Google rank dropped after installing YOAST

  • Resolved eisenreich

    (@eisenreich)


    7 years, 5 months ago

    Hi,

    i installed the free YOAST version as our previous SEO tool (Add meta tags) is no longer supported and updated since one year ago.

    So i installed YOAST and improved every site, post, portfolio item and product page according to YOAST. I created a sitemap with it and deactivated my old sitemap plugin Google XML sitemaps.

    Unfortunately, the google ranking has dropped sustainably since then. As we ranked very badly before, we recently redesigned our website and finally began to rank better. For our second most important keyword “eisenhaltige Lebensmittel”, we ranked at position 17. However, for the first most important keyword “eisenmangel”, we were at position 220, so we tried to improve more. Well, with YOAST we’re completely thrown out for “eisenmangel”. And with “eisenhaltige Lebensmittel” we are back page at 6. For most other keywords we also rank worse than before, only two minor keywords got better.

    I know google is kind of slow and sometimes it first gets worse when you change something and then gets better with time. But it’s been a couple of weeks now and our ranking rather gets even worse.

    Other than installing YOAST, i only added a little content to the page that should rank at “eisenhaltige Lebensmittel”. A week before we started to slowly reduce our google and facebook ads, which also reduced traffic a bit. But the traffic is now mainly lower due to the worse ranking.

    To cut a long story short, i am wondering wether i configured something wrong with YOAST or do i just have to wait longer? I am very tempted to install another plugin instead of YOAST or even the old one. Today i am going to update YOAST and i removed two sitemap erros google alerted, but i doubt that this is the cause.

    Best regards

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Have you looked at your Google Search Console data?

    Plugin Support Md Mazedul Islam Khan

    (@mazedulislamkhan)

    @eisenreich Unfortunately, we are unable to confirm whether you’ve configured the Yoast SEO plugin incorrectly or not since we don’t know anything about your setup, nor we are able to recommend or guarantee high rankings and traffic for your site. Google Rankings (and the traffic it generates) depend on over 200 different factors. You can learn more about the 200 different factors that Google uses to determine ranking here: Algorithms. Other issues that determine rankings (and the traffic it creates) are the server load, page speed, cache configuration, mobile versions, responsiveness, the site’s content.

    That said in order to get the organic traffic and higher rank in the search results, you’ll need to optimize your content. Please, refer to our this guide to learn more.

    Thread Starter eisenreich

    (@eisenreich)

    @galbaras Yes, that’s where i detected the sitemap alerts. Other than that, i don’t see anything of importance there. Do you propose any special thing to look at there?

    @md Mazedul Islam Khan I know of the many factors google is considering, and i didn’t expect YOAST to change much, if anything. But i didn’t expect it to make things worse either. As i barely changed anything else around the time i installed YOAST, it is hard to believe that it is not the reason for the worse ranking.

    @eisenreich what alerts did you see in GSC?

    Yoast SEO seems to be creating the correct output on your pages and your XML sitemaps seem to be in order to someone who’s not deeply familiar with your site. There may be something else going on.

    You might want to try crawling pages from your site in GSC, including desktop and mobile, to see what’s going on. Recently, Google started preferring “mobile friendly” sites, for example, and one of my clients started to suffer because of some stupid robots.txt instruction.

    Thread Starter eisenreich

    (@eisenreich)

    @galbaras thanks for your answer. There were two sitemaps listed, which didn’t exist. I removed them two days ago, so now it seems fine.

    Regarding mobile usability, GSC showed some problems with a single page “…/authors/’authorsname'”. When i let google check it again, the problem was gone. A few days ago, GSC stated the mobile usability as completely fine.
    When i use “fetch as google” in mobile mode, theres an orange warning because of redirection. That’s because we ware using a mobile version of our homepage. When visiting our homepage, mobile visitors are redirected towards it. All other pages are fine on mobile mode. On desktop mode, all pages are fine, besides the ones i recently renamed.
    The robots.txt tester shows no problems.
    We got a mobile score of 66 at page speed insights, which is the same as for months.

    Plugin Support Md Mazedul Islam Khan

    (@mazedulislamkhan)

    @eisenreich We looked at your front page source code and we can confirm that Yoast SEO is generating all the SEO meta correctly:

    <meta name="description" content="Die Müsliriegel aus eisenreichen Lebensmitteln helfen, Eisenmangel vorzubeugen. Decke einen gro?en Teil deines Eisenbedarfs als Frühstück oder Snack!"/>
<link rel="canonical"  />
<meta property="og:locale" content="de_DE" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Eisenreich Müsliriegel enthalten natürlich viel Eisen" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Die Müsliriegel aus eisenreichen Lebensmitteln helfen, Eisenmangel vorzubeugen. Decke einen gro?en Teil deines Eisenbedarfs als Frühstück oder Snack!" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.eisenreich-riegel.de/" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Eisenreich" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Die Müsliriegel aus eisenreichen Lebensmitteln helfen, Eisenmangel vorzubeugen. Decke einen gro?en Teil deines Eisenbedarfs als Frühstück oder Snack!" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Eisenreich Müsliriegel enthalten natürlich viel Eisen" />
<script type='application/ld+json'>{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"WebSite","@id":"#website","url":"https:\/\/www.eisenreich-riegel.de\/","name":"Eisenreich M\u00fcsliriegel","alternateName":"Eisenhaltige M\u00fcsliriegel","potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":"https:\/\/www.eisenreich-riegel.de\/?s={search_term_string}","query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}</script>
<script type='application/ld+json'>{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"Organization","url":"https:\/\/www.eisenreich-riegel.de\/","sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Eisenreich","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/eisenreichriegel\/"],"@id":"#organization","name":"Eisenreich","logo":"https:\/\/www.eisenreich-riegel.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Logo_Blutkoerperchen_1000x668.jpg"}</script>

    We can also confirm that Yoast SEO is generating the sitemap index and child sitemaps correctly.

    So, we’re unable to confirm why you have lost the rank of your website in the search results for particular keywords.

    Thread Starter eisenreich

    (@eisenreich)

    @mazedulislamkhan thank you very much for the test. then i will have to watch out for other reasons..

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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