Amazing decrease of visits in a Good Content Site
-
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-HistoryI 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
- 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" />
- 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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
Duplicate Content
Let's say a blog is publishing original content. Now let's say a second blog steals that original content via bot and publishes it as it's own. Now further assume the original blog doesn't notice this for several years. How much damage could this do to blog A for Google results? Any opinions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CYNOT0 -
Adult Toys Sites
Does anyone know of any changes SEOwise when running an adult toy site versus a normal eCommerce site? Is there any tips or suggestions that are worth knowing to achieve rankings faster? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Differentiating Content
I have a piece of content (that is similar) that legitimately shows up on two different sites. I would like both to link, but it seems as if they are "flip flopping" in ranking. Sometimes one shows up, sometimes another. What's the best way to differentiate a piece of content like this? Does it mean rewriting one entirely? http://www.simplifiedbuilding.com/solutions/ada-handrail/ http://simplifiedsafety.com/solutions/ada-handrail/ I want to the Simplified Building one to be found first if I had a preference.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CPollock0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Any SEO suggestions for my site?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor1 -
2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
Hello, I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places. Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site? There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1