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
-
Huge drop in rankins, traffic and impressions after changing to CloudFlare
Hi there, In October, one of our customer's programmer made a change on their website to optimize its loading speed. Since then, the all the SEO's metrics has dropped. Apparently, the change was to move to CloudFlare and to add Gzip compression. I was talking with the programmer and he told me he had no idea why that happened. Now comes 5 months later and the SEO metrics havn't come back yet. What seems so wierd is that two keywords in particular had the most massive drop. Those two keywords were the top keywords (more than 1k of impressions a month) and now its like there is no impressions or clics at all. Did anyone had the same event occur to them? Do you have any idea what could help this case?
Technical SEO | | H.M.N.0 -
Organic Traffic Down March-April 2016
Hello MOZ Community! I have been scouring the web to try and assess what may be responsible for our sites traffic decline which fell off quite suddenly between March and April of this year. While I have heard of two specific things that may have impacted us: The Mobile-Friendly update (April 2016) Phantom Update (May 2016) I would like to share what we have tried to uncover ourselves, and would welcome your thoughts/feedback on what may have happened, thoughts on repairing the rank damage, and in general. In May we noticed a large cooling off of our organic searches from Google, the largest a >30% occured in June, but on average we're seeing a trend of 23% less visitors from organic search than only months prior. Paired with this was a decrease in overall visibility, like a number of pages were struck from indexing. The number of URLs ranked in the Top 100 listings dropped by ~ 32% at the beginning of April We review our visibility with SISTRIX's Visibility Index tool, which showed a visibility plummet of almost 50% between mid-March and mid-April Traffic, until towards the end of July, early August has remained low and now only really returning to normal levels in the past few days. All that said, we're puzzled by what would cause such a sharp decline in visibility > organic search. Regarding the known/unknown Google Updates, while our primary site is responsive, we do have a number of old help/support pages that are not responsive – So that is one theory, but I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you have, or to know if anyone else experienced a drop within the same timeframe.
Technical SEO | | kernewein0 -
Questionable Referral Traffic
Hey SEOMozers, I'm working with a client that has a suspicious traffic pattern going on. In October, a referral domain called profitclicking.com started passing visits to the site. Almost, in parallel the overall visits decreased anywhere from 35 to 50%. After checking out profitclicking.com more, it promises more traffic "with no SEO knowledge". The client doesn't think that this service was signed up for internally. Regardless, it obviously smells pretty fishy, and I'm searching for a way I can disallow traffic from this site. Could I simply just write a simple disallow statement in the robots.txt and be done with it? Just wanted to see if anyone else had any other ideas before recommending a solution. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
Site getting referral traffic from its self
Buon giorno from zero degrees C freezing fog Wetherby UK On this site http://www.collegeofphlebology.com i ran a referral report via Google Analytics and was surprised ro see referral traffic being counted from its own url, illustration here http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/referral-anomoly.jpg So my question is please how can a site get referral traffic from the same url? Grazie Tanto, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Does anyone use buzzfeed to creat links traffic and increase brand
Hi i would like to know if anyone uses http://www.buzzfeed.com to create links, gain traffic and increase brand awareness. I have signed up for an account but cannot get it to work and would like some help. I can get my content on there but cannot manage to get the links to work I signed up for this account a while back and a friend shown me how to use it but i have forgotten. here is my page http://www.buzzfeed.com/lifestylemagazine some links work and some links do not. what i am trying to do is to publish stories from my site as well as other sites and have the link included where you press the title and it goes to the site any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
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 -
Dramatic Decrease in Google Organic Traffic Indicates a Penalty But None Found
So we've been having some difficulty with one of our websites since we split it in half and moved one section of content to a new domain with a new name, at the end of May. http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/ was moved to http://www.somobile.co.uk And in the following 6 weeks, the google organic traffic has fallen to miniscule levels, that seem to indicate a more serious issue than just low ranking. Initially when the site was moved, the 301s transferred the authority very quickly and the new website pages ranked well. Now, some of them simply won't rank at all unless you include the name of the website "somobile". Here is one of the current rankings that indicates an issue:
Technical SEO | | purpleindigo
"somobile" - 1
"somobile mobile phones" - not in top 50 These are some of the terms we used to rank in the top 10 on Google UK, and still do on Bing UK, but don't rank in the top 50 on Google UK now:
samsung galaxy ace
apple iphone 5 deals
samsung tocco icon Our webmaster central account says that only 30% of the pages in our sitemap are in the index. It seems like a penalty has been imposed, but our reconsideration request (just submitted because it seemed like a sensible next step) came back saying there were no manual actions taken. Can you see what it is that might be causing the problem for us? I would have thought it was the new domain (with less direct links and less brand credibility), or content issues, but I would have thought that would just reduce the ranking by a few pages rather than just hide the pages altogether.0 -
ECommerce Platform Switch and SEO Loss
Hi - We're switching eCommerce platforms, and naturally we're worried about losing organic search ranking. From what I've read on the message boards, I understand it's important to try to minimize as many 301 redirects as possible. Here's my problem: Our Product URLs are like this (ex: http://www.stupid.com/fun/TOLMG.html). On the new platform, URLs cannot contain capital letters. 😞 According to the new eCommerce platform's design team: "Google and other search engines do not see that as a change in URL, they are not case sensitive and will not affect search listings" How accurate is this? And how come on our current platform, if I use an all lowercase URL, it get a 401? (ex: http://www.stupid.com/fun/tolmg.html) Will we be fine switching our Product URLs to lowercase on the new platform? One thing also to note: Our Category URLs will remain the same. Are there any other areas of a typical eCommerce store that I should avoid changing URLs if I want to prevent SEO loss? Thanks! -Justin
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0