SEO: When a site dropped out of Google
Read how a website seemed to have dropped out of Google, what I found out analysing the problem and how I fixed it.
The site drop out in Google Analytics
Below is a Google Analytics chart of the four weeks preceding the drop out of the site. The average number of visits per day is around 180.
And here is the same period, four weeks, for the following month. A webmaster's nightmare has come true: the website apparently has dropped out of Google's index. The average number of visits per day had dropped to around 40. Traffic dropped by almost 80%!
Analysing the drop out
The site drop out didn't happen for no reason. In mid-January I had migrated this site to another top level domain. The entire site remained the same, not a single file was changed. I had just moved from one provider to another and from one top level domain to the next.
Did this cause the site to drop out of Google? And if yes, why?
Checking Googles index
When I searched for the site in Google by simply entering the site's name it didn't show up. Competitors with similar names came up as usual, but my site's name was completely gone from the first search results page where it used to be. I found it eventually, ranked 71st. The site's search result rank had dropped by 68 places!
However, when I searched for the site's content using Googles "site:" parameter I could see that it was still indexed. In fact, the site was still in Google's index, it just ranked so badly that pages who were in the top 10 search results now came dozens of pages later (where nobody would see them).
How could this happen, given that no page had been changed?
Site dropped out with a delay
It is interesting to note that the drop out did not occur immediately, but with a delay of almost four weeks after the site had been moved.
I had installed a 301 Redirect ("moved permanently") on the old top level domain, which is the usual practice to inform search engines of a site move. Apparently Google had reassessed the site after four weeks and found it no longer deserved the rank it had earned.
Why?
Finally a hot trail
Analysing the site homepage's source code I finally found a hot trail. The home page had not been updated for a long time. When I disabled images and styles I could see the misery:
- Just five links led into the site.
- No headings, no semantic structure.
- The first two words of these links were glued together rendering them useless for SEO.
- The majority of the text available to search bots was copy about hyperlinks and copyright.
That was the problem: The site's homepage wasn't optimised for SEO at all. Google had tolerated the bad home page since the site went live a few years back, but when it moved to a new top level domain Google knew no mercy anymore.
Bringing the site back on track
Given that only the homepage was in poor condition it was enough to completely rewrite this page to comply with standard SEO rules. The new home page went live on March 4th. Check out what happened in Google Analytics:
It took Google about 10 days to reward the site's new home page which was the only page I changed.
Drop out sideeffects
Apart from the obvious SEO lessons this drop out incident shows us also how the sites depend on Google.
Traffic sources
Let's have a look at the traffic sources before (left) and after (right) the dropout (after period disregarding the spike):
Suddenly the search engine driven traffic is reversed, from three quarters to one quarter. Referring sites and direct traffic have become vitally important for the site's "survival".
Further analysis of the top traffic sources shows how dependent this site is of Google. Google accounted for over two thirds of search engine driven traffic (left). When the site dropped out of Google (right) this figure was less than ten percent, and Yahoo overtook Google:
Interestingly, during the drop out phase the time spent on the site more than doubled from 1:48 to 3:53 minutes. The reason is clear: While Google ranked the site way down its search results it also reduced the number of visitors who found the site through organic search but did not find what they were looking for. With Google gone as a source for short-time visitors the remaining ones boosted page viewing times.
Lessons learned
The lessons learned in this case are obvious:
- Place many links into the site's content on the home page.
- Use effective keywords on the links, headings and images.
If you do that you don't have to be afraid to move a site across top level domains.
Compare the search engine robot's view of the old home page (above) and the new, optimised page (right).
The new page has the following improvements:
- Many links into sub index pages of the site.
- A clear semantic page structure expressed by the use of nested headings.
- "alt" tags with keywords for each image.
- A short paragraph of copy introducing each section, interspersed with relevant keywords.
All these measures led to the success of bringing the site back to where it was before it dropped out of Google's search results.
Reaping the SEO benefits
Look at what the search engine optimisation brought to this site:
- Organic search results are up 10%.
- The average number of site visits per day is now over 240, up 60 from 180.
