Understanding and Restoring Your Website’s SEO Health: A Guide for Beginners
As a novice to SEO and website management, it’s common to face challenges when trying to grow your site’s visibility on search engines. Your experience of initially seeing positive growth, followed by a sudden decline, is something many new site owners encounter. Let’s explore what might have caused this and how you can take practical steps to recover.
Understanding Your Situation
From your description, you launched your website without prior development experience but made good progress initially. You created blog posts and landing pages, and even tried a small-scale Paid Search Engine Optimization (PSEO) campaign. Those efforts resulted in an increase in impressions—your site’s appearance in Google Search Console—peaking at around 900 impressions in a day.
However, after executing a second batch of PSEO pages, you noticed a dramatic drop in impressions, falling from hundreds to just a handful per day. You also discovered 404 errors (pages not found) on approximately 350 URLs stemming from this batch.
Common Causes and Considerations
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Impact of Error Pages (404s):
A large number of 404 errors can harm your site’s SEO. Search engines may interpret these errors as signs of a poorly maintained or broken website, which can diminish your rankings and impressions over time. -
Effect of Duplicate or Low-Quality Pages:
Creating many new pages without proper optimization, canonical tags, or careful linking can cause search engines to become confused, decreasing your site’s crawl efficiency and ranking potential. -
Possible Penalties or Algorithmic Changes:
Sudden drops can also be due to Google algorithm updates or penalties, especially if your pages were created or optimized in a way that violates best practices.
Next Steps to Recovery
- Address and Fix 404 Errors:
- Use Google Search Console’s “Coverage” report to identify all errors.
- Redirect (301) these broken URLs to relevant, existing pages if possible.
- Remove or correct pages that shouldn’t be indexed.
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Ensure that future page creation respects SEO best practices.
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Audit Your Content and Site Structure:
- Keep your number of indexed pages manageable initially; focus on quality over quantity.
- Check that pages have unique, valuable content with appropriate keywords.
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Use proper canonical tags where necessary to avoid duplicate content issues.
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Monitor Your Site’s Health: