90% traffic loss. Pandalized?
-
Happened several times during this year. After launch as soon as we reach exactly 100K uniques Google kills 90% of the traffic. Then sudden recovery (pretty much without any action from us) after several weeks not connected to any algo updates/refresh.
No warnings. No malware. WMT clean as a baby. Only old good whitehat SEO. Not even close to the edge of wrongdoing:)
This time it happens again Aug. 22nd right after Panda 3.9.1. What is different now same exact date Bing traffic went down as well.
Need advice:)
-
Irving, should we also submit removal request for these pages?
Thank you
-
Already noindexed and followed. I guess it will take next Panda data refresh to see the results. Thank you Irving.
-
Canonical tags are the least of the issues. I would focus on beefing up the category pages. In the meantime, use the noindex,follow robots tag on those pages.
-
Local - My site was severely hit by Panda 3.5 and Penguin 1.0. Bing results held steady. Eventually a slight decline in Bing but I attribute it to the loss of the FB Likes that resulted from my taking a break in the "community" (think "Free Beer") and taking a break from developing IBL's, new postings, etc.
-
Already did. Think we can adjust few things.
Weird that Bing traffic went down the same way as Google. It's Google's Panda afterall so does that mean that rumors were true and Bing "steals" Google results to add to it's own SERPs?
-
Not sure I understood this part: "You should also have canonical tags on every page."
Thank you!
Edited: Ah I see what you mean. Unfortunately we can't. Pages may look similar but locations are completely different. Happens because some locations may have almost identical set of retail chain stores (obviously same products in same stores...)
-
Take the quiz at http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/
-
You really need to look at all your pages especially the /catalog pages and see if they can be considered quality content or are they are just a bunch of links. I would noindex,follow all those pages until you can spruce them up. Basically, your site looks like a big link farm. I also found serious SEO infractions and formatting issues with your meta tags and microformats. You should also have canonical tags on every page.
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
-
Organic Traffic Dropped By Half
My company website (https://factoryexpodirect.com/) organic traffic is dropped in March 2017 and after that it never recovered. I am not sure what is the reason. Can anyone help me out to figure out the reason.
Technical SEO | | christmaslaserlights0 -
Take a good amount of existing landing pages offline because of low traffic, cannibalism and thin content
Hello Guys, I decided to take of about 20% of my existing landing pages offline (of about 50 from 250, which were launched of about 8 months ago). Reasons are: These pages sent no organic traffic at all in this 8 months Often really similiar landing pages exist (just minor keyword targeting difference and I would call it "thin" content) Moreover I had some Panda Issues in Oct, basically I ranked with multiple landing pages for the same keyword in the top ten and in Oct many of these pages dropped out of the top 50.. I also realized that for some keywords the landing page dropped out of the top 50, another landing page climbed from 50 to top 10 in the same week, next week the new landing page dropped to 30, next week out of 50 and the old landing pages comming back to top 20 - but not to top ten...This all happened in October..Did anyone observe such things as well? That are the reasons why I came to the conclustion to take these pages offline and integrating some of the good content on the other similiar pages to target broader with one page instead of two. And I hope to benefit from this with my left landing pages. I hope all agree? Now to the real question: Should I redirect all pages I take offline? Basically they send no traffic at all and non of them should have external links so I will not give away any link juice. Or should I just remove the URL's in the google webmaster tools and take them then offline? Like I said the sites are basically dead and personally I see no reason for these 50 redirects. Cheers, Heiko
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
Did I cause my 70% drop in organic traffic?
Held top 10 SERPS for brands over the past few years, did a site redesign on May 19th, site used to have a long left hand nav consisting of each brand I carried. Site redesign was an attempt to make it cleaner and more compact. Now the site has a top nav menu with categories based on garment type and the addition of a brand category, no fly out nav menu, these links just open the sub-category page. On the 10th I checked my SERPS and almost threw up, off the map, no where to be found at all. Would a site redesign take almost 2 months to reflect? Am I being penalized by Google(no notification in GWT). I'm lost and thinking of how to tell my landlord I'm not going to be able to pay rent in a couple weeks.
Technical SEO | | scrubcouture0 -
Need advice badly domain rank loss
I have a main domain and a sub domain that both were doing very well and after looking at the Moz history its obvious that panda and penguin affected my site considerably. My keywords are holding rank but my search results and traffic are way down. My question is if I just take my subdomain (which is really my bread an butter shopping cart) and I consolidate my sub domain with my main domain would this help? I would basically make my main domain the shopping cart and make them one site. This should change the links to all the sites. The problem is I will lose the backlinks if I do not do a 301 but I do not want to bring bad links over and my keywords are holding rank. What to do?
Technical SEO | | megapixall0 -
Traffic drop with no explaination
Hello Everyone, I made a post a few months ago about one of my sites, Poker On A Mac dropping off the face of google. I found out that it was hacked, and redirecting traffic from google to other, pharmacy websites. Doing some research, I found out it was the WordPress PharmaHack, and we ended up recovering from it. Now, since October 23rd traffic has went down again mainly organic traffic, I tried to see if it was hacked again, with the same thing and their was nothing I noticed. I was wondering if anyone could give me any insights as to why this happened? Thanks Zach CwFda.png
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
High-Traffic but Low PageRank?
Hi all, I just did a site audit, and I noticed that some of my high-traffic pages have a PR 0. The other pages on the site have PR 4 or 5, and yet the PR 0 pages are among the highest-traffic landing pages we have. This simply does not make any sense to me. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ClarityVentures0 -
Organic traffic down after 301 internal linkstructure
Hi, i have a question. On a wordpress site i made a change redirecting (301) all traffic from /category/subject to /subject/ - I removed the /category/. Now i have a big drop in visitors from google. I waited for the traffic to return for some over one month now but with no luck. What can i do best. return to /category/ with 301 redirect or will this hurt me more. Thanks, Robin
Technical SEO | | link0040 -
Traffic drop after migration?
Hi everybody. One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas. I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that? Your thoughts would be great! S
Technical SEO | | neooptic0
