Help fixing the traffic drop that started on 4 September 2012.

[TheBigK]

I'm happy to be a part of this wonderful community here and request help analysing my situation and would appreciate suggestions to fix the issues I'm facing.

First, The Website Setup -

We've a WordPress powered technology blog on main domain - http://www.crazyengineers.com & community forum on /community/ In the last 60 days, I've made following changes to the site that might have gone against us.

1. I added a sidebar to all the pages of our community forums to offer more useful information to the users, like recent threads, our latest exclusive interviews etc.

2. I added a descriptive welcome notice on all the pages of community at the top.

3. I added two ad-spots above the fold, didn't hurt user experience (IMHO).

4. I removed a LARGE number of unwanted tags from our WordPress blog that  offered no value to visitors; resulting into Google Webmaster Tools reporting a large number of 404 - Page Not Found errors.

Point To Note: Since September 4, I've been noticing significant drop in our traffic to the 'community' forums. The traffic is down almost 40-50%. Corrective Measures I've Taken -

1. Made sure that all the removed tags show proper 404 HTTP status. I added a search box to the 404 pages so that users have opportunity to find what they're looking for.

2. Removed the two ad-spots and placed only one 728x90 leaderboard above the fold.

3. We never engaged in any black-hat SEO techniques, link-building or content-copying. I double checked whether there are any suspicious activities reported in GWT but haven't spotted any.

I'd really appreciate analysis of what might have really gone wrong and the direction in which I should proceed to recover our traffic.

[TheBigK]

Thank you for your words and interest in our website. We tend to focus on latest in engineering, technology (gadgets too) for our blog. Our aim is to simplify the latest in engineering & technology for people who're interested in being up to date with technical stuff.

Do you have any suggestions on setting up 301s as Rand suggested (I've stated my requirements towards the bottom of this thread.

[danatanseo]

I appreciate you hanging in there and glad Rand jumped in to assist. Thanks also for not being offended at my observations. I think it's super cool that you are a "gadget news" site. I signed up to follow your blog Please keep us posted on how this goes. I hope the suggestions you receive here help you to recover from the traffic drop.

[RobertFisher]

Rand, Had to say that I am impressed on a lot of levels. But, I always have been.

Best to you and yours,

Robert

[TheBigK]

Well, makes sense. So leaving the 404s are they are, is more suicidal than 301'in them to relevant category pages? In our case, we only have one category called 'VoiCE' that gets all the news articles (from where the tags were deleted). So I'd be redirecting the tags to www.crazyengineers.com/category/voice/ .

But would it not be better to redirect them to homepage?

Also - is there any way to setup a 301 redirect for only the deleted 'tag' pages? I'd like to keep the 404 pages for other locations that are not existent. I'd really appreciate inputs on setting up 301s. Can't afford to go wrong.

I want www.crazyengineers.com/tag/ <deleted tag="">to 301 to http://www.crazyengineers.com or maybe the category.</deleted>

[randfish]

I think 404'ing is a worse "suicide" than 301s. And as I noted above, you can start by redirecting a few bunches, then see if things improve.

[randfish]

Wouldn't be disastrous (certainly no more than a 404). Better would be to redirect the tags to relevant category pages, though.

[TheBigK]

Rand - a simple question: There are about 20k tags that are removed. It's impossible to fix each one of them manually. Would you recommend redirecting each of the deleted tags to homepage (via 301)? Wouldn't that be disastrous to SEO?

[TheBigK]

Well, yes and I want to know what's the best way to fix these errors. I checked my backups and I don't have any way to restore those tags and associate them to relevant posts. I've received mixed responses about adding 301 redirects to the deleted tags - some say I should 301 all the deleted tag pages to homepage and some say it'd be a SEO suicide.

I believe the deleted tags were not helping much. They were the 'descriptive keywords' associated with posts and most of them were used just once.

What's your suggestion?

[randfish]

Sounds like it - fixing/redirecting those 404s is definitely a first step. You may also need to see if the content on those pages and the links to them were helping your SEO, and if for the future, you need to repoint/recreate categories that were lost or work on XML sitemaps + accessibility to recover.

Once you start down a path, just watch and see if you're recovering. You should know fairly quickly if you're on the right track.

