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Losing rankings - Google showing wrong URLs

An overnight massive change in the local content

         

brumbrum

9:45 am on Aug 9, 2022 (gmt 0)

Top Contributors Of The Month



Hello guys, I've noticed something that really worries me. Some of the main keywords got dropped from 1-2nd place to 10th.

This happened overnight, yesterday everything was fine. Today what I see is that keywords are going from top positions to the bottom of 1st page. The reason is quite obvious at least in my eyes - the displayed URLs are not relevant. For example, our top ranking page for many commercial keywords was changed (by Google) with a page that is almost not relevant. When I try to search the page in Google using the heading it shows a different one (namely an article from our blog with a completely different heading). Furthermore, when checking the missing page in GSC it shows no problems with it whatsoever - the page is indexed.

Something else I see is that when using site:sitename.com the indexed pages dropped again overnight from ~230 to 169! The home page in the local language does not show anywhere. I see the blog page but the home is nowhere to be found. Also, I see the home pages of the different language versions but not the main one.

Additionally, when searching for our company's name, our website is showing 7th to 10th position. The first results are local listing directories, Facebook, LinkedIn and etc. Furthermore, the results that show 7th to 10th place are not the home page as you expect when searching for the company, on 7th position we see our "Terms of use" page...on 8th position we see our "Contact" page, on 9th place we see our "Privacy policy" page. A total mess.

It is strange that our competitors have no problems similar to us. Their pages are the ones that always show in the SERP. Just ours got changed to less relevant ones and in some cases one that got almost nothing to do with the keyword.

No structure changes, nothing that can cause these major changes.

Are any of you seeing the same?

**NB** The title should be Losing not Loosing but in the haste to post, I did not see it. I don't know where I can edit it, so excuse me for that.

sapanpareta

12:27 pm on Aug 9, 2022 (gmt 0)



I have same issue today. I was ranking on position 10 to 15 for keywords. All of sudden my page is removed and I can not even see it on SERP. I have made no changes at all. When I search site:mysite.com I see few pages are removed. If you have any solutions for this issue please guide me

premjithbpk

12:57 pm on Aug 9, 2022 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



I have been facing the same issue.
Google is showing irrelevant pages for the queries and the relevant page has turned to noindex.
The page has not been indexed yet even if I submitted the URL through GSC.
Is it a bug?

not2easy

2:12 pm on Aug 9, 2022 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Submitting your URLs through GSC is not intended to get them indexed and Google has said that there is a limit to submissions per day (just a few URLs) using the validation tool: [developers.google.com...]

martinibuster

6:02 pm on Aug 9, 2022 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Sit tight. Google has been having issues. While the 500 errors appear to be over, there were ranking fluctuations that extended well into the early morning hours.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Sgt_Kickaxe

10:45 pm on Aug 9, 2022 (gmt 0)



Confirmed - old data was used to populate SERPs for a short time because of an issue with a software update but all should be back to normal by now.

“We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google Search and Maps, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online," a spokesperson wrote.
[sfgate.com...]

brumbrum

5:06 am on Aug 10, 2022 (gmt 0)

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Things seem to be back to normal at least for our website.
I will keep track of things during the day.
Hopefully, you guys too see things getting back to normal. Have a great day!

eastendman

8:46 pm on Aug 10, 2022 (gmt 0)

Top Contributors Of The Month



I have had nearly exactly the same issues.

I am also seeing wrong meta titles (google is switching current brand to old brand) from our old site / brand which we rebranded from. We also see our pages dropping out of index and back in straight back again into the high positions which they have always had for past 5 years but our homepage has worst issues and keeps dropping in and out of index....

In GSC for the dropped URLs google are shown as canonicals our old site which we did the domain transfer for 5 months ago (as part of rebrand).