Why Has My Site Vanished from Google?

bysnibbo71

68 followers

Updated 6 years ago

Eeek - My Site Is Not Ranking Well Anymore

Initially I was beginning to think my content just sucked... My Google Analytics was showing that the number of visitors to my site (which is still fairly new to be fair) had dropped off dramatically, and the bounce rate (the percentage of people who come to your site and then almost immediately hit the back button to go back to the Google search results) was almost 100%.

This was a personal tragedy. I've spent ages writing content, useful content hopefully - and I had been building traffic to a couple of the articles that people were definitely searching for answers for.

What was happening?

Initially I thought perhaps I'd been a victim of a Google algorithm change - but I'd not heard of anything happening on this front - and I've followed the advice of Kyle and a few others and only produced good content, not trying to do any 'blackhat' SEO or anything that Google would find dodgy.

So I dug a bit deeper and found 2 simple mistakes;

My Sitemap.xml was borked

When I moved my hosting to Wealthy Affiliate (excellent site hosting by the way - if you're running websites for any reason, I highly recommend the WA hosting service, even if you don't feel like using any of the other great tools here) I copied all the content over, along with the images (which didn't work well and I had to manually update my images later) and comments and all that good stuff. All good there.

But I didn't copy my All In One SEO plugin configuration across, instead setting that up manually. I forgot that I used the AIOSEO plugin to generate my sitemap.xml.

This meant - I think - that as far as Google was concerned my site had disappeared. It got a blank sitemap.xml when it tried to load it from the Google Webmaster tools. So not only was it not getting advised of my new content, it thought my old content had disappeared too.

I suspect Google is smart enough to know that my content is still there, but if it uses the sitemap.xml data to verify its existence (or at least as some kind of measure that I know what I'm doing!) then this could have hurt my rankings.

Secondly - and perhaps more importantly;

I Changed My Permalink Structure

Don't - I repeat, DON'T do this. Mine happened by accident - somehow my permalinks had been setup to be /2017/07/18/the-title-of-the-post for example. I don't like having the date in the URL, much preferring the simple permalink structure of /the-title-of-the-post which is how WA sets up your WordPress sites by default. ( I actually used to prefer .html on the end, but I think this is irrelevant these days ).

What did this mean?

Google had all my articles indexed with the date at the front - but my site couldn't find any articles with that structure and so it gave a great big fat 404 error whenever anyone clicked on a link from Google search.

Hello 100% bounce rate. People won't go looking for your content if it isn't there in front of them - they'll hit the back button, return to Google and find the next piece of information.

Which Google takes to mean your content is irrelevant to the majority of people and will most certainly move you down the rankings for those articles.

And because my Sitemap was broken as well, Google had very little way of telling that I'd restructured anything.

How Did I Fix This?

I've added the 'Redirection Plugin' to my site and I'm now redirecting all the old date formatted URLs to the new structure. I've used a 301 redirect which tells the browsers (and Google when it re-indexes me) that those articles have now moved PERMANENTLY. Don't use a 302 redirect, because that's signalling to the browser and the search engines that it's a temporary move.

I eagerly await the results of finding this damaging and potentially costly error. If you move your site to WA ( or anywhere! ) make sure you keep the same permalink structure and that you check your sitemap.xml still works after the move.