[TheBigK]

Hello Rand,

First of all - I must mention that you're super-awesome and I'm a big fans of yours. I really appreciate your help.

Allow me to summarize: I deleted about 20-25k tags from wordpress (www.crazyengineers.com) which were added by our authors over a period of time (1.5 years). Each removed tag resulted into 404 error.

GWT reported large number of 404 errors on the site and at the same time (around 5th September), traffic from Google started declining. The to the overall site is down and it's quite noticeable on /community/ (where our forums reside). Over 70% of our traffic is from Google and our overall traffic (visits) are down by about 50%. I noticed that the keywords that used to rank high have slipped by 5-6 positions and some even got pushed to page 2.

Please let me know if this information is sufficient. I'll be happy to provide more information. I think my situation is similar to the following discussion -> http://www.seomoz.org/q/seek-help-correcting-large-number-of-404-errors-generated-95-traffic-halt

[randfish]

Kaustubh - before I could help, I need to know what you mean by "40-50% traffic drop"?

Is that:

• Traffic as a whole (all visits?)
• Traffic from Google?
• Branded or unbranded search traffic?
• If unbranded search, which keywords? Long tail? Or some specific head terms?

Knowing those will help sort out what might be the problem. Sorry if my answers are slow - I'm a bit overwhelmed ATM, but will try to hop back in when I can.

[TheBigK]

Okay, so I'm quite sure that it's the large number of 404s causing the drop. I've arrived at the conclusion after reading several threads on SEOmoz. This thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seek-help-correcting-large-number-of-404-errors-generated-95-traffic-halt is quite closer to the problem we're facing.

Now, the big question :-

1. GWT reports ~90k "Page Not Found 404" errors and our traffic is down by almost 50%.

2. The 404 pages are all generated via the 'wordpress tags' I removed in bulk (almost 25k of them).

Should I go and 301/302 them or just let Google decide the fate of those pages on its own? If I just let Google do that; it might take 3-4 months for Google to do that.

Any possibility of having Rand to answer this question for me?

[TheBigK]

Hello Robert,

I apologies if my response looked like I'm defending the changes. I'm not defending the changes because my intension is to learn and fix the issues our site is experiencing. I really appreciate your responses, but want to make sure that the situation is properly understood so everyone's on the same page.

The traffic to the community is not from the homepage or the blog. The community forums draw their own traffic and the discussions were ranked high in Google searches.

The questions on my mind are -

1. Is it possible that the large number of errors on blog might have caused the community rankings go down? (The GWT notice and traffic drop to community were almost around the same time)

2. Is it the sidebar in the community that's responsible?

3. Is it the page layout algorithm that's affecting community rankings?

[RobertFisher]

Kaustubh,

If I am forthright, I would say that first you are defending changes. What I would approach the problem from is what can be reverted that would correct your drop. Remember none of us here are your customer/community. We can only speak to what we know or see and as such we have little or no emotional involvement in the site.

I went back to your original question and pulled this:

_"Point To Note: _Since September 4, I've been noticing significant drop in our traffic to the'community' forums. The traffic is down almost 40-50%."

Where does traffic "...to the community forums." come from? Is it direct to that landing page? Or, does it come from the home page?

I am guessing that with Dana and I that we both were assuming the traffic was originating at the home page. (Traffic to our community forums). Unfortunately, I could not see a cached page of the forum for a side by side.

So, unless you can lay it out in more analytical fashion, there is little to offer in the way of assistance. Your changes are likely what caused the drop. That is the only place I can think of to correct it.

Hope it helps.

[TheBigK]

Hello Robert,

First of all, thanks a lot for such a detailed response. Allow me to post my comments -

1. The list of changes I made is limited to what I mentioned in the first post. I never messed around with meta description, or link building or anything for the sake of 'SEO'. So that's not what I'd look at.

2. Most important point: The traffic to blog is almost normal (just down about 10%, but it bounces any-time we publish a breaking news).

3. It's the traffic to our community: http://www.crazyengineers.com/community/  that's getting affected. The sidebar was introduced on all the /community/ pages; the blog has remained intact, except for the bulk removal of tags.

