Is your site suffering from a sudden drop in traffic? Most SEO issues are preventable and find out the process for keeping these issues at a minimum.
Many elements that cause a drop in search engine rankings or traffic losses are avoidable and often not Google Penalty related. We have seen many clients come to us because they have experienced a significant drop in traffic or search engine rankings. But a lot of the time the issues have been caused by lack of SEO knowledge, poor quality work or mismanagement from the previous agency. In most cases we have been able to analyse, identify and rectify these issues on behalf of the client.
Common Issues Include:
Rel=canonicals. A common problem is broken or accidental removal of the rel=”canonical” link element, which specifies the canonical page among those which have duplicate content. Rel=canonical problems abound, as many pages have logic to determine whether to put on a self-referential rel=canonical or legitimately point to another URL.
Nofollow links. We’ve come across sites with “nofollow” link tags for all the links on a home page. In one case, all the paginated links on a blog were nofollowed, preventing multi-paged posts from getting link equity.
Meta Robots. We’ve seen the nofollow, as well as the noindex meta tags, on pages where they did not belong. We’ve also seen noindex removed inadvertently, which led to Google’s index getting flooded with low-quality pages.
Robots.txt. Sometimes, websites inadvertently configure their robots.txt file to block pages and or resources (blocking CSS can be a major mobile SEO issue).
301 redirects. The most common 301 redirect issues involve accidentally removing redirects or morphing 301s into 302s.
Page titles. We’ve seen these getting accidentally wiped out or set to the domain name.
H1 tags. Issues often arise when tags lose keywords and/or get deleted from the page.
AJAX sites. Sometimes, websites using AJAX serve the wrong content to the search engine spiders. (This is particularly nasty, since spiders get their own distinct version of the page, and
you need to regularly look at what the spider is getting served.)
Hreflang. The hreflang tag, which allows you to specify which version of a page should be served based on the user’s language or region, sometimes gets deleted.
Footer and Navigation links. Problems arise when links to important content are deleted.
Cross-links. Cross-link to important content might be removed, diminishing that content’s authority.
Meta Descriptions. Issues arise when the same meta description is posted to every page on the site or getting deleted.
For more information about this topic and to read the full articles please visit: https://searchengineland.com/seo-disasters-preventing-unthinkable-230403
If you are experiencing similar issues in terms of drops in traffic, drops in rankings or a general drop in sales/enquiries then contact Thule Media today. For more information regarding our SEO services click HERE.
