Steady, but continous Google traffic drop. Help?
-
I am facing a steady, but deteriorating Google traffic drop and i am struggling to find the real reasons. The site is in the video entertainment niche.
Here is some data regarding the site in general:
-
Site redesign happened around June
-
We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago)
-
GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s)
-
No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications
-
Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic
-
Removal of old content during August
-
Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure)
-
Robots file disallows only search-generated pages
-
No sitemap errors or warnings
-
2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs
Thank you and appreciate your help.
-
-
Well as for the 404s, I would run the site through Screaming Frog and see what I get. If you find 404s there, then redirects and edits will be needed to fix them. Otherwise forget about the GWT report.
I think the most important thing for you to do (besides an overall marketing campaign) is fix those duplicate page titles and descriptions. This is a huge factor, undoubtedly.
A PPC campaign (executed properly) can always help, but you shouldn't lean on it as your fix to your marketing campaign. It is only another spoke in the wheel of your overall efforts.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi Jesse, Thanks for your reply. I'll try to clear up some statements:
-
- GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) ** - That's not clean. Fix those 404s.**
How would you handle 404 errors in GWT? - They shouldn't have any negative SEO effects according to Google.
- GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) ** - That's not clean. Fix those 404s.**
-
- Removal of old content during August ** - ???**
-
We deleted the online games as part of the site (10% of all content).
-
Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic - Wondering what your anchor text profile looks like... - Anchor text profile looks safe, since top 5 are branded keywords and the rest are targeted keywords. Brand name tops the chart with 9%, and no significant gap between the rest.Another question, would a PPC campaign help in this moment?
-
-
Great responses Jesse - couldn't have said any of it better myself!
-
-
Site redesign happened around June - Don't matter
-
We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago) ** - This is your problem.**
-
GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) ** - That's not clean. Fix those 404s.**
-
No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications ** - Good. But doesn't always mean the algo isn't hurting you.**
-
Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic ** - Wondering what your anchor text profile looks like...**
-
Removal of old content during August ** - ???**
-
Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure) ** - or lack of SEM campaign in general.**
-
Robots file disallows only search-generated pages ** - Don't matter**
-
No sitemap errors or warnings ** - K**
-
2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs ** - ?! FIX THIS FIRST!! **
I would ask you: What are you doing to promote your site, market your business, and increase traffic?
-
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
-
Google serp pagination issue
We are a local real estate company and have landing pages for different communities and cities around our area that display the most recent listings. For example: www.mysite.com/wa/tumwater is our landing page for the city of Tumwater homes for sale. Google has indexed most of our landing pages, but for whatever reason they are displaying either page 2, 3, 4 etc... instead of page 1. Our Roy, WA landing page is another example. www.mysite.com/wa/roy has recently been showing up on page 1 of Google for "Roy WA homes for sale", but now we are much further down and www.mysite.com/wa/roy?start=80 (page 5) is the only page in the serps. (coincidentally we no longer have 5 pages worth of listings for this city, so this link now redirects to www.mysite.com/wa/roy.) We haven't made any major recent changes to the site. Any help would be much appreciated! *You can see what my site is in the attached image... I just don't want this post to show up when someone google's the actual name of the business 🙂 nTTrSMx.jpg C4mhfgh.jpg
Technical SEO | | summithomes0 -
Google Ecommerce Alerts
I recently started getting email notifications from Google re: new products on our websites. I am subscribed to Google alerts. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Technical SEO | | AMHC0 -
Need joomla help. site rankings dropped since upgrade
Hi, really having problems here with www.in2town.co.uk our site was always in the top ten for a large number of important keywords and since our upgrade from joomla 1.5 a month ago to joomla 3.0 we have vanished out of a lot of the search engines for important keywords I am concerned that we could be doing something wrong. two of our important keywords is lifestyle magazine and also gastric band hypnotherapy, but we are nowhere to be seen for these keywords. I must be doing something wrong. The site is an old site, we have been around for many years and have always ranked well up until now. We use K2 and i am just wondering if we have set up things wrong. for example under this article it comes under the category of trip advisor http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor/t ... -term-stay now when you delete the article name and just keep the trip advisor you get a list of the articles and i am wondering if this is damaging my site. http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor any help in helping me to understand why my site has dropped in rankings would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google bot notification
Hi there! I've just made some changes in my website in order to optimize it but I don't know if there's a way to notify the googlebot that some aspects of the configuration (metas) have changed and must be "taken into account". The spider visited my site two days ago and obviously processed the sitemap file. I've heard that it's possible to do a ping to certain websites. Is this the way to proceed? I must say that there're not many updates in the site (just one way information) as the social media activity is still low. Thanks in advanced.
Technical SEO | | juanmiguelcr0 -
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 -
Google Index Speed Opinions
Hello Everyone, Under normal circumstances, new posts to my site are indexed almost instantly by Google. I know this because an occasional search with quotation marks surrounding the 1st paragraph of text displays my newly published page. I use this tactic from time to time to ensure contributors aren't syndicating content. My question is this: I've noticed over the last day or so that my newly published articles are not yet indexed. For example, an article that was published over 24 hours ago does not appear to be indexed yet. Is this cause for concern? Is there an average wait time for indexation? XML issue? Thanks in advance for the help/insight.
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
Malware ranking drops
Hi, One of our sites got hit with malware in November. We cleaned it up and sent a reconsideration request and no malware warnings are in WMT anymore. We still haven't seen an improvement in rankings even though people say it can take up to 90days? Organic traffic is down 40% and still dropping. Any advice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Google Plus 1
How google plus 1 votes can affect your position in google search engine? On my website i have a google plus button, i have just 3 votes, if i buy lets say 100 votes, but slowly, in a month, will this affect my ranking positively?
Technical SEO | | prunarevic0