So, I'm wondering whether it's the 'tag' removal from blog that's affecting the 'community' or something else? If it's the page layout, then I've already removed the ads; and now have only 1 ad-unit above the fold on community pages, and one below the fold. This is no doubt, acceptable.

[RobertFisher]

Kasutubh

I think Dana gives some great places to look. The first place to look from my vantage would be Google Analytics (GA). I would go back to the good old days and start moving forward to find what happened when. Especially if you know you made change one on day one, change two on day four.

That said, I think it is a cautionary to any who are changing site structure/architecture or anything within the realm of UI/UX that results of changes can only be tracked to the degree that a single variant is isolated/isolatable. (Yes, there could be an argument to this-I am speaking broadly).

By making one change at a time, you are able to insure you have no oops moment that is lost in 5 changes of redesign.

I would focus on what most likely effected the ability of the user to get to the site. Did you change meta descriptions, were any outside the site changes made; do you advertise somewhere and now have halted it?

At the end of pondering I keep coming back to the ad changes and am wondering if the look of a month ago and now is so different you are getting people to the site but they are not going deeper (analytics will tell)? OK I have a thought. AH HA:

Using the wayback machine, I looked at home page cache from July vs Now. I like July 100% better. (Dana, don't think it was the tag cloud even though I am not much on them.)

I think you have messed with a UI/UX issue and need to slowly step back. when I look at both pages I just do not like the look or feel of the new. It is sterile, too news oriented. There is not a community feel at all. On July cache I have the FaceBook app showing people who are a part of your community (a good example of this is a site called SEOmoz), below that I have what an engineer said. They get to be involved. I was just looking at wired magazine and I had no sense of community but I did not pick it up for that. Here I came for community, saw a question that intrigued me, liked what Dana was saying and wondered if there was anything I could add. THINK ABOUT IT.

If I had to place a $100 bet right now, it would be that this is where your problem lies.

I hope this provides some direction,

All the best,

[TheBigK]

1. I've removed the tag cloud.

2. We're Google News blog and the posts aren't 'promotions'. Those are latest 'news' articles from the gadget world. We're a Google News accepted technology blog that frequently breaks stories.

3. Buy advertising is a common link on most of the blogs and that does not indicate we are all about 'advertising'.

4. I checked the traffic and it seems like the keywords aren't generating the traffic they used to. Now that does not tell me anything - it could be because the site went down in rankings and keywords aren't getting listed or the traffic to keywords shaded.

I look forward to responses from other members.

[danatanseo]

I would try getting rid of the tag cloud and see what happens. maybe it has no impact, maybe it solves the problem, at least you'll be able to eliminate it as the culprit.

The homepage of the blog. All of the blog posts were news stories about products, promotional stories, added to Adwords Ads, banner ads, and a big link in the navigation that says "Buy advertising"...all sent signals to me as a visitor that this site was about profiting from advertising.

Again, please don't be offended. I am one user, and I am only offering one user's opinion. I could be a sole instance, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

The best way I have ever found to keep track of historical rankings for keywords is SEOMoz Pro. You can get a free membership for 30 days.

If you had a good idea of what your rankings were before for specific keywords, put them into simple text list and load them into SEOBook's RankChecker Firefox extension and see where you are at now compared to where you used to be. Just beware that if you load in more than 50 words at one time to Rank Checker it will probably crash, so do them in groups if you have to.

I certainly hope this helps in some way. I understand how disconcertin huge drops in traffic can be.

Good luck!

[TheBigK]

Hello Dana,

Thank you for your response. I'm of course not offended and I'm willing to learn & improve.

1. I can get rid of the tag cloud - but is it a big deal? The cloud only lists the most frequently used tags.

2. Could you please point me to the page/section that looks like a collection of advertisements? I think we're very reasonable in putting up advertisements.

3. How do I check rankings for specific keywords?

[danatanseo]

Have you tried getting rid of your Tag Cloud?

My initial thought as a first-time user is that your site is a collection of advertisements. Please, don't be offended. I know that's not probably what you are intending, it was just my impression.

Try taking out the tag cloud and see if there is any positive result.

Have you been tracking your rankings for important keywords? Have these changed recently?