Unexplainable drop in traffic
-
Hello Mozzers, I am new at Moz and certainly hope you can help me!
I used to consider myself very knowledgeable in SEO since I had hundreds or maybe thousands of keywords very well ranked on Google Guatemala (www.google.com.gt) for more than a decade. That was until a year ago: November 8th, 2019... On that date, all of my rankings plummeted, never to return.At first I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried, so I started doing a bunch of things:
-
Reworked the pages (except home page) to make them responsive (I used to have two versions of each page, one for desktop and one for mobile).
-
Removed the ads from the pages to make them faster, thinking it could be due to the speed (even if my competitors sites were slower!)
-
Fixed thousands of 404s
-
Disavowed thousands of bad domains and spammy URLs (I never bought a single link but there were thousands of links from forums, theglobe network, etc)
-
Removed more than 12,000 members from my own forum who had never posted anything: about 4000 of them just had created a profile to include a link to different extenral sites.
-
Fixed a few other technical aspects...
Nothing helped. In fact, my rankings have kept going down. My content is good and unique, my site has good DA but still I get outranked and buried by several sites which don't have as much information as I have.
There are NO manual actions against my site according to Search Console. As I mentioned before, I have never bought any backlinks, so all of my links should be natural (although there were thousands of links to my forum from spammy sites which I disavowed).
So, I am frustrated as I really don't know what the problem is. I am giving you 3 examples of Keywords and URLs of pages that were number one for years, and now are not even on first page, so that you can see them and tell me your thoughts about what may be happening:
-
KEYWORD: VOLCANES DE GUATEMALA
URL: https://www.deguate.com/geografia/volcanes/Los-volcanes-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 5th page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help. -
KEYWORD: MINISTERIOS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/politica_ministerios/Los-ministerios-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 2nd page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help.
-
KEYWORD: LEYENDAS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/misterios-leyendas/las-leyendas-mas-famosas-en-guatemala.shtml Note: Was #1, now is on 3rd page. It's stuffed with ads, as it doesn't seem to matter wheter my pages have ads or not, and since I lost my rankings on thousands of pages at least I can probably generate a little more income like that.
Thank you so much for the help you can provide!
-
-
I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried
Free Stuff Request Form ==> https://freestuffsng.com/request-free-stuff/
-
I don't know why its happening but the same issue was happening with my site about action manga. In august 2019 my site was deranked after google algorithm update and after the 10 months when i forgot my url. Its again appearing in the top search results of SERP's. Thats very strange for me
-
We are facing a similar issue with our website's Organic Traffic. The main reason is now Google is now more focusing on Core Web Vitals. These Core Web Vitals are directly affecting Ranking & Organic visits. Therefore, Kindly also check your Core Web Vital issues in Search Console.
**Follow these path to find Core Web Vital Issues: **Login Google Search Console -> Enhancement -> Core Web Vitals
I have already created one thread for help https://moz.com/community/q/how-can-i-solve-core-web-vital-issues-for-mobile-desktop
Edit: ReadManga.fun
-
Hi there,
Have you guys tried the Panguin Tool (no affiliation) to see if your websites have been affected by changes in Google?
https://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/
Hope this helps.
-Zack
-
Hello Haris6464, happy to hear your site is appearing again.
Can you tell me what you did? What do you mean by "when I forgot my url it's appearing again"?
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
-
Using Similar Expired URLs to Send Traffic to My Site
Thanks in advance for any help! I have an existing website with content on a particular topic. I have discovered a few similar expired URLs that might still get some traffic. One in particular still has a number of valid links from other sites. Would it make sense for me to buy those URLs (which are really cheap) and just use them to send that traffic to my site? If so, am I better using a 301 redirect or having a home page on the new site that just mentions that the old site is expired, and that they might want to instead link over to my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alanjosephs0 -
When "pruning" old content, is it normal to see an drop in Domain Authority on Moz crawl report?
After reading several posts about the benefits of pruning old, irrelevant content, I went through a content audit exercise to kick off the year. The biggest category of changes so far has been to noindex + remove from sitemap a number of blog posts from 2015/2016 (which were very time-specific, i.e. software release details). I assigned many of the old posts a new canonical URL pointing to the parent category. I realize it'd be ideal to point to a more relevant/current blog post, but could this be where I've gone wrong? Another big change was to hide the old posts from the archive pages on the blog. Any advice/experience from anyone doing something similar much appreciated! Would be good to be reassured I'm on the right track and a slight drop is nothing to worry about. 🙂 If anyone is interested in having a look: https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots [this is the category where changes have been made, primarily] https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/keyboard-shortcut-editing/ [example of a pruned post]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc1 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
Why does our main keyword keep dropping?
Hey Guys, We've seen an alarming drop in our main keyword for our website. Our biggest driver of traffic has always been the search term 'gifts for men' which we commanded the top spot for a while, but have always been in the top 4 for. Recently (in the last 3-4 months) we dropped to 6 and as of last night we dropped down to 9th. We still rank number 2 for 'gift ideas for men'. Both search terms point to this page: GIfts For Men Nothing onsite or technically has changed, and there is consistently new content in the form of products being added almost daily. We hit a manual action back in October of last year and I'm concerned that the toxic links (that we didn't create mind you) we disavowed may have been unnaturally boosting this page and now we're dropping significantly because they're gone. Any ideas on how we can curb this concerning trend? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGreatestGoat0 -
A specific keyword has dropped from #1 in Google to nowhere at all...
Hi guys, I hope you can help. We have a large ecommerce website which has different domains for each language - GB, USA, DE, AU & CA. I've been working my way through the errors that have been flagged in Moz and today I noticed something quite worrying. One of our strong keywords has dropped from 1st place to nowhere at all. However, the Canadian version is ranking in the UK desktop search and our mobile site is appearing in the desktop search too. The keyword is 'personalised macbook cover' and the page in question is https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/personalised-macbook-cover/ I'm confused as this page was ranking brilliantly a couple of weeks ago and now it's nowhere to be seen. We've added alternate and canonical tags to distinguish which site is mobile and which site is desktop. We've also submitted a sitemap so that it takes into account all of the languages. There are no harmful links and we've changed the content of the page across each language. I've attached what appears in the SERP's in the UK. (there is the mobile version ranking at the top and the Canadian version further down the page) Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Danny webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=personalised%20macbook%20covers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Anyone notice big drops in Bing?
I am running keyword reports and I am seeing several sites that have taken big hits in Bing, but still are OK in Google. Anyone else seeing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
How to increase the traffic ?
Hi Everyone, I am a bit a newbie in SEO and I read different articles and comments regarding the SEO but I am a bit stuck to get traffic through www.organicur.com. It's a really new website build through Prestashop (1-2 month). I used the tool keyword analysis to look after keywords not to competitive. I used the on-page optimization of Seomoz until to have A for every pages and I have started to build backlinks. But the traffic doesn't improve at all. Does that mean my keywords are not relevant enough ? Do I need to wait and carry on the links building. Do I need to go through PPC ? Thanks a lot for your reply, K
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeSEO0 -
Suddenr Ranking Drop
Hello all . Im experiencing a sudden ranking drop for one of my websites . Keyword = Green Tea Search Engine = google.lk URL = www.eswaran.com/greenTea.html This page was at 7th on 1st page . Since coupe of weeks back its moving backwards . I didn't even do any link building for this page other than doing little changes to titles tags . What would be the reason for such a issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Osanda0