URGENT: SEO Rankings Dropped – Need Help!

I’m currently working with a client who is a competitor of Class Central. Our website has 85,000 course pages, of which 53,000 are indexed on Google. The website is built on React.

For our course pages, we pull content via API from various platforms like Udemy, Coursera, edX, etc., similar to Class Central. Could this be affecting our rankings? IMO, it definitely has an impact.

What We've Implemented So Far:​

Canonical tags
Robots meta tags
Updated 4,896 course page titles & descriptions (the rest are either set to default or not set)
XML sitemap updated
Robots.txt updated
OG tags implemented
Course schema implemented (but currently showing errors in GSC, which we are working on fixing)

Upcoming Tasks:​

Planning to update URLs because the current ones contain special characters.

The Issue:​

In January, impressions and clicks steadily increased. However, at the end of January, both impressions and clicks started declining daily. We checked the affected pages and found that they are no longer ranking in the top 100 for their keywords.

Has anyone faced a similar issue? Could duplicate content from APIs be causing this drop? Any insights or suggestions would be appreciated! If you need more details about the website, I’m happy to provide them.

malaykumar said:

Could duplicate content from APIs be causing this drop?

Click to expand...

This is surely not a helping factor, likely why your rankings and impressions are falling.

First check that your content is indexed or not. If it is deindex again means there is issue in your content. Google don't love it do changes in it.

resistosai111 said:

First check that your content is indexed or not. If it is deindex again means there is issue in your content. Google don't love it do changes in it.

Click to expand...

We checked that and pages are still indexed just their are not ranking

if is that case then you need to wait at least 3 weeks to start seen what is going on

malaykumar said:

We checked that and pages are still indexed just their are not ranking

Click to expand...

if your content are indexing one thing you need be patience and take your website content as serious check everything make sure nothing is going to get you paralyzed from google then you have to make backlinks. backlinks will incrase your position right now ur position will be 65-100

hope this help

Duplicated content is likely to be one of the major reasons to explain this problem

The best advice is to stop dumping garbage. You need to delete all the useless pages and keep only the carefully curated ones. It will take a few months to recover, as rebuilding trust is a long process.

If your SEO rankings dropped, it could be due to various factors like algorithm updates, poor content quality, broken links, or keyword stuffing. To recover, audit your site, optimize content for user intent, improve page speed, fix broken links, and build quality backlinks. Regularly update your content.

Yes, pulling duplicate content via APIs can hurt rankings focus on adding unique value, fixing schema errors, and optimizing indexable content to recover visibility.

pulling course content via API from platforms like Udemy, Coursera, and edX can lead to duplicate

Duplicate content from APIs could be affecting your rankings, and even with canonical tags and other technical fixes, it might still cause issues consider reviewing content uniqueness and improving course page differentiation.

Yes, duplicate content from APIs and lack of unique value on course pages can significantly impact rankings, especially after Google's helpful content updates.

Working on a React-based Class Central competitor seeing ranking drops on 53K API-driven course pages (Udemy/Coursera/edX); could duplicate content be the culprit despite schema, canonicals, and SEO best practices

Your suspicion about duplicate content from APIs like Coursera, Udemy, etc., is highly likely correct and it can significantly affect rankings, especially with Google's Helpful Content Update focusing heavily on original, user first content.
Run your top 100 course pages through a tool like Copyscape or Siteliner to see how unique your content is vs competitors. This helps quantify how serious the duplication issue is.

We pull course data via API from sites like Udemy and Coursera could this duplicate content be hurting us.

Working on a React-based course aggregator site with 85K pages (53K indexed), seeing ranking drops since January could API-sourced duplicate content be hurting SEO despite canonicals, schema, and meta updates?