Site went down and traffic hasn't recovered
-
Very curious situation. We have a network of sites. Sunday night one (only one) of our sites goes down, and since then we've seen a loss in traffic across all our sites!! Not only have we seen a loss of traffic, we also saw a loss of indexed pages. A complete drop off from 1.8 million to 1.3 million pages indexed.
Does anyone know why one site outtage would affect the rest of them? And the indexed pages? Very confused.
Thanks,
-
My indexation number went back to normal for 2/3 sites. But for one of my sites, the number still hasn't returned to normal.
Do you have any idea as to why this might be? Do you think it's a bug with Google?
-
WOW that's the exact date that my index number went down! That is a huge relief, but at the same time I'm still concerned that my traffic went down during that time. Thank you for sharing the video.
-
Hi,
Just a note on the indexation drop, it seems Google has adjusted how they display this figure, so if you're referring to Google Search Console for your indexation stats, this may explain it:
http://searchengineland.com/google-adjusted-how-they-show-index-count-estimates-230158
Hope it helps!
-
Thank you Dmitrii for your response.
No, our sites were not hit by manual actions, I checked out GWT for that. But yes, they do link to each other a lot and provide a very reasonable amount of referral traffic to each other. It's not necessarily a network, it's just a handful of domains that have different content, audiences and pages that happen to be owned by the same company. So no, it's not a network in the spammy sense.
But, you do provide a good point about the duplicate content and rankings. I will check those to see if it could have any affect. There was a panda refresh around this time so perhaps that added to our troubles.
-
Thank you for your response, Michael.
No, the site isn't down anymore. It was down for a couple of hours. We are getting traffic again, but not to the level it was at before. I have already checked the robots.txt file, but I will try the Fetch and Render suggestion as well.
Thanks!
-
Hi.
"Network of sites" always makes my spam sensors tingle
Please provide more information on the structure. Now, why did that website go down? Server problems? Have you checked the manual actions in GWT for those websites? You sure you're not being hit by some kinda penalization?
Now, the larger total number of indexed pages not necessarily means that it's good or would help your rankings/traffic. As well as deindexing does not mean the opposite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVOrml7fp2c However, the usual reasons of deindexing are connected/related to spammy techniques or duplicate content. What does your GWT crawling stats say? Was there a spike recently?
How about rankings of your websites? Did they go down as well? If so, then what happened first?
Since it's a "network", do those websites link to each other? do they link to each other a lot? Is it that much that the most of backlink profile of those websites are links from each other?
Anyway, the easiest explanation which comes to my head is (assuming that it's a "network of websites"):
Websites have links to each other -> One of them goes down -> Google sees that links went missing -> lowers the rankings (since backlink profile got worse) -> traffic goes down.
-
Is that site still down? Typically when I've seen sites go down, unless it's for a long time, Google doesn't seem to drop it from the index. I had a client site down all day Saturday and it continued to rank well.
And I don't see a reason why that would affect the other sites, unless a huge percentage of their inbound links were from the site that was down--but even then, it would have to be down weeks, at least.
I'm inclined to think that the site outage is a red herring, and that there's something else in common between the sites that's causing an issue. Have you done a fetch-and-render as Googlebot for each of the sites in Search Console? Maybe something is blocked by robots.txt in all the sites that's preventing rendering, and Google is seeing very little content above the fold? <-- bit of a wild guess there...but that's all I've got!
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
-
Country and Language tags-Running an SEO audit on a site that definitely has more than one language, but nothing is pulling up. I don't quite understand href lang or how to go about it. HELP HELP!
Ran an SEO audit and I don't really understand country and language tags. For example, sony.com definitely has more than one language, but how do I seo check href lang ? Do I inspect the page? etc?
Technical SEO | | Mindgruver0 -
Selling same products under separate brands and can't consolidate sites...duplicate content issues?
I have a client selling home goods online and in-store under two different brand names in separate regions of the country. Currently, the websites are completely identical aside from branding. It is unlikely that they would have the capacity to write unique titles and page content for each website (~25,000 pages each), and the business would never consolidate the sites. Would it make sense to use canonical tags pointing to the higher-performing website on category and product pages? This way we could continue to capture branded search to the lesser brand while consolidating authority on the better performing website. What would you do?
Technical SEO | | jluke.fusion0 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits). What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
Technical SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Can't get Google to Index .pdf in wp-content folder
We created an indepth case study/survey for a legal client and can't get Google to crawl the PDF which is hosted on Wordpress in the wp-content folder. It is linked to heavily from nearly all pages of the site by a global sidebar. Am I missing something obvious as to why Google won't crawl this PDF? We can't get much value from it unless it gets indexed. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Here is the PDF itself:
Technical SEO | | inboundauthority
http://www.billbonebikelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Whitepaper-Drivers-vs-cyclists-Floridas-Struggle-to-share-the-road.pdf Here is the page it is linked from:
http://www.billbonebikelaw.com/resources/drivers-vs-cyclists-study/0 -
Way to find how many sites within a given set link to a specific site?
Hi, Does anyone have an idea on how to determine how many sites within a list of 50 sites link to a specific site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SparkplugDigital0 -
What's the best way to switch over to a new site with a different CMS?
Is it better to 301 or to closely duplicate each page URL when switching over to a new website from an established site with good ranking and a different CMS ( Drupal switching to Wordpress)?
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve0