTTP when they should be embedded using HTTPS

Thanks Gaston I especially agree with your first point, as I believe that infrastructure  (structured data) will be critical to the 'voice-web' which may replace large swathes of 'visual' search. Not all of it, but large chunks of it

Thanks for your answers Tom I think I agree with most, especially the increasing utility of BERT and the increasing focus on E-A-T. I don't know about you, but I feel that E-A-T was significantly tightened in 2019, and that's set to continue

Check if you have clicks (Search Console) associated with these search queries. Google's search volumes are rounded up and down in 10s, so 0 really just means less than 5. You may be surprised to find that some of these keywords bring impressions or clicks to your site, despite the fact that Google says they have no searches

Google the keyword and see what the winners of the query-space are doing. Some keywords are more suited to categories, others are more suited to downloads, products, pages, videos etc. There is no absolute rule on which is best

One thing I will say though, only build category URLs if the category will contain enough entries to be useful to users. If you create a category with only one or two listings inside of it, don't expect it to rank well. The content always matters more than the format. For pages, content is more traditional (images, videos, text) and for categories, content is the number of useful entries which a user can compare and browse

I think you just have to wait for Google to catch up, basically. If terms are basically synonyms, then it wouldn't make sense to consider them as separate concepts. I don't think Google, or users, would like to see more long pages where the author is trying to make very similar terms seem like different entities (when they are not)

By the way, Google have more data than the  tools let on. Especially regarding their keyword data, where the search volumes are rounded up and down in 10s. So in reality, when Google says a keyword has zero search volume, it actually just means "less than five" - so it gets rounded down to 0

There have been many times where I have decided to build out along such keywords which 'seemingly' have no search volume, only to find that Search Console tells me I am getting clicks from keywords which (according to Keyword Planner / Keyword Explorer) have no search volume. I am pretty sure that Google's ranking algorithms, interact with non-averaged non-rounded searches, not the data which we see

In the end, sometimes you just have to say, "no! I don't believe this is a zero, I think people are searching for this question and others. I need to create content before search volumes show up in Google's tools, so that when search volume increases I am already on top and ahead of other marketers who are using a more basic approach". Sometimes this will work for you, sometimes your instincts will be wrong and you won't get as many searches as you think

Over time you will develop better instincts with regard to 'false-zero' keywords and it will become second nature