Flatlined traffic starting between April 29 and May 4 2013
-
One of our clients, an ecommerce shop, has seen a significant drop in their organic traffic and I'm trying to determine whether this was the result of a data refresh or algo update. The site has few inbound links and unfortunately still has a lot of duplicate content on it (manufacturer provided product descriptions). There are also some remaining issues of duplicate page titles that we've been working through. The client has also been writing blogs recently, however there are a number which are relatively short in length. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can start recovering from this?
-
Thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately their budget is limited so I don't think it will be possible to hire a writer. I will definitely take a look at de-indexing in the meantime as they work through the content.
-
Prioritise, prioritise prioritise!
First of all you have two options:
1. You throw a load of money at it and hire some great copywrites to write great unique content for all product pages and you look at fleshing out the blog posts.
2. You de-index using the 'no index, follow' tag all the pages which have weak/thin/duplicate content until you have new unique content ready in which case you remove the 'no index, follow' tags one by one.
If you decide to do option 2 then thats another topic but here is a great resource to get you started:
www.seobook.com/how-free-your-e-commerce-site-googles-panda
Hope this helps!
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
-
Organic Traffic Down March-April 2016
Hello MOZ Community! I have been scouring the web to try and assess what may be responsible for our sites traffic decline which fell off quite suddenly between March and April of this year. While I have heard of two specific things that may have impacted us: The Mobile-Friendly update (April 2016) Phantom Update (May 2016) I would like to share what we have tried to uncover ourselves, and would welcome your thoughts/feedback on what may have happened, thoughts on repairing the rank damage, and in general. In May we noticed a large cooling off of our organic searches from Google, the largest a >30% occured in June, but on average we're seeing a trend of 23% less visitors from organic search than only months prior. Paired with this was a decrease in overall visibility, like a number of pages were struck from indexing. The number of URLs ranked in the Top 100 listings dropped by ~ 32% at the beginning of April We review our visibility with SISTRIX's Visibility Index tool, which showed a visibility plummet of almost 50% between mid-March and mid-April Traffic, until towards the end of July, early August has remained low and now only really returning to normal levels in the past few days. All that said, we're puzzled by what would cause such a sharp decline in visibility > organic search. Regarding the known/unknown Google Updates, while our primary site is responsive, we do have a number of old help/support pages that are not responsive – So that is one theory, but I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you have, or to know if anyone else experienced a drop within the same timeframe.
Technical SEO | | kernewein0 -
Why would I suddenly start seeing a spike in hits from particular bots (specifically rogerbot, google, bing, and yahoo)?
We have seen consistent network traffic over the past month, then starting yesterday, huge spikes in hits (hits as in crawls to pages causing an increase in megabytes downloaded) started coming in from Rogerbot, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A specific example from Rogerbot is as follows: rogerbot/1.1+(http://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics#more-help,+rogerbot-crawler+pr2-crawler-104@moz.com) Useragent from the bot IP address: 54.226.73.52 Domain / hostname: ec2-54-226-73-52.compute-1.amazonaws.com Physical location: United States flag United States, VA, Ashburn We've have thought about doing a crawl-delay to prevent these bots from hitting us so hard, but that still doesn't help us answer why this even started in the first place. Any clue on what may be going on here?
Technical SEO | | eTundra0 -
Duplicate Content Issues - Where to start???
Dear All I have recently joined a new company Just Go Holidays - www.justgoholidays.com I have used the SEO Moz tools (yesterday) to review the site and see that I have lots of duplicate content/pages and also lots of duplicate titles all of which I am looking to deal with. Lots of the duplicate pages appear to be surrounding, additional parameters that are used on our site to refine and or track various marketing campaigns. I have therefore been into Google Webmaster Tools and defined each of these parameters. I have also built a new XML sitemap and submitted that too. It looks as is we have two versions of the site, one being at www.justgoholidays.com and the other without the www It appears that there are no redirects from the latter to the former, do I need to use 301's here or is it ok to use canonicalisation instead? Any thoughts on an action plan to try to address these issues in the right order and the right way would be very gratefully received as I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. (we also use a CMS system that is not particularly friendly and I think I will have to go directly to the developers to make lots of the required changes which is sure to cost - therefore really don't want to get this wrong) All the best Matt
Technical SEO | | MattByrne0 -
What may be the reason a sitemap is not indexed in Webmaster Tools?
Hi,
Technical SEO | | SorinaDascalu
I have a problem with a client's website. I searched many related questions here about the same problem but couldn't figure out a solution. Their website is in 2 languages and they submitted 2 sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. One got 100% indexed. From the second one, from over 800 URLs only 32 are indexed. I checked the following hypothesis why the second sitemap may not get indexed: sitemap is wrongly formatted - False sitemap contains URLs that don't return 200 status - False, there are no URLs that return 404, 301 or 302 status codes sitemap contains URLs that are blocked by robots.txt - False internal duplicate content problems - False issues with meta canonical tags - False For clarification, URLs from the sitemap that is not indexed completely also don't show up in Google index. Can someone tell me what can I also check to fix this issue?0 -
Merging sites, ensuring traffic doesn't die
Wondering if I could get a second opinion on this, please. I have just taken on a new client, they own about 6 different niched car experience websites (hire an Aston Martin for the day, type thing). All the six sites they have seem to perform reasonably well for the brand of car they deal with, the average DA of the sites is about 24. The client wishes to move all of these different manufacturers into one site and have sections of the site, they can then also target more generic experience day type keywords. The obvious way of dealing with this move would be to 301 the old sites to the relevant places on the new site and wait for that to rank. However, looking at the backlinks profile of the niched sites, they seem to have very few backlinks and i feel the reason they are ranking so well for all the individual manufacturers is because they all feature the name in the domain. Not exact match, but the name is there. If I am thinking right, with the 301 we want to tell Google page x is now page y, index this one instead. Because the new site has a more generic name I don't think it will enjoy any of the domain keyword benefits which are helping the sub sites, and as a result I expect the rankings and traffic to drop (at least in the short term). Am I reading this correct. Would people use a 301 in this case? The easiest thing to do would be to leave the 6 sub sites up and running on their own domain and launch the new site to run alongside them, however the client doesn't want this. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Traffic stats disaster
Hi, We have recently moved a few old websites to an existing one and redesigned the existing website too. The visits in Analytics have fallen though the roof in the last few days. I would expect the traffic to have gone up because visitors from the old websites should now be on the redesigned one. Not sure what the problem is entirely. GA code is on the site but not before the closing head where I asked for it to be put. It's just before closing body tag. Does it make a difference? (It's a CMS site). GA code must be working because visits are being recorded (tens rather than the expected hundreds). Redirects have not been done properly - not sure what IT have done there. Would the lack of proper redirects be the sole reason for the drop? I am still hassling for 301's to be sorted. Thanks all
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
My organic search results are down 16% since the Penguin update 4/24
Penguin has affected my search results down 16% When I look at my SEOmoz scan the only problem I see is "too many on page links" The problem is that my blog for each month is considered one page-eg august 2007 I wrote many blogs-the total on page links was 106-but that included all the blogs that were written in a month. The other problem area is duplicate content. I thought Penguin was after "link farming" which I do not do. Any advice how I can correct this? Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Traffic drop after migration?
Hi everybody. One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas. I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that? Your thoughts would be great! S
Technical SEO | | neooptic0