Why Does Google Hate My Site?

  • I’m not sure which forum to pose this question. Miscellaneous seems as good a place as any.

    My site almost over night went from having 3,000 page views per day to three. The reputable American based web design company who redesigned the site is flummoxed. It’s a long story.

    I sell cartoons. For the last 10-plus years I did so via a site I designed myself using Dreamweaver. That site’s home page can be seen at https://mchumor.com

    I hired “Web Gurus” to redesign it so it would work better on mobile devices and customers could download images as soon as they paid for them.

    They designed the site using WordPress and Woocommerce. That site’s home page can be seen at https://mchumor.com/home-2/

    I’ll explain why I have two home pages in a bit. Thank you for hanging in there.

    The new site was relaunched in February and after the old site’s links faded from cyberspace hardly anyone visited the site.

    My Web Gurus said they thought the problem might be that I had too many categories and what Google might perceive as duplicate content.

    At that time I had about 25 parent-cartoon-categories and hundreds of children. Lack of birth control, I guess. Whoops, I’m a cartoonist and these things just slip out.

    Anyway, here’s an example of how a cartoon was categorized. A cartoon of a woman looking at her cat, tail in the air, drinking out of a toilet saying, “I have a low flow toilet, but not by design,” was in the parent Animals category and the child Cats category; the parent Construction category and the child Plumbing category; and the parent Environment Category and the child Conservation category.

    My Web Gurus said Google was seeing the cartoon on six pages and dinging the site for having duplicate content.

    I then merged a lot of the categories so there were no children and only 90 categories in all.

    The site still had no visitors.

    My Web Guru’s next diagnosis was that there wasn’t enough content. The site might have over 4,000 cartoons, but apparently Google bots didn’t believe in the adage that a picture is worth a 1,000 words. This was ironic because one of the things I liked about the new site was how clean and uncluttered it looked.

    Anyway, I started blogging more and interspersing cartoons and links through out the posts. In two months I posted over 50 blogs.

    The site still had no visitors.

    The only advice my Web Gurus could then give me was to put up my old site and write Google. In other words, instead of spending a small fortune on them, a better investment strategy would have been to buy lottery tickets.

    I did write a letter addressed to Google’s Vice President of Humor, but I’ve yet to hear anything back.

    That’s why I now have two home pages. A couple of weeks ago reloaded my old site and kept the WordPress site on line, but not indexed. I’m now getting about 700 page views a day.

    I’m hoping someone out there can figure out what’s wrong with my WordPress site.

    Thank you for reading all the way through.

    Mirthfully yours,
    T- McCracken
    Humble cartoonist

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    Do you use Google Analytics?

    Thread Starter mchumor

    (@mchumor)

    Yes, I use Analytics. Before I reposted my old site the only thing I could discern from it was that I had no visitors.

    I have seen this before. I thought you were writing about a site I have inherited, was expecting to see “Names have been changed to protect the guilty”.

    * Have you joined “google webmaster tools” ? Do this, verify your site ownership by uploading the .html file, then see what google think, do you have html or crawl errors ? What is your page load speed ? Try the “How google sees you”, it could be that they are not seeing the real pages in full due to things like javascript presenting content.

    * Do you have a sitemap ? Is the crawler able to find all your pages ?

    * Do you have pretty permalinks ? It looks like you do, this is supposedly good.

    * Do your pages have keywords in meta fields ? Noooope! Descriptions ?
    Your old site does. There are ways to add these fields, one is a plugin called YOAST SEO, it will place the meta fields in the header, pitty it has a fetish that everything has to be novel, preferably unique, ignore it in this regard, your old site had these right.

    Thread Starter mchumor

    (@mchumor)

    Thank you for taking the time to write. I’m going to work on the keywords and meta fields and study my webmaster tools page. When I asked my “web gurus” about adding meta descriptions and keywords to the 90 category pages they said my time would be better spent blogging and that google doesn’t look at keywords anymore. I was skeptical, but since I was paying them a small fortune I assumed they knew best. I’ve since added them to the category pages and and am now slowly going through and adding them to the 4,200 cartoon product pages, a slow and tedious task.

    Can you look at the server logs and see google crawling your pages ?

    The unfortunate truth is that nobody knows what impresses google, and that google are frequently revising their algorithm. It has to be this way. Google are about delivering the best quality search results to their unpaying and highly mobile userbase.

    Rather than adding keywords and descriptions to 4200 items, I suggest that you focus upon a well defined micro market, a category which previously had reliable performance, you will be able to measure your efforts more effectively in a narrow domain.
    It would IMHO help if your images had “alt” descriptions, something like “Cartoon: The queen bee said ‘I laid thousands of eggs today, and you expect me to change for dinner'”

    Also I would be asking for assistance from your web gurus in bulk adding of keywords and descriptions, etc. I envision using a spreadsheet grid to provide keywords and descriptions to hundreds of items at a time, each still customised, then bulk inject these into your new catalogue. If they are competent they will be able to source lots of the details from your old website.

    Thread Starter mchumor

    (@mchumor)

    I just checked the logs. Before I reloaded my old site Google was crawling between 60 and 150 pages a day and now it’s crawling about 1,000 a day. I’m not sure if it’s crawling the WordPress part of the site because I currently have it unindexed so I’m not dinged for duplicate content.

    Micro and niche markets are my customer base, and I think that was part of the problem of when I merged categories. Google Law cartoons and there are hundreds of sites before mine. Google Court Reporter cartoons and I’m #1.

    You’re absolutely right that my “web gurus” ought to be able to add key words, descriptions and alt text in bulk using the Bento database I gave them when they created the site, and I really don’t know why they didn’t do it in the first place. I’m no web guru, but even I know that you should have alt text. I’d ask them to do it now, but I can’t afford it. I’m broke having suffered the double whammy of paying them my savings (the total bill was double their original estimate) and then having no income for six months when no one visited my site. They were “kind enough” to offer to put the old site up for free.

    Thank you again for your input.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • The topic ‘Why Does Google Hate My Site?’ is closed to new replies.