We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
-
Hi Mozzers!
Need some help/advice
I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about.
A few observations / thoughts;
- It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed?
- Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange …
- We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time?
- Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before.
Any feedback would be appreciated
Thanks!
Mike
-
Take a good look at some of the pages you have indexed here
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://superbetting.com/forum/&num=100
Decide what should not be there and remove them with a noindex. This will help with quality Score.
Then do a fetch in Webmaster Tools to speed the indexing up. That should help you on your way.
Disavow all the crap links ASAP
-
Hi Tom,
I follow you on the link profile but I honestly don't think we've been that aggressive
Yes, we've been hit with numerous spammers and have been trying to clean up but not good enough I suppose. Will look into that one.
Mike
-
Hi Mike
I'm looking at your link profile now and there are quite a few links in there that could be perceived to be unnatural (what betting site doesn't have these though, right? Used to work for a big brand in-house myself), however, I'm with you in being concerned about these Russian links and anchors.
It looks like your forum has been getting spammed massively. I can see russian anchors with anchor text like "useful links" and "useful products" - I can even see some Minecraft anchor text in there. It almost looks as though someone is using your forum to build forum links to rank their spam site.
Have you had trouble recently with spam hitting your forums? I worry that some people have been ploughing your forum with spam - and thus your site with spammy links - and it may have had a negative effect.
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
-
3 word brand name + SEO. Will I be losing out on organic searches with spaces?
Hello, Starting a new website and the company name has three words. We've made the decision for the brand guide that we will not have spaces when the name is included in copy. Are we going to have difficulties ranking for both instances? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jessicarechkemmer0 -
Too many dofollow links = penalty?
Hi. I currently have 150 backlinks, 90% of them are dofollow, while only 10% are nofollow. I recently hit position #10 for my main keyword, but now it is dropped to #16 and a lot of related keywords are gone. So I have a few questions: 1. Was my website penalized for having an unnatural backlink profile (too many dofollow links), or maybe this drop in positions is just a temporary, natural thing? 2. Isn’t it too late for making the backlink profile look more natural by building more nofollow backlinks and making it 50%/50%? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathalieBr0 -
Site traffic halved not sure why
Hi guys, not sure if anyone can help, but we had a client's google organic traffic literally halve from the week at the end of August to September (29 Aug 2016 to be precise) and it hasn't recovered since (here's a screenshot from GA http://puu.sh/sAmd3/b071dd1e57.png) I've been doing a lot of digging around on Moz and elsewhere about any Google updates that may have gone through around that time and there doesn't seem to be anything that I would think would affect it. I thought it might be to do with Penguin, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A while ago before then we did have some domains and pages 301 redirected to the main site when multiple other sites were rolled into the one, but I wouldn't have thought that should affect it. After that I've also gone and removed all those sites and redirects too (couple of weeks ago) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. There's no black hat SEO done on the site so very odd to have this happen. I'm rather out of ideas what it could be that has impacted things so suddenly and that we couldn't get it recovered from. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrisbaneSEOWorks0 -
Google Algorithm non-manual penalty. How do we fix this (quality?) drop?
Hi, See attached image. We received a non-manual penalty on March 22, 2015. I don't think we ever came out of it. We have moved up due to the Penguin update, but we should (by DA PA) be up on the first page for tons of stuff and most keyword are lower than their true strength. What kind of quality errors could be causing this? I assume it was a quality update. I am working on the errors, but don't see anything that would be so severe as to be penalized. What errors/quality problems am I looking for? We have tons of unique content. Good backlinks. Good design. Good user experience except for some products. Again, what am I looking for? Thanks. non-manual-penalty.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Penalty
Hi, I wonder if a subdomain gets penalty from Google. Is there any risk that the domain gets penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rob_I1 -
Overall traffic increasing but specific short tailed keywords decreasing any ideas?
Something very strange has happened regarding my website traffic when making a comparison to the first six months of 2012 and then 2014. Anybody got any ideas? From my Google analytics from 1 January 2014 to 1 July in other words six months my total traffic on my website was 30,209. Not provided source ( what does this mean ? ) was very high at 23,141 but two of the my main short tail keywords I've targeted in the past "Whitby holiday cottages “only equal 254 and "Whitby cottages" was only 176. When I made a comparison with the same time period below in 2012 the website traffic this year as gone up greatly by almost 20000, but the two of my money short tail keywords as gone down greatly! If I compare the same time frame for 2012 the overall traffic was only 13,380. Not provided source was nowhere near as high at only 1836 which is also much less than above in 2014 but the short tail keywords I targeted "Whitby holiday cottages was almost 10 times higher at 2005 and "Whitby cottages “much higher at 613. I ran the questionnaire on http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/quiz/ regarding Panda and particularly Penguin and its association with back links. The article says that Penguin didn't hit the overall keywords, but only specific ones if they been targeted on the following dates the time points of April 24, 2012 and May 25, 2012 which are known Penguin rollout dates. So when I checked the two short tail keywords above for those two dates the figures did seem to drop from 10 hits a day to 5 but then went back up immediately to approximately 10 hits a day during the two-month period which suggested to me that I'd not been hit by Penguin on those dates. So when you look at the comparison the first six months of 2012 and then 2014 there is no doubt that money short tail keywords of dropped off dramatically for me but the overall website traffic has gone up dramatically. Some of the increase in traffic will be down to time and more articles/pages etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WhitbyHolidayCottages
The two short tail keywords I mention above I know I've dropped in Google rankings I used to be position three page one and the site is now position 10 so I would assume that's why I've dropped in traffic for those phrases.
Has anybody got any idea what's happened? I can honestly say that I've not noticed it in bookings on the website business seems about the same overall.0 -
Removing Unnatural Link Penalties
As soon as I began working in my current position at my current company I noticed my predecessor's tendency towards buying link packages from blackhat companies... I knew we were being penalized, and had to prove to him that we needed to halt those campaigns immediately and try our darndest to remove all poison links from the internet. I did convince him and began the process. There was 57% of our backlinks tied to the same anchor phrase with 836 domains linking to the same phrase, same page. Today there are 643 of those links remaining. So I have hit a large number of them, but not nearly enough. So now I am getting messages from Google announcing that our site has been hit with an unnatural link penalty. I haven't really seen the results of this yet in the keywords I am trying to rank for, but fear it will hurt very soon and know that I could be doing better in the meantime. I really don't know what to do next. I've tried the whole "contact the webmasters" technique and maybe have had 1/100 agree to remove our links. They all want money or don't respond.. Do I really need to use this Disavow tool?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry
I hear mixed things about it.. Anybody with experience here like to share their stories? Thanks for the moral support!0 -
Massive drop in Google traffic after upping pagecount 8-fold.
I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petestein1
Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉0