What causes the reduction in traffic?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
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
-
Traffic, rankings and own manual note in one interface, please :)
Hey guys, I really hope that such a tool exists out there. Here's the problem. My boss asked me to create a graph that shows the traffic, rankings and notes on our site updates in one place. Here's what I did I just made a screenshot of my Google analytics and rankings from RankTracker. Then I added it all in one Photoshop file and tried to combine them so that I can see if traffic drops coincided with keyword drops. Also, I added some manual notes about the updates on my site (like text updates on the homepage, etc). So, is there a tool that allows to combine Google traffic data with ranking data. Plus it should allow to add my own comments ? Here's the result of my crazy drawings so that you understand why I'm not happy about doing that in Photoshop 🙂 https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_oX-XIT7OSCRC1jWUcxR3AwdkE/edit?usp=drive_web
Industry News | | VinceWicks0 -
XML Sitemap Leads to loss in ranking and traffic in Google.
I have submitted XML sitemap in Google's webmaster tools for some of the categories of my website. after submitting the sitemap i have seen the drop in traffic and ranking of keywords for the categories tof which sitemap was submitted. The other categories for which i have not submitted the sitemap the ranks have not changed. my sites alexa rank is approx 3000 Please help me out should i remove the site or change the priority of the urls which i have fixed in the sitemap?
Industry News | | seosogo0 -
Direct is taking over my SEO traffic in Mobile iOS and Android Devices
WIth all the buzz of mobile has anyone taken a look to dig into the SEO traffic by device (desktop vs mobile). Well I did and surprising my desktop trend was not even close to mobile traffic. Surprising to know that due to the security updates in iSO and Android organic traffic (traffic with out tracking codes) is getting bucket into Direct. (Yes we all know Direct traffic is dirty dirty label traffic that analytics platforms can identify.)http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/estimating-google-organic-search-visits-hidden-by-ios-6/17122012/http://www.definemg.com/recover-your-android-4-and-ios-search-traffic/ Feels like SEO is receiving no love... didn't we have enough with Google encryption, we didn't get the keyword but at least got the referral! Have you notice in your traffic and what are you doing about it?
Industry News | | LNEseo0 -
Difference between Organic and Natural Traffic?
This is a pretty basic question, but I'm wondering if there is any meaningful difference between the terms Organic and Natural traffic? My assumption is that Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes in through search engines, whereas Natural traffic would also include people directly entering a URL, coming in through social referrals, and through links on other sites in addition to organic search. Is this correct, or are there other definitions for what these terms mean?
Industry News | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Any research on a baseline traffic loss due to SERP crowding?
Hello all. I work with a number of ecommerce sites and in trying to gauge year over year performance I'm struggling to properly account for some of the organic shrinkage in SERPs. Many people have discussed the topic of SERPs with 6 & 7 results and the growing real estate being taken up by paid results. What I want to know is if anyone out there has done some large scale number crunching to find some averages on lowered CTR or traffic loss so I can better understand my numbers. Anyone have any input here?
Industry News | | NetvantageMarketing1 -
Steady Traffic Decline over a 1 year period
Hello everyone, Need some help or suggestions. We have been experiencing a steady decline in our traffic for the last year or so. Beginning in October of 2011, we were averaging about 14,000 unique visitors per month (465/day). We are now averaging about 8,000 unique visitors per month (254/day). The thing that is really weird is that we do not have any type of a penalty from the big G. We have just seen a constant decrease in hits over the last 12 month period. Anywhere between 50-1,000 hits per month in decrease (continuously). This has just been frustrating, and no matter what we do, we cannot turn it around. Our whole website has been re-done in the last 3-4 months to see if we can stop this from continuing. We re-did a lot of the content, got rid of some pages that had keyword stuffing, we're now working on removing bad backlinks pointing to us. I am including an image with this post that will show you our gradual decline in traffic. I understand that the Google updates and refreshers have been coming out quite frequently (Panda, Penguin). But I also understand that most sites that have been affected by these algorithm changes, updates and refreshes have actually received penalties, sudden drops in traffic etc... We are still working on fixing the whole site before we submit a re-inclusion document to the big G. Does anybody in the SEOMOZ community have any suggestions or ideas as to what can be done to better our chances of getting back to normal traffic again? Everything that we did prior to the 2 latest Google updates has been according to what was legal and what worked in the past. Now, we have fixed the majority of those issues with our site, yet the decrease of traffic continues. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I can provide you with our website URL if somebody would like to take a close look. Thanks ahead, Gaura lCx44.jpg
Industry News | | Gaura0 -
25% Drop in Traffic In Last Month - Suggestions as to why?
We have had a 25% drop in traffic in the last month and I am trying to establish why that is. Our serps on some key terms have also dropped. Has Google run any updates in the last month or so? Thanks
Industry News | | simplesimonseo0 -
I'm looking for solid internet usage / traffic data.
Hi there, In a week or two I'll give my first internet marketing presentation to a local business club. Ill walk them through the basics of what is happening online, and how both B2B and B2C business can use their online assets as marketing tools. I want some basic statistical data to back up my story, like: Current web usage distribution (social/search/media etc) Growth of Mobile vs Desktop Search Engines distribution (google bing yahoo msn) Online retail numbers To top it all off, I would also like to be able to show both worldwide and The Netherlands data. What is my best bet for some serious datamining ;)? Thanks in advance for helping me out!
Industry News | | rickdronkers0