Casey Markee explains why food blogs lose search traffic and how to find the cause. Technical issues like robots.txt blocks or manual penalties, page-level problems with schema and images, seasonal recipe shifts, and COVID's lasting impact on search behavior all play a role. Use Search Console and year-over-year data to diagnose what happened to yours.
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How about on the major kind of core updates front? I know one of the things that people, if there are things that keep publishers up at night, one of them might be a core update that results in a huge traffic drop. How, how common is that and how correctable is that if you run into a situation where that happens?
Yeah, that's, that's a, that's clearly a problem. And with the core updates, there's always going to be winners and there's always going to be losers. So we, we tend to, and Google understands this and Google actually published a blog post back in July specifically on search traffic drops because they know that this kind of win loss summation happens on a daily basis and it happens more following core updates. So when we're talking about technical drops, I mean especially with a core update or elsewhere, you usually want to think about five things. When you're looking at or types of traffic drops. You either have a technical issue, which is a site level issue. Maybe you've received a manual action that would be an example of a technical issue that you've made a mistake on. Google's letting you know by means of a manual action in your search console. We fix the manual action, we fix the technical issue and your traffic usually drops. Pop pops right back. Then we have technical issues that are on the page level and these page levels are usually the result of algorithmic changes or disruption. So let's talk a little bit about the difference between a site level on a page level penalty. Usually site level penalties again are manual actions. Page level penalties technically tend to be algorithmically driven where you've done something at the page level across many pages and it's result in a drop in traffic. And that could be things like a refinement that you know or. Well now it'd be like using incorrect schema. You miss sizing, you miss sizing images. It could be the fact that you accidentally blocked Google from crawling your site. Maybe you made some, maybe you made some mistakes in your robots. Txt file. They're, they're technical issues. Maybe you have a very poor host. Maybe you did a site migration or a redesign and your designer forgot to take off the disavow robot file and you can't figure out why your homepage isn't ranking. There's a plethora of issues. And then we get into other things. You've got seasonality.
And the point with those real quick is that those won't be reported on by Google. So they're a little bit harder to find if you have Like a. Essentially something in your, on your site that says directly to Google, don't show my site on Google. And the example of when you'd use that is if you're going through a redesign or an update, you maybe have your kind of staging site. You could potentially push that code over. Yeah, we've seen that happen where suddenly you have a drop. Google's not reporting on it because it's not considered a manual action. So then you have to sift through it and say like, what's happening here? So these are things that Google won't necessarily tell you, but are still technically issues that need to be corrected.
Yeah, whenever you do a redesign or you're changing or moving to a new platform. Technical issues, any kind of ranking drops are usually the result of some kind of a technical issue. Either Google has to recrawl the site because you've changed all your structure and they have to relearn how everything is working now, or. Or your site designer made a mistake, which is extremely common in the food blogging niche. Unfortunately, I've worked with them all. They'll either forget to include your homepage title and description. Maybe they forgot to pull over all the robots information where they're supposed to disavow certain things. You know, it's various things. Maybe they've accidentally added chain redirects on the server that have diluted the flow of pagering through the site. It's a long list, it's a litany of issues. And so we, you know, you want to troubleshoot all that, then you move down to the other two issues and the other two issues with regards to types of traffic drops. The next one is seasonality. We call that a seasonal based behavior or a change in search behavior. Now we've seen a lot of that with the core updates because Google has refined search intent. And by refining search intent, I mean that we talked about the vegan recipes. Google is no longer listing individual recipes. In many cases when you type in vegan recipes, they're listing lists of recipes. And we've seen that across a lot of other queries as well where you know, there's just a change in the intent match of that query and you're just not a good match for that in email. And we see that a lot as someone will say, man, Casey, I dropped a lot for this recipe. And I'll go in and I'll tell you, take a. This is a good thing about search console folks, is you can go in, click on the URL and sort by search query and you can see all the search terms you're ranking for for that query and then we could scroll down and see, well, what of the drops? You know, maybe I'm doing a seven day comparison of before the core update to now and I can kind of see, okay, well these, these terms dropped. Well, gosh, these terms really don't match.
Right.
What, what this article is about. So that's clearly. Maybe Google just stop, you know, know, refine the user intent on this a little bit and that's why you've lost matching on this other times. It's just, it's not a change in search intent, it's a change in seasonality. So I, we have a lot of bloggers who. A fish fry is a great example. Fish fries tend to be incredibly important. Popular in the spring.
Yeah.
April, May, June, they literally fall off a cliff after July. Fall off a cliff. So if you're ranking really well for fish fry, blogger came to me, was doing incredibly well for catfish fish fry. And we go in and we take a look. I'm like, well here's the. You were doing 5,900 searches a month query wise for, you know, April, you know, April, May, June. And look at this, it's 2100.
Right.
July, August and still dropping. That's an example of a change in seasonality. You're still ranking where you were. Right.
Right now as you are searching us.
But people are searching less. And this is also why we've had such big drops across the board because of all this Covid nonsense is that there's been a change in search behavior. Less people are indoors now as opposed to where they were last year when a lot of people were on lockdown. And so we're trying to replace that traffic with, with, you know, new content or expanded keyword lists and the like. And, and that's very important for users.
That makes sense. Can you speak holistically to the change that you've seen over the, you know, 20 months or whatever it is? What a bizarre period of time. If search itself isn't weird, it's made especially weird in a world of COVID What have you seen in terms of the general arc, like the roller coaster up and down. Is it possible to speak kind of broadly speaking in terms of where you see search related to food?
Well, yeah, I tell you, it's. It's really starting to come back. There is a lot of the bigger bloggers, specifically relatively immune. A lot of the bloggers have the same or near level traffics that they had last year and A lot of it might just be an increase in the fact that they've got better relevancy matching over the last year or so because traffic levels do seem to be down overall. When you Compare, you know, October 1st now to October 1st last year, there was a lot more traffic. I It's going to be interesting to see how Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Yeah.
Shake out because we're not going to be doing regardless of what the CDC says. There will not be a lot of virtual Thanksgivings this year. There will be a significant amount of travel. There will be a significant amount of, of people going and having in person Thanksgivings this year. And that is going to cause an increase, a paradigm increase in, in those seasonal related queries and searches. We'll just kind of have to see how it shakes out. But we, we always want to take a look and do a year over year comparison. I want to see, okay, what are the top 10 recipes that you had last October? Let's compare them what's showing up right now and see if we can see any clear patterns and if we notice that there's one that's significantly lower. First thing I'm going to look at is, okay, well, is this a change in search intent or is there something going on with this page that's caused such a drop in queries? And then we'll go in and make refinements and go from there.
