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SEO Tanked from Bad Sitemap, Won’t Recover
Posted by on May 12, 2021 at 1:22 pmHello all, first post here but I’m hoping you can help me.
I brought on a new client and a few months in, their SEO absolutely tanked in January. 12k Impressions and 335 clicks on January 19 to 146/6 on Jan 25, and it’s stayed that low since.
After digging around, I found that the old SEO guy had submitted a bad sitemap that lost some 80% of the URLs. I submitted the correct sitemap with the correct number of URLs about 10 days into the drop.
And it won’t make up ground. There’s an HTTPS error that recently popped up that we’re working on, But that doesn’t seem severe enough to keep SEO this suppressed.
Has anyone else seen this? Where else should I be looking?
I’ve run every scan and audit I can think of, and nothing is turning up anything that would explain this. The site passes plagiarism checks as well, so I don’t think it’s a copy-cat issue.
Has anyone seen a bad sitemap annihilate your SEO? Any tools anyone recommends?
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4 Replies
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an xml sitemap is only a backup method for crawling it shouldn’t have any impact here
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Look for toxic backlinks or signs of black hat SEO. Four months is a long time not to get at least average traffic back to your site.
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Check server log files if any bots are coming and 404s
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It’s not the sitemap. Sitemap is only a guide – it’s not the only way for G to find pages on your site. It worked just fine before sitemaps were ever a thing.
Here’s a thought. My opinion:
Old SEO submitted site to subscription PBN. When his contract ended so did the links.
Check your backlinks – are there any large drops in the number of links and/or sites linked from?
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