My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
-
Hi all,
We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower.
One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www).
Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August.
We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor:
- We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks.
- Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day.
- GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact.
- Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google?
This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl
Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for this. When you had the linking issue, did you traffic drop suddenly or was it gradual? Were only the mislinked pages deranked or were all pages on the domain deranked?
-
If you have one of the typical applegate programs they are duplicating your content, competing with you in the SERPs and giving you a big load of worthless to dangerous links.
That's my opinion.
-
It looks like we were hit by this algorithm update described by Matt Cutts:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-four-15705.htmlHe says it is designed to remove duplicate domains from search results, but we still show several times on the first page for some searches and have dropped completely off on many others.
I think this update must have included some Panda elements, or triggered a reevaluation that we fell into because our site is still being indexed.
-
I did take the quiz and got a big fat "maybe."
Our strategy with this site was to nail long tail terms and it worked very well for a while. This is an ecommerce site so I don't think it is out of place to have a lot of item and listing pages. However we do generate several variations of each item page because our products have size, color and shape permutations, and unlike other sites in the same space, we have unique pages for all of those combinations. The pages are different, but perhaps not very significantly. We have had success with this strategy on another site which has not been penalized, though we stepped up the number of item listing pages substantially on this one.
Traffic seems like it may be recovering slowly but you might be right that we are being overly aggressive on the number of generated pages.
-
They are follow links. How does this differ from shopping comparison sites?
-
I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. [...] Do you think this could be hurting me?
Are these followed links? If they are followed links, if they are not hurting you now they have a high chance of hurting you in the future.
-
Hi
I have the same problem. We launched a new site in June and had started to see traffic increase 25% per week. Last week my traffic dropped by 50%.
I use PRweb and send regular press releases to industry magazines to build backlinks. I have also signed up with Applegate who list my stock on their website. I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. The links go back to the individual product pages. Do you think this could be hurting me?
Thanks
-
Consider uploading images that are correctly scaled. You have large images and then you scale them smaller, That means you are loading half a megabyte of images too much.
Also, apply lossless compression and make them smaller without losing any quality.
The subdomains would have hurt your rankings.
It could be another site linked to you with the subdomain and that started the problem, because you didn't already have it handled.
About 5 years ago, a big site linked to us, but they screwed up all the story URLs and my system knew what they really wanted it, so it provided the content. Google trashed all of our listings. It took a month to work out what the problem was, and it took months to recover.
-
we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
As soon as I see this my BS meter goes off.
Is all of this unique and substantive content? If it is duplicate or thin then you could have a panda problem.
If I was you I would take read about Panda and take the quiz at MyTrafficDropped.com
That might help you understand what's happening.
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
-
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
Rankings appear mixed up causing huge drop in organic
Hi, Our top page appears to have dropped out of the index. The core keyword "business ideas" is still showing us at the top but it's a different post and it's lost all the long-tail. Whats even stranger is that it's not even directly relevant to the topic of business ideas. Looks like something fishy happened here – perhaps due to the recent algo updates. We've always seen a significant increase in organic when anything Panda related updates (c.20%+ growth every time) yet this has compeltely killed us. We spent a long time building this post up, eventually outranking Entrepreneur.com. It's been #1 for Google.co.uk for months. Any help would be MASSIVELY appreciated! ikvJVrq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | entrepreneurhandbook0 -
DA dropped 7 pts in one week as well as our competitors. Is something going on?
We have consistently had a 70 in DA and now all of the sudden we are at a 63 as well as seeing the same considerable drop among our competitors. This was odd as I have not seen this type of drop in DA since being with the company. Any ideas are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeaverMike0 -
Not Adding Fresh Content Daily Did Got Me Penalized?
One of my website used to post like a 1000 words articles every 4-5 (say like 12 x 300 words articles each in a week) days in a week. The process went till 3 months. Then suddenly we stopped adding content to it for a flat 15 days due to unavailability of content writer. Suddenly a major drop took place. Now we have been adding the same amount of quality content but the ranking doesn't seem to be improving. Is it a penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Is it OK to dynamically serve different content to paid and non-paid traffic from the same URL?
Hi Moz! We're trying to serve different content to paid and non-paid visitors from the same URL. Is this black hat? Here's the reason we want to do this -- we're testing a theory that paid ads boost organic rankings. This is something we saw happen to a client and we want to test this further. But we have to have a different UX that's more sparse and converts better for paid. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon_SEO0 -
My website has dropped in the rankings drastically. How can I get it back up the SERPs?
I manage a website that I took over 6 months ago - the site was sitting happily on page one of google so I haven't had to do much to keep it there - other than a few onsite improvements. However, last week the site dropped off the SERPs. The site is http://www.pro-techairconditioning.co.uk/content/home.html Could someone please suggest reasons for this and ways to solve the problem? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising0 -
How can I track traffic source for each user?
We received an enquiry on one of our landing pages and I am trying to track down where that user come from? Whether he came from social networks or search engines and if it is from search engine which keywords he used etc.. Does anyone know if there is any way I could see that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Switch hosting to be closer to site visitors, and 99% dropped from rankings?
Last week I decided to switch for a UK server to a US one at Hostgator since most of my visitors are from the US. About nine hours later 99% of my pages disappeared from google rankings, only a few non-relevant pages are at position 100-200. All decent (1000-2000 word) articles on specific topics, are gone. These pages were getting 2-3 minutes per user of readership and a low bounce rate, so I think they were pretty good quality. Does anyone think it's possible I got accidentally added on a blacklisted IP? Or why would something like this happen. Since then, I've tried switching back to the old IP for 3 days, that didn't work. Now I've filed a reinclusion request with the details. Has anyone had a similar experience? What can possibly cause this massive drop in rankings and traffic? Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zpeti0