Deindexing Bug, Site Architecture, and Ecommerce SEO

This Week In SEO 109

? Google Bug Randomly Deindexes Pages, Causes Existential Crisis in SEOs and Site Owners Everywhere

A “technical issue” in Google’s algorithm has caused pages in some websites to be completely deindexed.

Gone.

Erased.

But don’t worry, John Mueller tweeted that everything was cool now, and Google wasn’t randomly deindexing pages anymore.

 

EXCEPT IT WAS STILL HAPPENING!

 

 

There is some hope, though. There’s a tool in Search Console you can use to tell Google to recrawl that link and <chris farley voice>FOR THE LOVE GOD REINDEX MY SITE!!!</chris farley voice>

You can use the fetch feature and once you do that, the page should return back in the index almost immediately but if 50% of your pages have been dropped, that might take a while to do.

Also, someone came up with a script to bulk submit URLs to Search Console to get them recrawled and reindexed ASAP.

Good luck!

 

A Very Detailed Discussion on Site Architecture

https://builtvisible.com/solving-site-architecture-issues/

Be honest, how much thought did you give when setting up your site’s structure? Most likely, you started small and added the the site over time, and now you’ve got a mess of pages and a site structure like a pair of earbuds thrown into a backpack.

2007 called…

Maybe it’s time to really consider (getting an expert to help) restructuring your site in a purposeful way (but seriously, don’t just go changing URLs and structure on your own, you will break the sh*t out of your site and lose all your rankings).

Let’s get started by addressing the classic issue of PageRank distribution in content silos. This is a typical situation encountered in a large scale website where many items are listed in a paginated series of category pages.

The post goes on to discuss this issue at length. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve never given this any thought, and are looking for ways to improve your rankings outside of building links.

 

An Ecommerce Case Study That You Should Read

https://www.serpwoo.com/blog/analysis/seo-for-ecommerce/

If you ignore the crazy amount of hype in this post, it’s a really solid case study of how to rank well if you have an Ecommerce site.

Seriously, SERPWoo–even rappers are embarrassed by some of this stuff…

So naturally, this is why we are publishing this series of articles about “What It Takes To Rank In X Industry Right Now” so we can help you understand what it takes to get ranked today.

Something none of our competitors will even dare write about or share with you, because they don’t run real data and share it with their users as we do.

It’s just not true…

But anyway! I love SERPWoo–the site and the SEO tool, so I forgive their bravado.

This is a really interesting post and you should spend the weekend going over it in-depth if you’ve got an ecommerce site and you’re looking to rank well (because of course you are).

Some interesting (if unsurprising) takeaways:

If taking over a client’s website and trying to help them rank, I would look at getting their breadcrumb navigation set up correctly, producing more images and text content on each page, and making sure you get keywords in specific areas of the site like H tags which would include H1, H2, and H3 at the least.

With linking, both examples would need a fair amount built up from other highly relevant domains and URLs with brand anchors coming back to the page. I would focus on this tactic more than trying to secure high authority links that are not relevant with anchors that match the exact name of the product or target keyword you want to rank for.

Here’s a nice piece of data (that, while it isn’t always true for every keyword, is generally true): more backlinks = higher rankings:

 

A SERP Feature You Probably Haven’t Paid Attention to, But Should

http://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/04/search-console-reporting-for-your-sites.html

Google Discover. Especially on Android phones, it serves up relevant news/topics/stories it knows you’re interested in from relentlessly tracking you because you’ve previously shown interest by reading about that topic, etc.

It looks likes this:

Now there’s a Search Console feature where you can understand how your site is being shared with users using this feature.

The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019. We hope this report is helpful in thinking about how you might optimize your content strategy to help users discover engaging information– both new and evergreen.

Probably not a lot of data out in the world yet on how to optimize your site for being featured, but definitely something to start paying attention to!

 

Link Prospecting Tip

If you’re doing a lot of research, either for sites to post on, site to acquire, or other super nerdy SEO stuff, Google shared a really interesting trick for narrowing down dates in a search different from clicking Tools > Anytime > Custom Range:

June's Algorithm Update, Link Valuations, and More!
The March 2019 Google Core Algorithm Update Extravaganza

Learn How To Rank Your Site

Get our simple, straightforward guide on how to rank your site.

Sean Markey

Sean Markey

Obsessive consumer of SEO news and strategies, writes the This Week in SEO column. Loves playing drums and writing fiction. Bets you he can throw a football over them mountains.
dotted line pointing to the void

Smash your traffic records with quality SEO.

SEO emphasis line

If you’re tired of the empty promises… Tired of the mediocre results…
Tired of SEO companies taking you for a ride… Tired of reading the word tired…

Let Smash Digital help.

Scroll to Top