Pet Blog Site - All pages deindexing since 7th Jan

[biondi]

Hi there,

Firstly - I couldn't see if I should post my domain or not, so I won't for now but if you want it - I certainly can and will.

I have a pet-based Wordpress blog site that I've been running for around six months. It was created by migrating three smaller pet-based niche sites of mine into this more generic new one. The migration was performed via the recommended approach of 301 redirects in the .htaccess file and by informing Google Change of Address tool, via the GSC. I lost a fair bit of organic traffic but it has been growing recently quite nicely.

The articles (a couple of hundred or so) were created by myself and my wife and no 'dodgy' black-hat tactics SEO tactics were used (I don't even know what an example would be) and the site had about 60 articles that were in the top-spot/snippet.

On the 7th Jan organic traffic cut by about 50% overnight. Many of my articles in that top position were now nowhere in the SERP (literally nowhere) and performing a site:url I confirmed they were no longer indexed. Although oddly, in the GSC it said they were still available in the index (this is still the case).

This continued and since that point more and more of my posts are being deindexed. The 60 articles I had in that top spot are now down to just 2 and I expect them to be gone soon also. Many others are also gone and I am confirming this by monitoring the output of site:<main url> where I see the total number dropping almost hourly.

I have never had any Manual Actions within GSC. Nor have I selected the option to discourage search engined from indexing the site. I literally can't see any reason why this is happening. I have Moz Pro and can't find anything unusual here also. My backlink profile is okay, yes - a few sites I'd rather weren't in there but nothing unusual. Other search engines (for what they are worth) are still showing my articles as per normal. There is nothing blocking in robots.txt

Does anyone have any idea why Google might be removing all our articles from the SERP and deindexing them? I've been doing this for a while now (I have other sites) but I have never seen this before.

Help!

Thanks,

Matt

 

[floorsandingdublin]

Google has updated again at the start of January. Some of my keywords are getting a lot of traffic now while other have lost it. The SEO rankings seem to be changing daily now. Few years back, if you got the 1st position, you had it for a while. Now is up and down over night

 

[biondi]

Thanks for replying but this isn't just one or two posts - it's all of them and what you're describing impacts the SERP position - not a deindexing of all articles on a site.

 

[Colin]

Have a read about it at Search Engine Journal, it tells you why you could be getting articles de-indexing.

 

[Tim89]

This type of thing happens every year, some may see it as a refresh, time will tell, movements up/down daily, complete bonkers' results, I'd say just keep doing what you're doing.

I've seen quite a few posts about people suffering from de-indexing etc could be website structure, could be dup content, I can't say I've noticed it myself on a grand scale but if it's something that is concerning you then I'd recommend using express indexer, just run your urls through the service and sit tight, that should get them back in the index within a fortnight.

Other than that, I wouldn't worry too much until the dust has settled from these "updates".

 

[theteamplayer]

we love the google dance. up and down, round and round, where will she stop? no one knows