Racketboy In Trouble: Google Search Traffic

[racketboy]

So I'm it a bit of trouble with traffic on the site -- Google search traffic in particular.
Google traffic is the lifeblood of keeping the site financially healthy.

For years, we've had really good ranking for terms like "best snes games" or "most valuable games" -- we were almost always near the top.

The whole site hasn't disappeared from Google -- the forum, the store, and the main index pages of the content show up fine, but all individual posts seem to have disappeared from Google's index.

See my notes below with my developer. I tried having Google re-index, but either it hasn't helped or it hasn't gone into effect yet.

Any of you techies/web-heads out there find anything wrong with how the posts are set up or anything that would cause this issue?


Nick:
I know this isn't really your problem, but I'm hoping maybe you can look into somethings.
I don't know if maybe something got messed up with those URL redirects, but my Google juice tanked a couple weeks ago.

Used to be I was a top result for a lot of searches like "best [insert old system] games" and "most valuable [system] games", not I don't show up much at all -- I noticed this first when I tried searching for old posts of mine (wasn't even a top result even when including "racketboy" in the title"

See attachment for Analytics info

Untitled-1.gif (37.93 KiB) Viewed 936 times

One thing worth noting in the example of my own experience:
I was trying to find my popular Rare and Valuable NES games post.
Usually a search for Rare NES Games would lead you right to the post, but even with "racketboy" added to the search brings up my main rare & and valuable index (not the page directly) and it was like the 4th listing down.


.....


Doing more digging -- it seems to just be effecting individual Wordpress posts.
Forum and store or index pages on the front page seem to be fine.

....

Yeah, it seems like individual posts aren't being indexed.
Here's a perfect example of a search for one of my recent posts -- everything other than the actual post shows up
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=c ... 20&bih=965




Matt:
Strange stuff.

My firs thought, was that maybe the sitemap was messed up. But it appears to be okay - http://www.racketboy.com/sitemap.xml

March 5 seems to be the day things tanked; did you make any changes to the site that day? I know the podcast category path was changed, but I don't know. Anything else like that be modified lately? Even then, the old podcast URLs redirect to the new ones, so that shouldn't be an issue. Really don't know what else could have caused all of your posts to be removed from Google's index.




Nick:
I didn't change anything -- the only changes were the other day when that caching thing seemed to clear up. Not sure if A Small Orange did anything to clear that up.



Matt:
The issue seems to have started around March 5th, though. It was March 14th when I reported the cache issue. I don't think they're related.



Nick:
But maybe the caching issue broke the links and indexing before we noticed it.



Matt:
Oh, yeah, I wonder if that's the case? No idea how long that's been going on. Only reason I discovered it, was because I made a change on the front-end and it wasn't being reflected, even after clearing the cache in WP-Admin.




Nick:
But everything else looks good to you? I can try to re-submit for indexing if you can't think of anything to fix.



Matt:
I think that would probably be a good idea. I don't see anything that could be causing issues.

[Stark]

Yeah searching for "rare saturn games" doesn't come up with your post at all. I know that's how I found this site back in the day (2010-ish). I'm not much of a whiz with this stuff, but I think it's very important! Good luck!

[dsheinem]

Is there any way to contact Google and ask for help or understanding?

Are we going to need to sell candy bars door-to-door?

[racketboy]

In my experience, actually contacting Google in next to useless.

It's documented that their philosophy is to set a software support system that doesn't require human interaction.

[CRTGAMER]

Made me curious, see if the Guides would pop up in a Google search. I tried sd gecko and Racketboy is on the first Google page 7th link. I next tried arcade spinner, Racketboy also popped up on the first page. I'm not sure if Google is just remembering my particular searches, but the first page Popup seems okay here.

On the other side of the coin, I tried gotcha force and went thru a few pages to no avail. One thing that strikes me is the first two searches were successful because maybe older posts already in Googles Data base? If I include racketboy in the search, it pops up right away.

The only thing I can come up is for everyone to use clear descriptions in new post titles. A vague title that is open ended with a mystery question might not be found. This helps in local searches, maybe also helps bring in Google Hits?

[racketboy]

Made me curious, see if the Guides would pop up in a Google search. I tried sd gecko and Racketboy is on the first Google page 7th link. I next tried arcade spinner, Racketboy also popped up on the first page. I'm not sure if Google is just remembering my particular searches, but the first page Popup seems okay here.

On the other side of the coin, I tried gotcha force and went thru a few pages to no avail. One thing that strikes me is the first two searches were successful because maybe older posts already in Googles Data base? If I include racketboy in the search, it pops up right away.

The only thing I can come up is for everyone to use clear descriptions in new post titles. A vague title that is open ended with a mystery question might not be found. This helps in local searches, maybe also helps bring in Google Hits?

The forum is fine -- see my notes up top.
It's just blog posts that have disappeared.

[Ivo]

The forum is fine -- see my notes up top.
It's just blog posts that have disappeared.

As a temporary (hopefully not permanent?) solution, why don't you create a special section of the forum and ask for volunteers to re-post the blog posts into the forum so they can be tracked again?

They could have the link to the properly formatted blog post on the top, and then a text dump (that would be google searchable). It is not ideal but is a work around

Ivo.

[racketboy]

The forum is fine -- see my notes up top.
It's just blog posts that have disappeared.

As a temporary (hopefully not permanent?) solution, why don't you create a special section of the forum and ask for volunteers to re-post the blog posts into the forum so they can be tracked again?

They could have the link to the properly formatted blog post on the top, and then a text dump (that would be google searchable). It is not ideal but is a work around

Ivo.

While I appreciate the idea, I don't think a temporary solution like that would help in the right way. I don't want Google to end up indexing a new post instead of the "real thing".

[KDub]

When you make a post do you have any plugins set up to add SEO key words and descriptions to direct search engines? These can be helpful if you are losing search engine visibility from the usual means.

Also using good tags and key words in the normal wordpress set up will help too. Use a lot and keep them tight, don't just use a few real broad terms.

[racketboy]

When you make a post do you have any plugins set up to add SEO key words and descriptions to direct search engines? These can be helpful if you are losing search engine visibility from the usual means.

Also using good tags and key words in the normal wordpress set up will help too. Use a lot and keep them tight, don't just use a few real broad terms.

I realize those elements -- like I mentioned before, we had good ranking and it's not that the pages have "worse" ranking, they aren't in the index at all.