Big drop in traffic on 18 Oct
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Hi mozzers,
One of my client’s sites has a big drop in traffic. The site is topdealshotel.com. The drop was in 18 Oct and I know that there weren’t any algo changes.
The site has 20+ language versions all optimized properly for all languages. In june I made some big changes in site’s structure and I also changed all URLs.
After these new improvements the organic traffic started to grow naturally and very good, but dropped drastically in last 30 days.
Unfortunately I couldn’t 301 old URLs into new ones and in WMT at crawl stats I have almost 2 million 404 errors.
The site has many hotel pages with content that is from hotelscombined.com, but we also add our own content for all pages.
In city pages we have unique content, written by our copywriters. I also made a reconsideration request and there was no manual penalty. I do not have any idea for this drop in traffic. Do you have any suggestions?
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i did the cleanup before the dropdown.. this was the firs thing i did after i upload new version of website and i sent the new sitemaps...
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when did you do the cleanup. Might take some time before you bounce back in the results.
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URLs were removed from WMT and blocked from robots.txt but they still appear i can't redirect them
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Tudor, google did do 2 updates in Oct, the Penguin # 3 and the Page Layout # 2 , details here
The errors on your WMT might have something to do with it as you mentioned 2 million of them . That is definitely a very high number and might have raised flags with Google. Try cleaning out the 404's, redirecting any of the old url's to the new ones and then resubmit your sitemap.
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