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Messed up CMS harms my rankings?

by Valli
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey there,

got a problem with one of my client's sites i am doing SEO for since December.

We defined a set of 12 keys to work on which are in the top 10-20.

I built some rank but beginning of February lost ground again.

I can hardly see why, except that there was a problem with the CMS, which spew out hundreds of bogus pages automatically. At the time they contracted me they were already aware of this problem. Now it seems that their admin finally worked on it. At the same time as the rankings dropped for some keywords from 10 to 20 for example, google threw a lot of indexed pages out of the index. That was beginning of February.

Volume of indexed pages has been quite constantly at about 20.000 and dropped each week in February to about 6.000 today.

The client is unhappy and may suspect that the drop in rankings are due to bad SEO.

I suppose that there might be a causal correlation with Google deindexing about 70% of the pages.

What do my fellow warriors think?? Any experience with such heavy deindexing and its effects on the rankings?

Thank you all!

Bye for now...

V.
#cms #harms #messed #rankings
  • Profile picture of the author linkvana
    The deindexing itself isn't what caused the problem, it's what the deindexing communicates to Google.

    If your site went from 20,000 pages to 6,000 pages than Google probably thinks your site is having issues. As far as Google is concerned, your site now has 14,000 404 pages. Since Google only wants high quality sites in the SERP's it will lower your rankings.

    I have seen many cases where a bad CMS causes Google to penalize the site. My suggestion is to add Webmaster Tools to that domain and watch it carefully.

    Check for crawl errors every day and immediately correct any that are found. After a few weeks you should be able to return to your previous rankings.

    So, while I can't guarantee that it wasn't poor SEO that caused the drop, I can tel you that I have seen bad CMS's cause similar issues.

    Follow the steps above with Webmaster Tools and you should be okay.

    Good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author Valli
    Thanks a million for the WMT tip linkvana!!

    To your success.
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