Dramatic drop since September Update

[Sharif]

Hi all,

We have seen a dramatic drop in ranking. We have been building a new platform since last November and migrated in June (we did have some SSR-related issues and a recent non-www and www mixup that could have caused some indexing problems). But I pray it is the technical issue and not the new helpful content update (I have worked at least 8-10 a day since January on our content, and 1000% better than before. So this would not make sense).

[edited by: not2easy at 2:17 pm (utc) on Sep 23, 2023]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[not2easy]

Hi Sharif and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

There are a lot of people in the same boat right now, only in the past few days have some noticed any return to better conditions. There is an ongoing September Update discussion here: [webmasterworld.com...]

As you mention, the various URLs for your site need to be 301 redirected to a single domain that is the same as your GSC domain name or Google treats them as different (and duplicate) domains.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Sharif

(we did have some SSR-related issues and a recent non-www and www mixup that could have caused some indexing problems)

Not could but almost definitely would, this is precisely why testing is so important before launching anything and especially so for new sites and major updates.

So it's 3 months since you did this? Depending how well you ranked before and how often G visited your site usually signifies how fast it will re-evaluate your "new" site. I have seen completely updated business sites done and dusted in 2-4 weeks, I have also experienced simple updates and new small sites take 3-4 months minimum, some have posted recently that they have experienced 6-12 months!

It is evident that popular news and big brand sites do get preference however exactly what the criteria for being popular is I have no idea other than to say I have a hotel venue site that G updates at least a couple of times per week!

[Sharif]

Hi all,
Thank you for the feedback.

Please tell me more about this:

"As you mention, the various URLs for your site need to be 301 redirected to a single domain that is the same as your GSC domain name or Google treats them as different (and duplicate) domains."

Given that I have worked on this site for 10+ years, I thought I was really good at SEO and made sure all the redirects were done correctly. I didn't even use a script approach and transferred each page manually, one by by one, with the right old URL, just to get things right.

Once we went live in June, we had a dip, and then everything recovered (and we even started to do better) until last week when everything started to go down.

Thanks,
Sharif

[not2easy]

These topics are normally discussed in our Apache [webmasterworld.com] forum, assuming your domain is hosted on an Apache server.

The following URLS:
http://example.com
https://example.com
http://www.example.com
https://www.example.com
Should all land on the same page of your site. That is, domains have these various URLs that need to be redirected to one URL so that you can avoid penalties for duplicate content. If your site is normally found at https://www.example.com, it can also be found at those other examples shown. A rewrite rule in your .htaccess file should ensure that any such request resolves to one URL. If you do a search here for "canonical rewrite" you should find hundreds of examples to help - or you can browse the discussions at the Apache forum link.

The same rule ensures that a request for http://www.example.com/page.html lands on https://www.example.com/page.html and what makes that important is that Google views that list above as 4 different websites.

Edited to add - if you are managing your own server, you may have used httpd.conf to ensure that URLs are handled properly.

_{I should also add, that out of curiosity, I tried a search as suggested and the results are sooo old, they may not apply to a current setup. I don't like bing.}

[Sharif]

I will have the developer look at this (superbly helpful). I just want to note that everything is working fine as far as I can tell (the front end is Next JS, and it is hosted on AWS Amplify).

We did have a www and non.www glitch (sitemap was non-www where as the site was www, and we fixed it. Wondering if it just needs to be reindexed and if I just need to wait a little).

Thanks,
Sharif

[not2easy]

When you are sure you've ironed out the details, you can resubmit your sitemap and from there it can take a week or a month. Or more. They do not schedule things with regularity.