Site went down and traffic hasn't recovered

[TMI.com]

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,

[TMI.com]

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?

[TMI.com]

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.

[Daniel.Boardman]

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!

[TMI.com]

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.

[TMI.com]

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!

[DmitriiK]

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.

[MichaelC-15022]

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!