Hi Peter
Our rankings really seems to have fallen, is this normal?
Also since changing to All in one SEO our homepage title is loading correctly. Could you advise?
Can I ask how you’re testing your ranking please? And also, things are worse than that – all my settings have been removed from the site?! All the meta tags, titles, and general SEO settings too. Was that intentional?
I’d very much like to put them back in if I may. (I keep backups.)
Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert
We use a system called Rankinty.
Strange, we haven’t changed anything. I did ask our web developers why and they said that maybe Yoast and all in one are conflicting. I did check and I’m pretty sure you deactivated Yoast (from what I can see).
No one our end would have changed anything.
That wouldn’t cause the issue anyway. Both can be activated and have settings in the backend (although that’s awful for the actual SEO settings that get output – but it’s technically possible.)
It looks like a completely ‘fresh’ install of All in One SEO Pack. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say it looks like someone accidentally deleted All In One, realised their error and reinstalled it (not realising that as of about 16 months ago, WordPress doesn’t keep settings for plugins if they’re deleted anymore).
That’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense of it.
Anyway – I just want to double check – you’re happy for me to put all the work back in place?
Peter Mahoney
That is really odd. Could that be why the rankings took a bit of a dive?
Yes if you could please reinstate the work that would be much appreciated.
Another thing I wanted to ask you. How do companies have the below?
Well, there’s a couple of things with the issue of the rankings drop.
The first is I don’t love those third-party systems for reporting on organic search stats. I get all my stats directly from Google and Bing webmaster systems, which are the only official ‘from the horses mouth’ places to get that data.
BUT, having said that – yes, it’s entirely possible the rankings dropped when the SEO work was removed.
I actually blogged about this recently, you can read the post here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/case-study-turning-seo-work-off/
but the short version if removing search engine optimisation rank has a nearly immediate, massively damaging effect on rankings and SEO stats!
I’ll put the work back on for you right away.
As to your query about the ‘sub links’ in search results, those are called ‘site links’, and Google chooses which pages to use itself.
Now, that’s not 100% true – we’re able to say in our sitemap.xml file that certain pages have a greater ‘weighting’ than others, which we have done. (For the top level navigation.)
But we can’t then do anything more than that to influence Google’s choice of site links. They only show them for something like 10% of sites that have all the right setup for them anyway – it’s all down to your overall website SEO and domain authority.
(They actually did use to have an option in their Search Console system to nominate pages they SHOULDN’T include as sitelinks. But that was removed some time ago.)
All we can do to influence them with site links is already done I’m afraid.
Thanks for the above, Peter. Much appreciated.