Sudden Large Traffic and SERP Drop
-
Hi
This site www.militaryplaques.com
We have had steady traffic over a number of years with the site both on terms of impressions, click through rates, bounce rates, time on site and most importantly sales.
The site has remained fairly static over the last 6 months with no significant changes to content or structuire.
However, on July 11 our traffic and impressions crashed by over 90% and remain at this low level.
We have never been hit by Panda but this looks like such a case?!
Any insight or suggestions as to why the sudden "de-listing" may have happened?
R/
John J Morgan
-
I looked at some of your main keywords. Looks like they are back to decent ranking. So did you fix the issue already? If so, can you share what you did? I had a similar issue around the same date with my site. Ranking has not been returned yet. This is the details of my specific issue http://moz.com/community/q/is-this-site-hit-with-penguin-or-something-else . If we can compare notes, it would be great
-
Thanks for the responses.
We're still examining the change in traffic volume, source and search terms.
We have a couple of theories on what's going on and will revert back after the next Mozscape index update.
-
I saw two major problems in your link profile... I won’t call the link profile too bad but there is no way I can call it a good link profile!
Your link profile got links from mediocre sources but very few links that are coming from high authority relevant sources and the other problem is that your link profile is not diversified and links are coming mostly from forums, blog comments and PR websites....
Rankings in the month of July in my personally opinion has shifted a lot so my advice would be to get good quality links from diversified sources and you will see a positive bump in rankings!
Hope this helps!
-
HI Tom
Thanks for this. I looked at the suspicious links and they seem to be false positives. Mostly revolving around our brand name "military plaques"
Noted on the low quality /dead links - will have these removed.
-
Hi John,
Your back links are not great I did a quick check
http://www.linkpartners.com/lparts53_23.html
http://blpdirectory.info/Business/Products/
http://freedirectorysubmission.in/Military-Plaque.html?cid=28338
http://blpdirectory.info/submit_article.php?c=709
Even dead or 404 URLs
http://free-listing.org/Military-Plaque.html?cid=157597
This stuff must go
Use tools link OSE & then http://www.removeem.com/ to get rid of the links.
FAQ
http://www.removeem.com/faq.php#suspicious
So you did actually received a notice of the problem from Google?
Using http://www.removeem.com/
Via only 1 data source, we estimate about 51 links with suspicious anchor text ignoring 373 safe links automatically. Some of these may need to be removed!
Check your MozCast every day it is a SEO weather map
Weather for Saturday, July 13
MozCast is a weather report showing turbulence in the Google algorithm over the previous day (or see the 5-day history on the left). The hotter and stormier the weather, the more Google's rankings changed.
Use one of the SEO listed here to fix your site if needed
http://moz.com/community/recommended
Hope this was of some help,
Tom
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Traffic going down in all sites in a niche
Hello, A client has three Ecommerce sites in a niche. Because of competition and a (possibly) non manual penalty due to doorways and paid links (though I think it's mainly competition too) our traffic is going down. What are the keys to increasing traffic at this point. Feel free to include tricks that cost money. A Hrefs (I love Moz though!) has some neat content tricks. Please give me the best tricks in the industry to increase traffic. We're adding content to the main site of the three and maybe that's what to focus on, but we're having trouble driving serious traffic with the content. We need serious traffic. We are experts in our field and capable of almost anything as far as information goes in our field. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Massive rank drop on one particular keyword
As all other marketeers do I follow closely my keywords, one particular keyword has ranked continually at #2 and has suddenly dropped to +#60, but all others remain the same. We are a fairly large site in terms of numbers 9m views annually, could it be possible that someone has black hatted that particular keyword, and if so how do I find out how and more importantly who?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sususu0 -
Does showing the date published for an article in the SERPS help or hurt click-through rate?
Does showing the date published for an article in the SERPS help or hurt click-through rate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Website starts ranking on Google then always drops - Targeted for Australia but most traffic from U.S - Bounce Rate at 94.49% - HELP!
Hi everyone, Thank you for your time. During the past 8 months I have been working on this website which is a .com.au . I have fully optimised the website which is targeting Brisbane in Australia and I have setup everything (Sitemaps, Geo location on WMT, Fetched as Google etc..) However the website just does not want to rank at all. I know that the previous SEO company were not too good but since then I have disavowed all unnatural links, we have moved the hosting to a new company and the website content has been updated. Only recently the Website has started ranking for it's brand name (not even in top of Google) and whenever a keyword starts ranking above the Top 50 of Google it suddenly drops again. The other issues is that even if I have setup the website to target Australia the majority of traffic comes from the U.S. Last month out of the 127 Session - 85 from United States - 29 from Australia - 3 Brazil - 2 India - 2 Italy - 1 Canada etc... Because of this the website has a Bounce rate of 95%. If you would have any advice, tips or recommendations that I could do to try and fix this it would be much appreciated. I suppose we can consider this as some kind of penalisation - potentially due to the past work and issues that occurred before the business became our client but I am not sure what more I can do to stop the wrong traffic and improve the rankings. Thanks for your help. Lyam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AlphaDigital20 -
Solved PayDay hack - but SERPs show URLs - what should I do?
We had the PayDay hack - and solved it completely. The problem is - the SERPs have over 3,000 URLs pointing to 404 on our website all of which have urls that are like this: <cite>www.onssi.com/2012/2/post1639/payday-loan-companies-us</cite> What should I do? Should I disavow every one of the 3,000? No Follow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ocularis0 -
Changing domains from .net to .com after 7 month of traffic loss.
We are in business since 2005 and we always used the .net version as it was the only one available when we started. In about 2007 we bought the .com version to the person who owned it but we kept using the .net as customers were already used to that version. In January we started to see a SE traffic loss, not to mention being outranked by several sites (95% of those site spammers). We had no manual penalty but it could be an algorithmic, we are not sure if we even have some sort of penalty or is just that our niche is too spammed. We are now considering moving the site to the .com version as all our tries of increasing and regaining our ranks were useless (backlink cleanup, disavow tool usage, excellent link building, excellent content creation and social interactions). Our DA and PA are both higher that any of the other ages ranking on top. We have about 3k pages indexed. What do you guys think? Should we move the site to the .com? (note that the change is ranking-wise, not in terms of branding). And if we do, should we 301 all pages? or rel=canonical to avoid a possible "penalty flow" to the other domain? Note: for years, the .com version was/is 301 to the .net one. Thank you all!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
It appears that no matter what I do, my website is not picking up traffic. What can I do?
I have tried everything, followed everything by the book...yet nothing is happening. I I yet have to try PPC, but I am sure that by now the website is healthy since I have spent from January to the current date fixing every sort of warning and errors. While I have worked on link building strategies(only submitting links to directories for the moment) However the website is dead. What should I do? Is this due to a Google penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ts24group0