With every one of Google’s most recent updates, many websites get clobbered in the rankings. Unfortunately, small business owners who contract out their search engine and online marketing work often bear the brunt of the fallout. There are some invisible killers to your search traffic, and you need to know what they are. Here are three examples of what might be causing your traffic drop.
- Robots.txt file is blocking site access. In the past year, many people have come to us screaming about their site completely disappearing from Google. In many instances, it’s right after the launch of a brand new site. The most common cause of a new site completely disappearing from Google is an incorrect robots.txt file. The robots.txt file instructs web crawlers on how to interact with the site. Many developers will build your new website on one of their own servers, and to avoid confusion with Google or another search engine potentially finding it, add an exclusion in their robots.txt file that reads:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The * is a wildcard, meaning all robotic/crawler traffic. The slash means the main file directory, which excludes the entirety of your website. You can install Google Webmaster Tools and see this in the report under Crawl > Blocked URLs. If your robots.txt file is set up this way, Google will not crawl or index your site. Remove the exclusion, or have your developer remove it for you.
- Your site speed took a hit. A used car warranty company’s site recently showed up in a blog post that discussed the fallout from a slow server response time from one Google crawl. If your rankings take a sharp drop, go into your Google Analytics and look at this report: Behavior > Site Speed > Overview. If you see huge spikes in your page load times, this is very likely the cause of your drop. The company referenced above reported a horrendous 19 second page load time one day, and over the next week Google dropped the site’s rankings by more than 15 positions on average. Ouch! If that happens, you may want to move to a new hosting provider, or follow some of Google’s suggestions for speeding up your site. Those can also be found in Google Analytics under the Behavior > Site Speed > Speed Suggestions Report.
- Duplicate content. The other thing Google has been cracking down on in its most recent updates is duplicate content. For big sprawling sites you may not realize that you use the same product descriptions on multiple pages for slightly different models, or you may have just copied the manufacturers’ descriptions and pasted them into your site. That won’t fly anymore. If you have pages you think contain duplicate content within your site or others, copy and paste a sentence or two into the Google search box with quotation marks on each end like so. If you see hundreds of other links with the same content, or even a couple dozen, Google will likely devalue your page since it has no unique content.
Google is forever getting more finicky. Keeping an eye on your traffic and your rankings is something that needs to become a part of every small business’s operations if their website is an important source for revenue or leads. Keep an eye on these issues to make sure they don’t harm your bottom line.
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