What causes the reduction in traffic?
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On FEB 2012 I got the now-famous notice from Google about the unnatural links. I contacted the SEO company who worked for my website and removed the inbound links. I submitted the reconsideration request and Google said that there are still unnatural links. I dig more on my links and continue to remove the links I think Google does not like. I again submitted the reconsideration request and they responded “we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.”.
When I compared the non-paid traffic month by month, starting on March, I see these fluctuations:
March compared with Feb -16%
April compared with March -18%
May compared with April +13%
Jun compared with May -10%
July compared with June +10%
August compared with July -10%
September compared with August -12%
October compared with September-29%
Also, If I look into the index stats on my WMT, I see that on October I have 50% less pages indexed compared with July. It has been dropping between 10% and 15% each week, as follows:
|
Date
|
Total indexed
|
Change
7/1/2012
|
1101
|
-0.09%
7/8/2012
|
1020
|
-0.07%
7/15/2012
|
1020
|
0%
7/22/2012
|
975
|
-0.04%
7/29/2012
|
781
|
-0.2%
8/5/2012
|
714
|
-0.09%
8/12/2012
|
703
|
-0.02%
8/19/2012
|
690
|
-0.02%
8/26/2012
|
690
|
0%
9/2/2012
|
588
|
-0.15%
9/9/2012
|
582
|
-0.01%
9/16/2012
|
580
|
0%
9/23/2012
|
580
|
0%
9/30/2012
|
580
|
0%
10/7/2012
|
622
|
0.07%
10/14/2012
|
618
|
-0.01%
10/21/2012
|
618
|
0%
10/28/2012
|
562
|
-0.09%
|
The rankings for the 3 top keywords went (starting on April)
From 5 to 15
From 8 to 27
From 5 to 39
At this point, I am not sure what causes the reduction in traffic.
-
Do you know if I have to consider the inbound links from OSE or WMT?
-
I am working on that. What am not sure if I should take in consideration the links published on WMT or from Open Site Explorer?
-
Hello Jason,
thank you for your answer.
I finished analizing the qualitiy of my link profile, based on this great article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization, and I see that, not only I have a Targeted 71.16% vs Non Targeted 28.84% distribution, but the Exact Match anchor text represents the 66.51% of the targeted links, having a Variance from Normal of 48.46%.
The new question is: should I reduce the targeted anchor text percentage by removing some targeted links or better add new links for non targeted anchor texts?
-
You could give it a whirl. What do you have to lose?
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Yep... as you pull those links down the site may drop more. Negative link velocity is no good.
-
Have you tried using the new disavow tool? I'm hearing mixed reviews, but it was designed for folks like you, and you might as well give it a shot after you've tried to remove as many of the links as possible.
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True. And, less links means less traffic options for people to find our site. As you remove links, are your looking at white hat ways to replace that lost visibility?
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Google has sent you a notice telling you why. It does not like the link profile of this website. The way I see it you have 3 options:
clean-up the link profile
ignore it, add new content, and hope for the best
start a new site.
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