GSC shows a decline of my QA pages

Matt1966
Moderator (243 upvotes)

There was a huge update on MAY 4TH, & on the 21st & 23rd, there seems to have been slight reversal on the big update. This may co-inside with your issues.

If your site follows the trend of a couple of sites I look after, then you should be basically back to normal, ~90% normal anyway.

Good advice?

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bobptz Member

Hi Matt That's a relief! As far as rankings go. However this still does not explain the continuing drop of the QA pages. What should I look for?

Matt1966 Moderator

It does, because in Google's update they probably deem the pages too thin / not of a good enough quality to index. With the reversal, their opinion on this may change

Chedders
Moderator (243 upvotes)

The normal reason for seeing pages dropped like this is google is deeming the pages as thin or duplicate content. Sometimes it can be down to just poor quality but I doubt that is the case here. I would suspect its just because the page does not contain enough unique content worthy of showing in the index.

I do know Google are forever changing what it considers thin content v something useful so seeing as they have just done a major update it is worth holding fire before making any major changes to see how this latest round of updates settles down.

Good advice?

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bobptz Member

A typical page from my forum (besides the commercial website) that google might take a "thin content" is this: learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/1440/votanikou-what-is-the-meaning Simple question, simple answer and to the point.

Chedders Moderator

Yeap, a perfect example of what could be considered thin content. I am in agreement with you it's short and to the point and should be useful to a human, however, we are not dealing with a human here. Its a computer algorithm, Despite its complexity it is still pretty dumb when handling pages such as this. Normally the trick is to add extra content which I appreciate is difficult. One technique we use here as this is a very similar type of site is to show related posts. This keeps the pages unique but pads out the content. It also has the benefit of generating more internal linking to relevant pages, lifting the importance of each page in the list. Ours is done automatically and not sure how difficult it would be for you to achieve something along the same lines, but it something I would possibly add.

bobptz Member

ok, I just did exactly this, 10 related questions/links to the same forum. I used to have it in the past, dont remember how this feature became deactivated. Maybe I did it by accident, maybe I decided to clean up the page. We'll see. If this works, Thank you for the tip!

bobptz Member

I just noticed, the SAME decline, for the same dates happened for the mobile usability. Is this also due to "thin content"? https://i.ibb.co/rMfgBC2/Screenshot-from-2020-05-28-10-42-50.png

Chedders Moderator

Google uses the mobile version of your site to drive search console. So I would expect to see the decline there as well.

bobptz Member

15 days have passed since I added the "similar pages" feature. The number of QA and Mobile pages did not go up. The google rankings have recovered to ALMOST the previous level, like Matt had suggested.

bobptz
Member (-1 upvotes)

I just noticed, the SAME decline, for the same dates happened for the mobile usability. Is this also due to "thin content"?

Good advice?

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Chedders
Moderator (243 upvotes)

On a slightly different note regarding this site. It is a site I personally may use as I quite enjoy learning basic language skills, However, I can't use it. The reason being all the answers I have seen explain using the greek alphabet, This makes it impossible for me knowing nothing about greek to even have a guess at the word.

Here is a perfect example

https://learn-greek-online.com/ask-greek/836/hello-in-greek-language

A really useful question that I am left without a clue still how to say hello.

Good advice?

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bobptz
Member (-1 upvotes)

Hello Chedders

Please clarify, you are able to see the Greek characters and you are unable to read them (lack of knowledge in Greek), or your browser does not properly display the Greek characters? Thsi is a screenshot of what you should see:

BTW, we just added the PHONETICS in this question and anybody can have a perfect understanding now.

Thank you so much for the valuable feedback!

Good advice?

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GSC shows a decline of my QA pages

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