Ranking drops and deindexed pages are plaguing service area business sites. Let's explore the potential cause and what local SEOs can do.
Within the last few months, service area business (SAB) websites started to see rank fluctuations aligned with the rollout of Google’s helpful content and spam updates around late August through October.
Chatter around those fluctuations picked up in the local SEO community during this period in various forums, including the Google SEO Mastermind Facebook group.
The common theme with sites that were impacted the most seemed to be related to duplicate content, specifically location pages – in other words, doorway pages.
However, sites weren’t getting directly penalized by rank. Instead, pages were being automatically deindexed, which in turn caused ranks to drop for queries related to the corresponding location pages.
Deindexing of location pages
Schieler Mew, admin of the Google SEO Mastermind group on Facebook, posted this video explaining what he saw with over 200 SAB sites.
In the video, he explains that sites with relatively low authority or a lack of helpful content throughout the site saw a deindexing of their “duplicate content” location pages en masse.
Scheiler and I jumped on a Google Meet, where he shared some data and screenshots below of what had happened in Search Console to these sites.
The first thing that was noticed was a large shift in the middle of September regarding indexed pages. This seems to line right up with the...
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