Amazing decrease of visits in a Good Content Site

[Tintanus]

Dear Sirs, contributors and aspirants of Seomoz:

I have a site called General History (http://general-history.com/) that was created in 2010, and has a current PR of 3, a DA of 23 and a home page authority of 32. It also has 1.690 links, knowing that we have not invested on link building, all the links were built manually via post inserting or viral via social shares.

The thing is that in only 5 months, it passed from receiving 14.000 visits/per month to only 1.500. Is that a decrease of 700% in 5 months?

I must admint that I earn my life offering SEO to companies, but this is one of my own sites, a site in which my 73 year old father likes to write about General History. I really think, given that he used to be a journalist, that the content not only isn't spam but it is high quality content.

As I had Analytics, I started searching for the cause. The first question was...

1.- From what source did I loose the most amount of visitors? Organic, Paid or Social. The answer is organic by far.

As I discovered it was an organic loss, I tried to find what content used to have the most visitors. I found 3 posts that brought 80% of the total traffic.

How did the people find the content? Well, some of them found the site in the first page of google when searching for "Holocaust facts and figures" for example, but Analytics says that the most people came from image search in Google Images.

General history disappeared from the SERPs but progressively, not from one day to another. So then I thought, It can't be a penalization.

I contacted google and send them a reconsideration. 5 days later they answered saying that general-history.com is not a spammy site and thus it has not been penalized. For the ones who can read Spanish, here is Google answer:

"Estimado webmaster o propietario del sitio http://general-history.com/:

Hemos recibido una solicitud del propietario de un sitio para que volvamos a comprobar si http://general-history.com/ cumple las directrices para webmasters de Google.

Hemos revisado tu sitio y no hemos detectado acciones manuales del equipo de webspam que puedan perjudicar la clasificación del mismo en Google. No es necesario que presentes una solicitud de reconsideración para el mismo, ya que las incidencias relacionadas con la clasificación que puedan producirse no se derivan de acciones manuales realizadas por el equipo de webspam.

Existen otras incidencias relacionadas con tu sitio que pueden perjudicar la clasificación del mismo. Los ordenadores de Google determinan el orden de los resultados de búsqueda a través de una serie de fórmulas denominadas algoritmos. Cada año, se realizan cientos de cambios en los algoritmos de búsqueda, y se utilizan más de 200 señales diferentes para clasificar páginas. A medida que cambian los algoritmos y la Web (incluido tu sitio), se pueden producir fluctuaciones en la clasificación, ya que se actualiza para ofrecer a los usuarios los resultados más relevantes.

Si has detectado un cambio en la clasificación y consideras que no se debe simplemente a un cambio de algoritmos, te recomendamos que investigues otras posibles causas, como un cambio importante en el contenido del sitio, en el sistema de gestión de contenido o en la arquitectura del servidor. Por ejemplo, es posible que un sitio no obtenga una buena posición en los resultados de búsqueda si el servidor deja de proporcionar páginas a Googlebot o si el usuario cambia las URL de una gran parte de las páginas del sitio. En este artículo se incluye una lista de otros posibles motivos por los que tu sitio no obtiene una buena clasificación en los resultados de búsqueda.

Si sigues sin poder solucionar la incidencia, accede al foro de ayuda para webmasters para obtener asistencia.

Atentamente,

Equipo de Calidad de búsqueda de Google"

They say interesting things like it might be other problems that caused my position decrease like: Site content change, content management, server architecture or change or urls.

After receiving this, I thought I should get in the admin panel in wordpress and search for bugs, html or css, php errors and I found that somebody had hijacked my site, entering the wordpress panel and adding a code of into one of my landing pages. That page does not exist anymore. I erased completely.

The span code was as follows:
General History | General-History General History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-History

I thought that would be the problem ! But it was NOT, because Google did not penalize me as you can see in the letter they sent me. I erased the complete page in which the span appeared, I updated my sitemap, re-check my robots.txt, searched my folders via FTP and mucho more...

Conclusion? I have no idea why I General-History has lost 700% of its traffic in 5 months.

[Tintanus]

HI Grasshoper and other repliers, many thanks for your answers.

1.- The alt attribute: You might be absolutely right, I know the attribute and use it every day in my job but hadn't apply it on General-History. The alt attribute is nothing new, so if I hadn't inserted them on the first place and reached 14.000 visits, how come I now descend to 1.5? Is google penguin so powerful? I did not read any change about the alt attribute when I read about penguin, did you?

2.- The Wordpress Theory: This, I admit has impressed me. I think this might not be the only reason, but it can be a major reason of the decrease as the older posts get far away from the home thus decreasing its importance. I very much liked this answer, thank you.

3.- Competitors. I fullishly dismissed this issue because I did not think that other history sites would invert or do something about their SEO, but I might be wrong.

Grasshoper would you like to have access to the associated analytics account to study the case? I have SEO friends who consider this issue as interesting as anything, I mean, have you ever seen a non spammy site decrease it's visits as such?

Thanks in advance, and by the way, if it is the ads that appear in the header, I would not mind to take it off as it gives very little money.

Thanks a lot to all of you.

[EGOL]

Some of my competitors have noticed similar traffic losses when I have moved into their niche.... and I have noticed similar traffic losses when competitors have moved into my niche.

The most dangerous competitor is the one who has yet to arrive.

So, go out looking for the new competitor in your niche.  That might explain your traffic loss.

[grasshopper]

Hi Christian,

It's good that you got confirmation that no manual action has been taken against the site.  That means that changes in traffic are most likely due to changes in how Google is calculating individual relevance or authority signals:

1. Relevance - Since a large percentage of your traffic was coming from Image Search, I took a quick look at your source code.  You are using the image title attribute, but you are not using the <alt>attribute on your images.  The <alt>attribute is a much stronger relevance signal to engines.  Make sure to include descriptive alt text on all of your photos, for example:</alt></alt>

class="size-thumbnail wp-image-2824" title="Nimitz young lieutenant" src="http://general-history.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Nimitz-young-lieutenant-141x150.jpg" alt="Chester William Nimitz, photographed as a Lieutenant, United States Navy" width="141" height="150" />

2. Authority - Because your site is built on Wordpress, there's a chance that the photos (or posts) that were getting the majority of your traffic are being pushed farther and farther away from the home page as new posts are added. As they're pushed successive clicks away from the home page, the link authority flowing to them drops drastically.  A quick test you can run is to grab the 3 posts that were getting the most traffic, and put them in a "Most Popular Posts" navigation widget on the home page.  That should increase the flow of link authority to them substantially, and should allow them to start ranking again (if this is the problem).

Another possibility is that your site's links got devalued by Penguin.  But I'd address #1 and #2 before jumping to that conclusion.  Hope this helps!

[TheeDigital]

Christian,

I don't have a true answer for you, but here are a few things that you might want to look into if you haven't.

1. Have you done a link analysis of your competitors?  If your problem has to do with organic searches you might be being pushed down in the search rankings.  I would suggest that you, do that.

2. You mention that most of your hits came from "images", I'm curious if these were images that showed up in the SERPs and are not now?  I'd look into that.

Hopefully that helps.