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
-
What to try when Google excludes your URL only from high-traffic search terms and results?
We have a high authority blog post (high PA) that used to rank for several high-traffic terms. Right now the post continues to rank high for variations of the high-traffic terms (e.g keyword + " free", keyword + " discussion") but the URL has been completed excluded from the money terms with alternative URLs of the domain ranking on positions 50+. There is no manual penalty in place or a DCMA exclusion. What are some of the things ppl would try here? Some of the things I can think of: - Remove keyword terms in article - Change the URL and do a 301 redirect - Duplicate the POST under new URL, 302 redirect from old blog post, and repoint links as much as you have control - Refresh content including timestamps - Remove potentially bad neighborhood links etc Has anyone seen the behavior above for their articles? Are there any recommendations? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ppseo800 -
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 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
DAs dropped for many pages?
I recently noticed that the domain authorities dropped by 5 or 6 points for us and for our competitors. And for many other pages that I check regularly. Was the algorithm changed or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
Search traffic down 30% this month
Our search traffic has been growing at a steady clip for the last year but is down about 30% this month. As part of a redesign, we've repurposed our home page (blog.getvero.com). Rather than serve as a feed of recent posts, it's now an email signup page. We created a new page (blog.getvero.com/posts/) to display new posts. I think this is likely the reason for the drop in search traffic but I'm frustrated that it's losing us thousands of visitors per month. A few questions: 1. How long will it take to recover from this? 2. Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery process? 3. Why are some of our best performing posts seeing less search traffic even though the URL hasn't changed? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116983020420 -
Will SEO cause a drop in the number of impressions?
Hello, I have been a member of the Moz community for a long time. I very seldom ask questions here but this time I really need your help to make sure I will not make mistakes that will negatively affect my site. My site monetizes according to the number of impressions visualized by the users who visit it. I now want to try to optimize it by using all those nice SEO techniques I have learned through Moz. My goal is to make sure that if I use the various SEO strategies, I will still be able to obtain the high number of impressions I get now. If not, I prefer to leave the situation untouched and I will not start optimizing the site for SEO. Please kindly read the situation below and give me a little support to make sure I am doing the right thing. I would like to ask for your professional advice to solve and issue related to duplicate content. Please visit my site: www.chhedonna.it. The sitemap has indexed 21.890 articles, but if I digit the command 'site:www.chedonna.it', I obtain 158.000 results.I believe that the duplicated content has emerged due to three errors I would like to indicate in order for you to tell me whether my interpretation is correct or not: The article writers made a mistake in that although the content of the articles is different, they have employed the same title for all of them. Therefore, you can see 5 articles with similar/duplicated Tag Titles but the content of said articles is different. For example, http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto and http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto-2/ are different articles (i.e., the content of the articles is different from each other) that have been published using the same titles. If I inserted the 'follow-noindex' tag to 3 of the 4 duplicates, as shown in the example above, would that be a solution? I fear that if I did insert the follow-noindex, I would cause a drop in the number of impressions visualized by my site's users. It is important to point out, in fact, that I monetize the site via the number of impressions I generate. Therefore, it is fundamental that I do not compromise the number of impressions that the site gets, if I try to optimize it for SEO reasons. On the other hand, I believe that the idea to operate via a 'rel canonical' would not be right, considering that the content of every post having the same title is different, that is, the articles are different even if they focus on the same topic. Also, I would not find it beneficial to use a '301 redirect', since the number of duplicated Titles Tags is very consistent. 2. The second error concerns the duplicate content due to the images that have been included in the articles. For instance, http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2012/12/04/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2013/03/15/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto-2/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2-2/. I could solve this problem by preventing the media indexing. But I fear that this would produce a very high number of '404 error' messages. If such a thing did happen, my site would stop monetizing overall and I cannot allow this to occur, as you can understand. My very important question is the following: if I prevent the indexing of the photos, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions that my site would normally generate? 3. Duplicate content generated by the indexing of archive subpages. For example: http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/ http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page2/ http://wwwchedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page3/ If I prevented the media indexing, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions and many 404 errors? Thank you very much for taking the time to help me sort out this very important issue. Cheers, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
SERP Drop overnight for one of our domains - could it be the title changes?
Hi Scratching our heads here over SERP drop for some of our product pages, Although they are all uniquely titled with the product name, we have recently added 4 words at the end of our title, like a slogan which are repeated on every one of our product pages. However, we've also seen a drop, but not as far, on related category pages, these have unique titles. When we talk about "unique title" being important for SEO, does that mean 0 reptition between page titles? I see many companies use their site name in the title (even here see | SEOMOZ Q&A - would four words at the end of a title do this? Or am i barking up the wrong tree entirely? Ive seen so much movement over the past few weeks its hard to correlate anything we do with the result, so even after advise I think i'll wait a week
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0