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
-
Website relauch - traffic dropped in Latin America
Hi guys, We relaunched our website www.troteclaser.com on Sept. 6th. Traffic on the new website has been stable or slightly increased except for one area: In Central and South America organic traffic dropped by 50%. We properly set up all 301 redirects and solved all 404s within a week. We changed approx. 30% of the website structure. But I don't think that internal link juice could be the problem. Any idea what might be the cause for a local drop in traffic like this? Did anyone have similar cases in the past? Thomas
Technical SEO | | Troteclaser0 -
Merging sites, ensuring traffic doesn't die
Wondering if I could get a second opinion on this, please. I have just taken on a new client, they own about 6 different niched car experience websites (hire an Aston Martin for the day, type thing). All the six sites they have seem to perform reasonably well for the brand of car they deal with, the average DA of the sites is about 24. The client wishes to move all of these different manufacturers into one site and have sections of the site, they can then also target more generic experience day type keywords. The obvious way of dealing with this move would be to 301 the old sites to the relevant places on the new site and wait for that to rank. However, looking at the backlinks profile of the niched sites, they seem to have very few backlinks and i feel the reason they are ranking so well for all the individual manufacturers is because they all feature the name in the domain. Not exact match, but the name is there. If I am thinking right, with the 301 we want to tell Google page x is now page y, index this one instead. Because the new site has a more generic name I don't think it will enjoy any of the domain keyword benefits which are helping the sub sites, and as a result I expect the rankings and traffic to drop (at least in the short term). Am I reading this correct. Would people use a 301 in this case? The easiest thing to do would be to leave the 6 sub sites up and running on their own domain and launch the new site to run alongside them, however the client doesn't want this. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Matt Cutts explains: 301 linkjuice loss is a Myth!!
Hey Guys, Finally got an answer i was looking for about 301's and link juice (pagerank) loss. Matt Cutts posted the following video on Youtube yesterday confirming there is no linkjuice (pagerank) loss from a 301 redirect. Check out Matt Cutts video and discuss the concequences and tactics here 🙂 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw
Technical SEO | | PrizeWize1 -
Can backlinks from advertising cause a traffic drop?
Hi, I recently noticed that our organic traffic has started to drop and maybe coincidently our adwords traffic has increased. I was asked to investigate the drop. I know that from the google update that unnatural backlinks would be penalized so I thought it might be the backlinks from a site that we advertise on because of the sheer number we have required from them in the last month. Would you think that would be the cause? if not, what could it be? and if it is, how do I go about correcting it as fast as possible? Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | digital.moretogether.com0 -
Could getting referral traffic from SEO moz damage your rankings?
Buon Giorno from OS grid reference SE404481 Having just read Googles https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 disavow contnet something troubled me... Is it a possibility you could damage the page rank of a site if you add its url in these posts. Put another way if I added a url pointing to a specific site would googles radar detect the source as SEO and penalise the site in some way? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Drop in Domain Authority and MozTrust -> -20% in traffic?
Hello Everybody,
Technical SEO | | uMoR
with the latest seomoz index update for OSE my website had a big drop in Domain Authority and MozTrust and at the same time a drop in SEO traffic. It seems to be a correlation between the drop in the Seomoz metric and SEO traffic, infact from the 9th of August we lost the 20% of traffic (the 2nd of august our DA and MT was normal, the 15th Seomoz show the drop). Unfortunately it seems that this trend is valid only for my website and not because of a Seomoz index error: my competitor still have the same DA and MT. I will check for sure if, with the next index update, there will be some change in DA or MT, anyway which are your suggestion? How can I know what has happened to my link profile and the cause of this big change? Advice are welcome!0 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710 -
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