Hello everyone,I am seeking advice on our website’s recent decrease in organic traffic. Here is a summary of the situation:
- Our organic traffic has gone down from 18K daily visits on Oct 21 to 12K on Nov 4, possibly due to the Google Helpful Content Update (HCU). Despite the drop in traffic, our indexing is strong and our average position and CTR have remained stable.
Brief website overview:
- Core Products: Experience Management Platform and Professional Review Listings
- Platform: Built on React JS
- Pages: 200 static SaaS pages, 4.5M professional listings, and 100K location-based pages
Action Plan:
- Enhancing Homepage Content: We are planning to include more “Professional Listings” content and related navigation links on the homepage, which currently focuses only on our Experience Management Platform.
- Conditional Rendering: Considering removing conditional rendering to avoid potential cloaking issues.
- Addressing 404 Handling: Returning a 404 error page to search bots when a page is deleted, and showing related search results or NLP-generated URLs to users instead of a 404 error page.
- Handling Distance Filter Pages: Users can access distance filter pages, but we are currently using a 308 redirect for these pages specifically for Google bots.
- Resolving Soft 404 Errors: We are working on improving over 300K pages with minimal content (no reviews) that may be flagged as soft 404s.
- Resolving Domain Duplication: Our main domain and subdomain share the same homepage, which could cause confusion. We are planning to address this issue.
- Dealing with Duplicate Pages: We are experiencing problems with duplicate pages due to data inconsistencies and are implementing appropriate canonical tags on alternative pages.
Please let me know if you need more information or have suggestions on other areas we should focus on. Thank you for your input!
The website’s recent drop in organic traffic, coinciding with the Google Helpful Content Update, suggests a potential impact from the update. The fact that indexing, average position, and CTR have remained stable indicates the issue might not be related to search engine penalties or technical SEO errors.
The website’s focus on experience management platform and professional review listings might be contributing to the traffic drop. The HCU emphasizes providing helpful and original content that meets users’ needs. Therefore, prioritizing “Professional Listings” content on the homepage could be a positive step.
The website should also carefully review the content on the 300K pages with minimal content, as these might be flagged as “soft 404s” by Google. Addressing these pages and improving their content quality can be crucial.
Furthermore, the website should ensure proper handling of 404 errors. While redirecting bots to a 404 error page is important, offering users related search results or NLP-generated URLs instead of a generic error page can improve user experience and potentially boost SEO.
Finally, resolving domain duplication issues and duplicate page problems is crucial. Canonical tags and proper domain structure can help Google understand the website’s hierarchy and prevent content duplication issues, which are often penalized by the algorithm.