Drop in organic results after Base feed expired

[Alliance]

Can anyone explain this?

Up until a month or so ago we used to get good organic results from some really competitive keywords. Now this was strange in itself because I used to try putting these keywords in Google and we were certainly not near the top, sometimes nowhere to be found for these terms. Nevertheless, they were some of our top organic sources according to analytics.

Now though, they've stopped showing all together. We don't get any visits via these terms.

See this for an example...



Competitive search term "wine glasses". We used to get up to 20 hits a day for this yet we are not in the top 200 results on Google for this term or in the products search.

Our Google base feed expired on the 26th March (as highlighted in the image). I re-uploaded the feed and now we get nothing for this term.

I'm sure nothing has changed in the base feed. It's weird.

What's got me perplexed is the fact we were getting these hits in the first place. We shouldn't have been! We were nowhere to be found so why were they there?! If anything, the results now are correct. haha

Thanks in advance for any help.

[temi]

Google giveth, Google taketh, Glory be to Google On a more serious note, what must have happened the first time round was that Google ranked your Base feed highly hence the excellent hits you were getting, perhaps, the second time around, your feeds are not that highly ranked any more, give it a few more days and see it things changes.

BTW, did you add some new product to the feeds the second time you upload it?

[Alliance]

Originally Posted by temi

Google giveth, Google taketh, Glory be to Google

haha, very true.

Originally Posted by temi

On a more serious note, what must have happened the first time round was that Google ranked your Base feed highly hence the excellent hits you were getting, perhaps, the second time around, your feeds are not that highly ranked any more, give it a few more days and see it things changes.

BTW, did you add some new product to the feeds the second time you upload it?

Nothing has changed, we still see no hits for these terms. I'll keep an eye on it.

As for the base feed...Google sent an e-mail out to everyone saying products in the Base feed must have the id attribute. We added it, so no issues there I don't think. There might be a few new products added, not many though. It's created dynamically from our CMS then I upload the XML file. It's around 7000 products so its hard to see what (if anything) has been added/removed.

[temi]

If you have added or removed some products, it certainly must have changed, even if its by just a tiny bit.
I will say give it a few more days and see what happens, I wonder if base give priority to feeds that are coming to their network for the first time over feeds coming the second time.

Originally Posted by Alliance

Nothing has changed, we still see no hits for these terms. I'll keep an eye on it.