Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google News and Discover down by a lot
-
Hi,
Could you help me understand why my website's Google News and Discover Performance dropped suddenly and drastically all of a sudden in November? numbers seem to pick up a little bit again but nowhere close what we used to see before then -
We worked with a content site years ago that focused mostly on superhero movie news and a lot of their traffic came from Google News. One day it just dried up and dropped by more than 90%. They brought us on to help and what we figured out was they were feeding Google their sponsored posts for months. The posts were made to look like news but were very clearly sponsorships pushing product so they got hit with a penalty. Not sure if that is what is going on with you but it's food for thought. As Tom mentioned, they are very volatile channels.
-
@tom-capper Thanks for the answer Tom. Much appreciated!
-
Hi, sorry for super slow reply.
These are, unfortunately, highly volatile channels. There was a core update in November, and this can have an even larger update on Discover than organic.
All you can really do is check how you perform vs competitors on the issues that Google claims to be valuing - brand trust, site speed, content quality/depth, and so on. Google Discover is particularly sensitive to speed.
Of course, you should also check for any technical hitch with your own site that might be causing issues.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved IP Address Indexed on Google along with Domain
My website is showing/indexed on Google search results twice, with IP address and domain name
Other SEO Tools | | mupetra
I'm using AWS LightSail
I don't know how to fix this, beside I'm afraid this duplicate can harm my website0 -
Unsolved Google Search Console Still Reporting Errors After Fixes
Hello, I'm working on a website that was too bloated with content. We deleted many pages and set up redirects to newer pages. We also resolved an unreasonable amount of 400 errors on the site. I also removed several ancient sitemaps that listed content deleted years ago that Google was crawling. According to Moz and Screaming Frog, these errors have been resolved. We've submitted the fixes for validation in GSC, but the validation repeatedly fails. What could be going on here? How can we resolve these error in GSC.
Technical SEO | | tif-swedensky0 -
Backlinks on Moz not on Google Search Console
Moz is showing thousands of backlinks to my site that are not showing up on Google Search Console - which is good because those links were created by some spammer in Pakistan somewhere. I haven't yet submitted a disavow report to Google of well over 10K links because the list keeps growing every day with new backlinks that have been rerouted to a 404 page. I have asked Google to clarify and they put my question on their forum for an answer, which I'm still waiting for - so I thought I'd try my luck here. My question... If Moz does not match Google Search Console, and backlinks are important to results, how valid is the ranking that Moz creates to let me know how I'm doing in this competition and if I'm improving or not. If the goal is to get Google to pay attention and I use Moz to help me figure out how to do this, how can I do that if the backlink information isn't the same - by literally over 10 000 backlinks created by some spammer doing odd things... They've included the url from their deleted profile on my site with 100s of other urls, including Moz.com and are posting them everywhere with their preferred anchor text. Moz ranking considers the thousands of spam backlinks I can't get rid of and Google ignores them or disavows them. So isn't the rankings, data, and graphs apples and bananas? How can I know what my site's strength really is and if I'm improving or not if the data doesn't match? Complete SEO Novice Shannon Peel
Link Building | | MarketAPeel
Brand Storyteller
MarketAPeel0 -
Fetch as Google temporarily lifting a penalty?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't! We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword. I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds. I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax. Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied. Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh! So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | semcheck11 -
Wrong page title in Google
Hi there, A while ago we took over the domain www.hoesjes.nl and forwarded it to our website www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. If you perform a search for the keyword 'hoesjes' in Google then we (www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl) show up on an organic number 1 position. The problem is that the page title isn't correct. Google shows the page title of the website hoesjes.nl we took over and (correctly?) redirected to our domain www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. Does anybody have any idea how to get rid of this wrong page title in Google?
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Here you can find a screenshot of what I mean. Thanks! Marcel0 -
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
How does Google view duplicate photo content?
Now that we can search by image on Google and see every site that is using the same photo, I assume that Google is going to use this as a signal for ranking as well. Is that already happening? I ask because I have sold many photos over the years with first-use only rights, where I retain the copyright. So I have photos on my site that I own the copyright for that are on other sites (and were there first). I am not sure if I should make an effort to remove these photos from my site or if I can wait another couple years.
Technical SEO | | Lina5000 -
How to: Sub headings appears in google results
I notice that many sites have sub headings appearing below their google results. http://i.imgur.com/A5JxMKD.png
Technical SEO | | kevinbp
See image for example. Q: what are these called? and how do we get them? A5JxMKD.png1