Unexplainable drop in traffic
-
Hello Mozzers, I am new at Moz and certainly hope you can help me!
I used to consider myself very knowledgeable in SEO since I had hundreds or maybe thousands of keywords very well ranked on Google Guatemala (www.google.com.gt) for more than a decade. That was until a year ago: November 8th, 2019... On that date, all of my rankings plummeted, never to return.At first I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried, so I started doing a bunch of things:
-
Reworked the pages (except home page) to make them responsive (I used to have two versions of each page, one for desktop and one for mobile).
-
Removed the ads from the pages to make them faster, thinking it could be due to the speed (even if my competitors sites were slower!)
-
Fixed thousands of 404s
-
Disavowed thousands of bad domains and spammy URLs (I never bought a single link but there were thousands of links from forums, theglobe network, etc)
-
Removed more than 12,000 members from my own forum who had never posted anything: about 4000 of them just had created a profile to include a link to different extenral sites.
-
Fixed a few other technical aspects...
Nothing helped. In fact, my rankings have kept going down. My content is good and unique, my site has good DA but still I get outranked and buried by several sites which don't have as much information as I have.
There are NO manual actions against my site according to Search Console. As I mentioned before, I have never bought any backlinks, so all of my links should be natural (although there were thousands of links to my forum from spammy sites which I disavowed).
So, I am frustrated as I really don't know what the problem is. I am giving you 3 examples of Keywords and URLs of pages that were number one for years, and now are not even on first page, so that you can see them and tell me your thoughts about what may be happening:
-
KEYWORD: VOLCANES DE GUATEMALA
URL: https://www.deguate.com/geografia/volcanes/Los-volcanes-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 5th page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help. -
KEYWORD: MINISTERIOS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/politica_ministerios/Los-ministerios-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 2nd page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help.
-
KEYWORD: LEYENDAS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/misterios-leyendas/las-leyendas-mas-famosas-en-guatemala.shtml Note: Was #1, now is on 3rd page. It's stuffed with ads, as it doesn't seem to matter wheter my pages have ads or not, and since I lost my rankings on thousands of pages at least I can probably generate a little more income like that.
Thank you so much for the help you can provide!
-
-
I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried
Free Stuff Request Form ==> https://freestuffsng.com/request-free-stuff/
-
I don't know why its happening but the same issue was happening with my site about action manga. In august 2019 my site was deranked after google algorithm update and after the 10 months when i forgot my url. Its again appearing in the top search results of SERP's. Thats very strange for me
-
We are facing a similar issue with our website's Organic Traffic. The main reason is now Google is now more focusing on Core Web Vitals. These Core Web Vitals are directly affecting Ranking & Organic visits. Therefore, Kindly also check your Core Web Vital issues in Search Console.
**Follow these path to find Core Web Vital Issues: **Login Google Search Console -> Enhancement -> Core Web Vitals
I have already created one thread for help https://moz.com/community/q/how-can-i-solve-core-web-vital-issues-for-mobile-desktop
Edit: ReadManga.fun
-
Hi there,
Have you guys tried the Panguin Tool (no affiliation) to see if your websites have been affected by changes in Google?
https://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/
Hope this helps.
-Zack
-
Hello Haris6464, happy to hear your site is appearing again.
Can you tell me what you did? What do you mean by "when I forgot my url it's appearing again"?
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
-
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Creating two websites from one and building up traffic to the new domain quickly
A client has an existing successful website that sells niche products - they are well known in their marketplace. They have two sets of key customers, let's call them (a) and (b), that need addressing in different ways to maximise sales. (a) is the more specialist end of the market, where people have complex needs - there are fewer of them but repeat business is likely, and we can talk to them in more technical language. (b) is the layman's end of the market - there is a vast pool of potential customers but they'll be more casual buyers and need to be addressed more in layman's terms. So what they want to do is to take their existing website, and essentially split it into two different websites, one for each market. The one that will use the existing domain, with all the links that have built up over the years pointing to it, will be the site for the more specialist end of the market (a). The domain name suits it better, which is why he wants to use the existing domain with that site and not the other. (b) will be a brand new domain. The client will write new product descriptions across the board so that the two sets of product information are not duplicate. I'd rather he didn't do this at all, because of the risk involved, and the difficulty of building up the traffic to the new site, which is after all the one with the best chance of mass market sales. But given that the client has decided that this is definitely what he wants, does anyone have any thoughts on what the action plan should be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | helga730 -
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Unexplained Drop In Ranking and Traffic-HELP!
