Strange Website Activity
-
Hello, I have been building websites for about 4 months now and finally had my first real success with a website.
I found a niche that I was able to get on the first page with. This site was fine and then boom it dropped to #17 around the time of the recent Google changes. So I just thought it was that, I decided to add it as a campaign on here.
This is when I noticed that the pages were not being crawled. So being new at all of this, I researched that. Of course, the main things were is the privacy and robots.txt. It is running on wordpress and I know not to set the blog to private, but I wasn't familiar with how to edit the robots.txt.
I found a good plugin that easily allowed me to set the text to allow all bots. It seemed to be set to the normal wordpress settings before, and I never had a problem with any of my websites not being crawled.
Anyway, once I just set it to allow all bots on ALL of my website, the pages started being crawled again.
My traffic went back up and I was on the first page all day yesterday.
Today, so far big drop off. So, I deleted the campaign and set up a new one. Sure enough no pages crawled yet.
I made some security changes using Bulletproof Security and another plugin to see if that effects it. Nothing yet.
I am just really confused as to what is going on, so if any of you have any ideas that would be great.
It is a simple site, and I made some changes like theme when I was trying to figure out why the pages weren't being crawled. So it is not the most beautiful design right now. Also, I try my best to put up well-written useful content, so I don't think that is the issue for the rankings drops.
I don't have many if any actual backlinks yet because of the newness of my site, could be the reason for it acting strange BUT none of that explains the pages not being crawled at the same time my site drops?????
Sorry so long but had to explain it all! Thanks in advance to anyone who has anything to say about this situation!
Edit: I should clarify, I put the the security plugins on yesterday while I was on the first page and have deleted them to see if that allows the pages to be crawled. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
-
Thank you both! These are great answers and probably true in this case but I guess that would lead me to a secondary question.
I have seen questions in here about pages not being crawled with the SEOMOZ Campaign tool. So I hate to now post the question, "why are my pages not being crawled?"
But that is the mystery. As soon as I made the new allow all robots text file and submitted it, I checked and instantly my pages were being crawled again. Now nothing again, it just sits at N/A. As well as the traffic dropped off...
Confusing. But I am just going to give it awhile to look for overall patterns or maybe it is a glitch with the SEOMOZ tool that just happens to be corresponding with the traffic dips. LOL, I know strange things like this do occur in this business.
Thanks and if anyone has anymore ideas I am happy to hear them. I was worried I had some sort of malware or whatever the hackers do to your site????!!!!
-
Pretty much everything William said.
If you do notice your rankings fluctuating, this is just the Google Dance - every new site sees it and you will appear higher to start with and drop when Google figures where you should be placed.
I would suggest using the webmaster tools, get a sitemap in there and get it submitted. I know there are always going to be horror stories and coincidences and people will start worrying, but if you do everything right, you really have no need to
Andy
-
Thanks for your response! As for campaign I just mean the campaign tool here on seo moz. It is what keeps saying the pages aren't being crawled at the same time my traffic drops. Then when I see the traffic it also says the pages are being crawled on the campaign settings.
Sorry if all of this is wording confusingly, I am struggling to explain exactly what is going on here.
It could all just be coincidental. I probably will have to just wait and see, like you say, traffic is going to be up and down.
I haven't used any Google tools on this website, just because I have been paranoid of the big G lately and read about keeping some data private from them by not using those tools.
Paranoia maybe, so I might consider using those tools just to see if anything strange pops up.
-
It sounds like you are doing everything you can at this moment to get back to the rankings you once saw.
? Have you set up Google Webmaster Tools Yet?
As for your question about a campaign are you bidding on keywords? And is this where you are seeing the flux? If so I would check your landing page quality score to see what Google Rates that landing page and as well find a way to increase and improve the page for better conversion opportunities.
I also noticed you are not using the FREE Google Analytics tool so you can track this type of information that will give you a better idea of what your visitors are doing and where they came from.
Last you mentioned that this is a new website, and with that you will see traffic flux until a few months goes buy for a permanent position however when I say permanent it is dependent on your freshness of content and quality of all.. You will need links and in time those will come, however first focus on User Experience and then you can really start going after the SEO type factors.
I hope this helps a bit.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Historical Ranking of my Website vs. Competition
I recently received the dreaded "So, how do we rank?" question. Is there a way to use Moz Tools to measure how my site ranks for a specific period of time vs. other competitors for a specific keyword? My boss' boss is asking about how we have ranked for a specific topic over time vs. others. Which tools are best for me to use to try and answer that question? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Eric-Kinaitis0 -
How to find those website who are using our content
I'm tring to figure it out that by using seo moz how can i find all website who are using our content.
Moz Pro | | Showhow20 -
Broad Website - What keyword to target
Hello, I have a Brand name Roclay; and my domain is roclay.com . It is technology blog and we cover literally all technologies etc and every article is unique with it's own keyword. Please help me as I am facing issue of SEO for many months now. What keyword should I focus on and how ? Moreover what should I setup in moz.com for keyword of my website when every single article is different. Regards
Moz Pro | | roclay0 -
Its been over a month, rogerbot hasn't crawled the entire website yet. Any ideas?
Rogerbot has stopped crawling the website at 308 pages past week and has not crawled the website with over 1000+ pages. Any ideas on what I can do to get this fixed & crawling?
Moz Pro | | TejaswiNaidu0 -
Error on SEOMoz When Trying to Track Website. Please Advise
Hi, I'm trying to start a new campaign for a root domain, but I'm getting the "Roger found an error" and am not sure what to make of it. Error #1: "You've decided to set up a root domain campaign, but entered the subdomain path: www.siteurl.com. Don't worry, we'll switch that for you and crawl everything on the subdomain: www.siteurl.com. If you meant to set this up to only crawl pages in the root domain, click 'Go back and Change" and enter a root domain URL in step 1." Error #2: "Oops! The root domain siteurl.com redirects to a domain that is not within the specified root domain (www.siteurl.com). This will cause us to stop crawling as the first discovered page falls outside of the root domain you've defined. Please make sure you enter a root domain that resolves to a page that is under the root domain." What does this mean? Is there something I am doing wrong? The first error is what returned when I input www.siteurl.com. The second was returned when I put just siteurl.com. I didn't put up the exact URL for privacy reasons, but if you really do want to help me out, PM me and I can give you the real URL. Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | locallyrank0 -
How do you get Mozbot to crawl your website
I trying to get the mozbot to crawl my site so I can get new crawl diagnostics info. Anyone know how this can be done?
Moz Pro | | Romancing0 -
How to track with SEOMOZ a website in several language
Hi, We have a customer with a website in EN, FR and ES. They used Joomfish, so each language is in a subdirectory : sitename/en sitename/fr sitename/es and they want their website to be well placed on the web for all that languages and countries: English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. It is a website for specific affiliation, that's why there is no barriers. What I need to do to use the best way SEOmoz. For the moment I created one campaign following Google US, google Germany and Google France. To go deeper, I would need to create different campaigns in my account? And also, your robot will be able to recognize the different subdirectories and languages? And to improve the SEO of this website, it wouldn't be better to have 3 domains name, one for each country? Thanks a lot in advance for your answer, Anne
Moz Pro | | ahernoux1