My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
-
Hi all,
We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower.
One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www).
Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August.
We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor:
- We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks.
- Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day.
- GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact.
- Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google?
This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl
Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for this. When you had the linking issue, did you traffic drop suddenly or was it gradual? Were only the mislinked pages deranked or were all pages on the domain deranked?
-
If you have one of the typical applegate programs they are duplicating your content, competing with you in the SERPs and giving you a big load of worthless to dangerous links.
That's my opinion.
-
It looks like we were hit by this algorithm update described by Matt Cutts:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-four-15705.htmlHe says it is designed to remove duplicate domains from search results, but we still show several times on the first page for some searches and have dropped completely off on many others.
I think this update must have included some Panda elements, or triggered a reevaluation that we fell into because our site is still being indexed.
-
I did take the quiz and got a big fat "maybe."
Our strategy with this site was to nail long tail terms and it worked very well for a while. This is an ecommerce site so I don't think it is out of place to have a lot of item and listing pages. However we do generate several variations of each item page because our products have size, color and shape permutations, and unlike other sites in the same space, we have unique pages for all of those combinations. The pages are different, but perhaps not very significantly. We have had success with this strategy on another site which has not been penalized, though we stepped up the number of item listing pages substantially on this one.
Traffic seems like it may be recovering slowly but you might be right that we are being overly aggressive on the number of generated pages.
-
They are follow links. How does this differ from shopping comparison sites?
-
I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. [...] Do you think this could be hurting me?
Are these followed links? If they are followed links, if they are not hurting you now they have a high chance of hurting you in the future.
-
Hi
I have the same problem. We launched a new site in June and had started to see traffic increase 25% per week. Last week my traffic dropped by 50%.
I use PRweb and send regular press releases to industry magazines to build backlinks. I have also signed up with Applegate who list my stock on their website. I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. The links go back to the individual product pages. Do you think this could be hurting me?
Thanks
-
Consider uploading images that are correctly scaled. You have large images and then you scale them smaller, That means you are loading half a megabyte of images too much.
Also, apply lossless compression and make them smaller without losing any quality.
The subdomains would have hurt your rankings.
It could be another site linked to you with the subdomain and that started the problem, because you didn't already have it handled.
About 5 years ago, a big site linked to us, but they screwed up all the story URLs and my system knew what they really wanted it, so it provided the content. Google trashed all of our listings. It took a month to work out what the problem was, and it took months to recover.
-
we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
As soon as I see this my BS meter goes off.
Is all of this unique and substantive content? If it is duplicate or thin then you could have a panda problem.
If I was you I would take read about Panda and take the quiz at MyTrafficDropped.com
That might help you understand what's happening.
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 Manual Penalty Lifted - Why is my website still decreasing on traffic?
Hi there, I was hoping that somebody has a potential answer to this or if anyone else has experienced this issue. Our website has recently hit by a manual penalty (structured data wasn't matching the content on the page) After working hard on this to fix the issue across the site, we submitted a reconsideration request which was approved by Google a few days later. I understand that not all websites recover and it doesn't guarantee rankings will go back to normal, but it seems as if the traffic is continuing to drop at an even quicker rate. There's a number of small technical optimisations that have been briefed into the dev team such as: Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links, There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound. Has this happened to anyone else before? If so, how did you recover? Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbutler9120 -
Gradual Increase in Domain Authority After Domain Migration But No Improvement in Organic Traffic Yet
We migrated our domain in early April and simultaneously added an SSL certificate. Everything was done by the books. All redirects implemented perfectly, very few errors. Google notified via Search Console. Despite all steps being done perfectly our domain authority dropped from 24 to 8. Organic traffic dropped from about 80 per day to about 10. Each month domain authority increases by 2 or 3. We are now back up to a DA of 16. But no improvement in organic traffic yet. At what point should organic traffic start to return? Hopefully the consistent improvement in DA is a good sign. I have been told that adding SSL and moving the domain at the same time was a very bad idea. We are starting link building next week. Hopefully that will help further. Any ideas as to when this situation will improve? Needless to say it has been awful for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Dramatic drop in Domain Authority
I have a client who has reported a drop in Domain Authority from 16 to 1 in a matter of a few weeks. Also, MOZ was reporting links, but now none! I know there were some issues with the recent MOZ index update. However, this sounds like something else. Anyone got ideas on where we should start looking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Anyone Seen a Drop in Rankings from Article Links from Years Ago?
A client of mine did article marketing years ago with Ezine, PRlog, ArticlesBase, etc. Now those links are still linking to their domain. Do you think they'll see an increase in rankings from removing those links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0 -
Lots of city pages - How do I ensure we don't get penalized
We are planning on having a job posting page for each city that we are looking to hire new CFO partners in. But, the problem is, we have LOTS of locations. I was wondering what would be the best way to have similar content on each page (since the job description and requirements are the same for each job posting) without being hit by Google for having duplicate content? One of the main reasons we have decided to have location based pages is that we have noticed visitors to our site are searching for "cfo job in [location] but we notice that most of these visitors then leave. We believe it to be because the pages they land on make no mention of the location that they were looking for and is a little incongruent with what they were expecting. We are looking to use the following URLs and TItle/Description as an example: | http://careers.b2bcfo.com/cfo-jobs/Alabama/Birmingham | CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL | | Are you looking for a CFO Career in Birmingham, Alabama ? We're looking for partners there. Apply today! | | Any advice you have for this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | B2B.CFO0 -
Home page sudden drop in rank, but not others.
Over the weekend, I noticed "www.thematstore.com" drop out of the search results for "chair mats", where previously it was between 10-12 ranked. The other pages on the domain have remained the same in regards to rankings for their intended keywords. The only thing I changed (on Nov 29th) is the title tag from "Chair Mats - Commercial Quality Chair Mats, Custom Made", to "Chair Mats - Best Custom Chair Mats, Commercial Quality". I know there is a lot that needs to be done on the site, and the site architecture is a bit of a mess (I recommended building a new site)... but I was hoping to gradually fix these issues without gambling with a rank drop. Not sure why the home page all of the sudden dropped out, any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Drop in Traffic on Friday April 20th.
Just curious if anyone noticed a drop in traffic last friday. I got hammered with about a 20% drop overall. Didn't know if there was an update or what. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110 -
Ranking & Traffic drops in last month
Over the last month, our rankings have been in a slow slide - that is until this week, when they absolutely crashed. Here are some example phrases: Phrase 11-Mar 5-Mar bug shields 24 9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShawnHerrick
floor mats 25 14
nerf bars 23 12
running boards 61 14
snow plows 25 18 For the life of me, I can't see what would have caused such drastic changes. Our site is almost completely unique content. Some things, like Warranty & Install instructions, are from the manufacturer to protect us from liabilities. We come up with our own feature text, and we have custom written articles, blog posts, research guides, etc. We also appear to be the only one of our competitors being affected in this fashion. Any thoughts would be helpful. Domain is realtruck.com.0