- Oct 28, 2020
- 11,663
- 14,636
RDs means Referring Domains, which basically means UNIQUE domains that you have backlinks from.1. did your site ever rank? If yes, for how long, and when did it stop ranking?
The first drops happened after May 2022 Google update. But they were significant. After that, the biggest drops started after September 2022 Helpful content update. After that some drops started happening after every Core update and December 2022 Helpful update, every Review update also takes some traffic from the website.
Before May 2022 update everything was good and the site ranked great, rising year after year.
2. How old is your site?
It was started in 2011
3. what type of content does it have (manually written or AI)?
Only manually written
4. what niche / industry is your site in?
Technology
5. how many content pages does your site have?
Before content pruning I had 409 pages with content, right now 286 URLs.
6. how many RDs does your site have?
Can't say, I don't know what you mean by RDs...
===> always willing to learn
For example, if you have 2 backlinks from blogger and 6 backlinks from tumblr this means that you have only 2 RDs (blogger + tumblr) because these are the only 2 different domains that give you backlinks. Sometimes, RDs are more important than backlinks....
But anyway, your site looks good from what you're describing. The helpful content update was in August 2022, though, not in September, but either way, if that's part of your problem then you could probably fix it by editing / improving the content. For the other updates you need to check out this list of updates to see what those updates did, and fix as necessary:
https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history
Without having audited your site I assume that your losses happen due to one, or more of these reasons, so check them out yourself 1 by 1 and see what you can fix:
a) no authority... it's pretty common nowadays for google to prefer authority sites to new / no authority ones, so if your authority (DR / DA) lacks behind your competition you need to start getting some good links (to the homepage mostly,. but also to the pages that lost rankings). And speaking about backlinks....
b) internal links... the pages that lost rankings might need some good internal links pointing to them from relevant pages that already rank. I'll be honest, I don't think this is the reason for most of your site's losses, but orphaned pages do lose rankings, so I mentioned it as a precaution...
c) if you have product reviews on your site you've probably lost rankings because you don't make your product reviews the way google wants. Again, check out the link above for all updates targeting product reviews and see what you can fix. There have been 5 or 6 product review updates in the last 2 years, so you must have been hit by one of them if you have product reviews on your site. Unfortunately, though, if you're not big enough (amazon-level big I would say) and don't let google check you to DNA level you probably won't be able to rank for product review keywords ever again, but you can try....
d) something else that could be an issue (a slim chance of this being the reason, but I'm still mentioning it) is keyword cannibalization. That is, 1 or more pages on your site target the same keyword and since google have become so advanced that they can't figure out anymore which pages to rank for which keywords (sarcasm, of course
) you need to tell the dumb googlebot "hey, stupid google, THIS is the page that I want to rank for THIS keyword, not the other page..."You can do this by editing the conflicting pages to remove the conflicting keywords, or by adding the canonical tag to to the pages you wish to rank for whichever keywords. Just check which pages used to rank for which keywords before each update and what pages (if any) started ranking after each update and do some comparisons and fix / restore what can be fixed / restored
e) something else that pops to mind.... when you did the pruning (whatever that means) you may have deleted pages that were ranking. This is actually a very plausible reason if I think better, so restore those pages if possible and have google recrawl them by re-submitting the sitemap to your GSC, by building some links to those pages, by sharing them on social media, or by throwing into paid indexers if everything else fails....
f) last but not least, you could have been hit by one of google latest scumbaggeries. More specifically, if you have noticed, google had spammed the page 1 for many keywords with youtube vids, paid ads, PAAs and - above all - AI content (yes, google's own AI content that they so casually and freely steal from us while ditching us without remorse or repercussions for their profits)... And if that's what's happened to you, well... I don't think there's anything you can do to ever gain those rankings back except for targeting other keywords (that are not already full of youtube + ads + AI's content) and hope for the best. Just check out how google's 1st page looks for the keywords that you've lost rankings for and if those pages are filled with google's own products and sites you're screwed....
