Google rankings tanked...

[Chris F]

My Google rankings have tanked recently. I've been trying to modify the site to optimize it as best I can, but I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong honestly. The site used to be first or second on all the major keyword searches, and now it's 3-4 pages deep. I have Google Alerts set up for our name, and when I added News articles, etc I would get alerts within 24 hours of the new article showing on Google. Now, nothing.

www.houstonswimclub.com is the site. It's been on CMSMADESIMPLE for at least 5 years now, and only this year has this happened. The site went under a few refreshes in that time, and we added SSL, but nothing else really has changed.

Any tips?

[DIGI3]

One thing I did notice is that news detail pages have a canonical url of https://www.houstonswimclub.com/news but it should be the full url to the article. This could be affecting how they're getting indexed, and why you're not receiving the alerts. If you look at the sample news detail templates there's a canonical assignment near the top with scope=global. Make sure your news detail template has that.

Anything else would require further SEO analysis and monitoring.

[Chris F]

Thanks for the response. My news template was missing that code. I added it and then set the process whole template in the config to False, but the canonical link is still just showing /news.

I also noticed Google isn't indexing my main sitemap.xml. It only indexed a handful of the separate news sitemap I have set up...will have to see what happens when I figure out why my canonical links the news articles aren't showing properly.

My global metadata has <link rel="canonical" href="{$content_obj->GetURL()}" />

[DIGI3]

Your global metadata canonical tag will need to be updated too. Something like

Code: Select all

  {if isset($canonical)}<link rel="canonical" href="{$canonical}" />{elseif isset($content_obj)}<link rel="canonical" href="{$content_obj->GetURL()}" />
  {/if}

Making sure it's happening after process_page_data

Your sitemap.xml doesn't contain any links to the news sitemap. The Sitemap Manager module should be able to automate all of that for you (http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/sitemapmgr).

[Rolf]

In this tutorial I describe among others how to create fully functional canonical urls
https://cmscanbesimple.org/blog/base-cm ... d-metatags

My SitemapMgr module is a great help for automated generating of sitemaps and robots.txt files.
Only submit sitemap.xml in the root of the website to Google

In Google Webmaster Tools did you resubmit the site with https url? After that Google will re-index your site and it will take a few days/weeks.

[Chris F]

Thanks for the help! My canonical tags are now working properly again. I resubmitted the sitemaps for indexing. I have separate ones for the main content pages, the calendar and the news items that I used a tutorial in the documentation to create via templates.

The next thing that has come up is "Accessible Index Page" Configured wrong. "Search engines see your https://www.houstonswimclub.com and https://www.houstonswimclub.com/index.html (or https://www.houstonswimclub.com/index.php) as different pages." I have a canonical link in the page so I need to figure out why this one is getting flagged.

[velden]

index.html and index.php ARE different pages. Stupid 'observation' if you ask me. Search engines shouldn't search for index.php nor index.html. They should just index what's served when they browse the mail domain url.

[Rolf]

Good installed canonical URLs should filter all double URL issues... That is the whole point of that meta tag.
Of course it will take a while to have search engines update their indexes!

[velden]

You're right, I read it wrong.

I'd be careful taking all 'warnings' of third party checkers (not from the search engine themselves) too serious.

[deactivated010521]

Simply said "competitive" websites are doing better than you.

I did not scan all your pages but in the Technical SEO area you did a good job. Markup, robots, sitemap.xml, metadata look fine.

Technically you can further improve on Performance, Accessibility and Best Practices like: upgrading to HTTP/2 and fixing vulnerabilties like Jquery 1.11 / JqueryUI 1.10.4

See: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/