Health Site Suffers 75% Drop in Organic Click and Impressions

Pages from SERPs about the only online STD Registry are mostly articles about my site that link to or at least mention it, so my site should outrank those in SERPs. It is that simple. Furthermore, if I suffered a manual penalty then Google should tell me about it. So far it says nothing and I can think of no reason for a manual action.

I understand Google not wanting to display unreliable information in SERPs for health information and therefore white listing sites for that type of info, but I am not trying to rank for information about diseases or how to treat them. There is no justification on Google's part for giving government websites so much authority that their generic vaguely relevant information outranks unique results for specific queries directly relevant to those results because the end result is a direct violation of Google's purpose. To provide users with content most like what they are looking for. Google's purpose is not to provide users with whatever content the government has that best resembles what they are looking for followed by what they are really looking for.

Again, the only queries effected have to do with STDs either by including the acronym STD(s) or specific diseases along with some other unique identifier that separates such queries from generic information about STDs. Results for such queries should return government results at the top only if the content on the government websites is what the user is looking for.

2. The content on the home page is not user hidden. Those are noscript fallbacks for images loaded via lazysizes. Users can see all those images. The noscript fallbacks are for cases in which the visitor does not have javascript enabled. Users like Google Bot for instance may have trouble seeing what the user sees without those tags.

3. Most organizations are unidentified if you follow the bread crumbs far enough.

4. I am not asking anyone to trust the content for issues relating to their money or their life. I am simply asking people to trust that the content is the best match for the queries I have specified. Since it is the only website named "STD Carriers," features the only online "STD Registry," and most of the web cites it as the most relevant place on the internet for both terms, it is the best result for those searches.

I am not giving medical or financial advice. I don't expect to rank for queries about just STDs by themselves or how to treat them. I do however expect to rank for my brand, which is over 10 years old and still unique. When a brand has ranked for itself for that long there really is no good argument against preserving the status quo.

Hi, STDCarriers.com

Please, read this - Google Best practices for health websites

You should improve your SSL - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=stdcarriers.com

 

Non-Mobile Links
https://stdcarriers.com/security/signup.aspx
https://stdcarriers.com/resources/directory.aspx
https://stdcarriers.com/secure/myaccount.aspx
https://stdcarriers.com/legal/recordremoval.aspx

 

 

The my account page is always hidden because you must be logged in to view it and i tested the others. They all look just fine on a mobile device.

How does that explain the sudden drop? What about the content was fine last week and not this week?

For instance, I would not consider "Celebrities with Herpes" to be a YMYL search even though I would consider "Herpes" to be a YMYL search. That is the query that has seen the biggest drop and if people actually were to compare my list of Celebrities with Herpes to the top results you would see that mine is the best because I only cite reliable sources, so my page should not be penalized as if it were trying to give unqualified medical advice. 

Most results for that query just guess which celebs have it based on rumors, which is why they have giant lists of celebs with that condition, but if you actually look for verified sources the list is quite small, hence mine only having 17 names. On top of that I have unique images and articles with streaming videos, so the content is good. It is not appropriate to use this EAT criteria as a means of preventing Google from actually reviewing the quality of the content. It seems like Google is saying that they won't review the quality of content if they make a negative determination based on EAT. So, if your EAT is low then you are not capable of creating quality content, that makes no rational sense when you really think about it.

As far as the "STD Registry" search goes there is no public government one, so it would make sense to show the only online STD Registry at or near the top for that query regardless of EAT because it is the only one of its kind. Instead I mostly see articles about my site hosted elsewhere or government information about STD reporting, but no actual registry.

My concern is that Google has falsely categorized celebrity results for famous people with conditions as YMYL even though almost every result is either news or gossip.

I think someone probably posted some bad links and that is what was hurting it. Now it is no longer possible for users to post links, so that should solve the problem. 

I also added an About page that I hope will help with the EAT issue https://stdcarriers.com/about/ since I nowhere claim to be a medical expert or to offer medical advice. I do however have a good track record providing people with services to exercise their first amendment rights.

I also improved my SSL setting.

On Monday I had the top spot for my brand back https://lmgtfy.com/?q=std+carriers and was doing well for https://lmgtfy.com/?q=celebrities+with+stds, but today I am doing worse for my brand than I was when I wrote this original post.

It seems like SERPs I am looking at are almost a random sampling from the top 10-20 results from the web. Looking at the results from time to time makes me wonder if Google knows what they are doing because it is not like just my website noticed a change. It seems like today's number one will be tomorrow's number fifteen only to find itself in the top 10 at the end of the week, regain its number one slot a over the weekend, and repeat.

If you look at the results for my brand you will find them packed full of pages about the brand most of which link to it and all of them mention it, so I find it hard to understand how Google can suddenly change their algorithm to rank a site below a bunch of pages talking about it for its own name.

Like before, the STD queries are the only ones that seem to be seeing this problem in my network. I have other sites that are doing better on Google than they were when this problem started, but they are not about STDs. The queries most effected are STD Carriers, STD Registry, and Celebrities with Herpes. I arguably provide the most relevant results for all those queries, so it does not make sense for the site to be going up and down like this along with the rest of the results. 

The top result for https://lmgtfy.com/?q=std+registry is now https://www.ptcommunity.com/wire/std-registry-gets-mobile-makeover-just-time-valentines-day which is clearly about my site as it contains the URL. The links are all robots.txt blocked redirects, but the point is that most of the top 10 are about or directly linking to my site. This is very weird.