I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). It was hit by Penguin in April 2012, with search volume falling from 6,800 per month in March 2012 to 3,300 by June 2012. After refreshing content and changing the theme, volume recovered to 4,300 per month in October 2013. There was a big improvement in early October 2013, perhaps tied to a Panda update. In November 2013 I hired an SEO company. They are reputable; on MOZ's recommended list. After following all their suggestions (searching and removing duplicate content, disavowing toxic links, improving the site structure to make it easier for Google to index listings, re-writing ten key landing pages, improving the design of the user interface) ranking and traffic started to decline in April of 2014 and crashed in June 2014 after an upgraded design with improved user interface was launched. Search volume is went from 4700 in March to around 3800 in June. However ranking on the keywords that generate conversions has really declined, and clicks from those terms are down at least 65%. My online business is severely compromised after I have spent almost double the anticipated budget to improve ranking and conversion. A few questions: 1. Could a drop in the number of domains lining to our site have led to this decline? About 30 domains that had toxic links to us agreed to remove them. We had another 70 domains disavowed in late April. We only have 78 domains pointing to our domain now, far less than before (see attached AHREFs image). It seems there is a correlation in the timeline between the number of domains pointing to us and ranking performance. The number of domains pointing to us has never been this low. Could this be causing the drop? My SEO firm believes that the quality of these links are very low and the fact that many are gone is in fact a plus. 2. The number of indexed pages has jumped to 851 from 675 in early June (see attached image from Google Webmaster tools), right after a site upgrade. The number of pages in the site map is around 650. Could the indexation of the extra 175 page somehow have diluted the quality of the site in Google's eyes? We have filed removal request for these pages in Mid June and again last week with Google but they still appear. In 2013 we also launched an upgrade and Google indexed an extra 500 pages (canonical tags were not set up correctly) and search volume and ranking collapsed. Oddly enough when the number of pages indexed by Google fell, ranking improved. I wonder if something similar has occurred. 3. May 2014 Panda update. Many of our URLs are product URLs of listings. They have less than 100 words. Could Google suddenly be penalizing us for that? It is very difficult to write descriptions of hundreds of words for products that change quickly. I would think the Google takes this into account. If someone could present some insight into this issue I would be very, very grateful. I have spent over $25,000 on SEO reports, wireframe design and coding and now find myself in a worse position than when I started. My SEO provider is now requesting that I purchase even more reports for several thousand dollars and I can't afford it, nor can I justify it after such poor results. I wish they would take it upon themselves to identify what went wrong. In any case, if anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it. I am very suspicious that this drop started in earnest at the time of link removal and the disavow and accelerated at the time of the launch of the upgrade. Thanks, Alan XjSCiIdAwWgU2ps e5DerSo tYqemUO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
My organic traffic has died!! Why?
Hi there, I have recently updated this website, as in new design, new URL structure, the works. The old site before I introduced the new site was doing well, as in up and down around 2 000 visitors a day. The site sort of started to go a bit down the slightest bit just before we launched the new site on the same domain but nothing of any concern. We 301ed all the old URLs to their corresponding URL structure as to keep most of the link juice from the old site, however with the new site going live the begining of this month June 2014, till now the site has dropped off to just 200 per day. I have been searching high and low for an answer and have been comming up blank. Why could this have happened, what did I do incorrectly? www.zulu.org.za
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Adding video snippet caused drop of star rating snippet in google SERP. Any solution to show both?
We are using on our product pages review schema markup which showed up well in google SERP. Now we added schema video markup as well and google shows in SERP now only the video snippet, but not the review snippet anymore. Any idea whether there may be a solution to show both video and review snippets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code?
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code? http://naturespremiumpestdefense.com/ Thanks, Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ULTRASEM0