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Site experiencing Google organic drop - looking for your opinion on why!!

Discussion in 'SEO' started by Lindsay Valdez, Jul 8, 2019.

  1. #1
    Hello,

    My name is Lindsay Valdez and I work at SHE Media. In 2018, this property https://www.sheknows.com was devalued/penalized by Google multiple times. Despite making changes to improve the site, we've seen ZERO improvement in the search results or in traffic. Site was seeing around 700K pageviews a day from Google and is now lucky to get 350K. If anyone is interested in sharing their opinion on why, I reallyyyy appreciate it and my e-mail is .
     
    Lindsay Valdez, Jul 8, 2019 IP
  2. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #2
    Autoplaying video pissing off users, broken to nonexistant alternative navigation. Overload of images on load with images too big to even belong as content -- certainly not that many at once -- on a page, and of course "powered by turdpress" which means the code is likely junk. that could leave search engines confused.

    Hence why when I pop the bonnet to have a look, it's got endless pointless static scripting in the markup, gibberish to nonexistent semantics, despite what SHOULD be plenty of content it actually feels content starved due to the low CTC (code to content) ratio. This is made even worse by having gone utterly nutters overboard with the "we need a image for every blasted render size" and using PNG which is a poor choice for what appear to be photographs.

    Hence the ridiculous 8.9 megabytes and 166 file requests -- which "real world" for the majority of "normal people" is at least thirty seconds of "handshaking" cache-empty, and could end up taking over two minutes for many users to even have finish loading. Between the painful load time and auto-playing video, not only are you likely getting penalized for speed by search, you're also making users automatically close the tab the moment that stupid huffing video starts.

    Again, even the markup is, well... what is to be expected from slopping together turdpress and frameworks without understanding enough HTML to be making websites.

    When looking at the code it's the typical train wreck of ignorance and ineptitude with static scripting in the markup, static style in the markup, presentational use of classes, endless pointless DIV for nothing, incorrect use of the utterly pointless HTML 5 "structural tags", data values indictating JavaScript for things that have ZERO business being scripted, pointlessly redundant use of the TITLE attribute, violating accessiblity norms by shoving new windows/tabs down the user's gullet with target="_blank", etc, etc...

    Which is why it's wasting 145k of "HTML" (those are air quotes, HTML is a generous description) on delivering 6.9k of plaintext and around four dozen content images, not even 16k of HTML's JOB!

    It's bloated, it's slow, and the markup is non-semantic gibberish. OF COURSE you're getting penalized.

    Hence why you get a 6/100 on insights.

    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https://www.sheknows.com/

    Also a stunning example of why I prefer custom turnkey solutions, since using off the shelf garbage like bootcrap is one of the fastest ways to screw any business; as you are now discovering.
     
    deathshadow, Jul 12, 2019 IP
  3. Lindsay Valdez

    Lindsay Valdez Peon

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    #3
    @deathshadow!! this is very likely my favorite response to any forum post I've ever received, HA!!! Such colorful descriptors, love it!! Ok, so 2 things: #1 when i actually go onto the site from my phone or comp, it loads fairly fast, which is what our tech team says when I tell them that we're getting 6/100 on Insights, like I didn't really think it was possible to get 6/100!!! Why does it "appear" to load fast IRL? #2 the site wasn't actually built on "turdpress" but when Penske Media Corp acquired SHE Media/SheKnows.com last year, they unfortunately migrated the site from a custom cms to WP VIP. In the migration, the tech team just moved it "as-is" without doing any true code review to see what scripts could be taken off or how to optimize in any way. I wouldn't have known all those code specifics (look at you, using your wizard skills to help an seo) but I have told them that it fails every speed test. Thank you so so much for taking the time to write this out, appreciate it!
     
    Lindsay Valdez, Jul 12, 2019 IP
  4. mmerlinn

    mmerlinn Prominent Member

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    #4
    Just because it loads 'fast' for you with your ideal equipment and ideal connections does not mean it will do the same for others. There are dozens of browsers & hundreds of variations of those browsers running on hundreds of different devices with MILLIONS of different variations of them. Further there are infinite speed variations depending on what the user's CPU is doing at the time, not to say anything about internet connection speeds. So what flies for you may choke for someone else.

    Bottom line is that if you want the fastest speed, your code must be as short as possible within reason. The more code the user's CPU needs to process, the slower the output is going to be. To a large degree, if you double your code length you will double the processing time. With short pages most will never notice, but pages built with Turdpress, Bootcrap, Jqueery, and other bloated shipwrecks can often freeze devices for minutes at a time. Sometimes it is often faster to soft reboot a computer rather than waiting for the CPU to process the garbage.
     
    mmerlinn, Jul 12, 2019 IP
  5. Lindsay Valdez

    Lindsay Valdez Peon

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    #5
    Thanks again, very much appreciated!!
     
    Lindsay Valdez, Jul 15, 2019 IP