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
-
Landing Page Drop Out
Hi, If a product page drops out of organic ranking, but you've made no changes is there a good place to start in order to find out why? I feel like it's almost impossible? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Help! Rankings dropping after optimising
I have been using MOZ a lot, in the past I have always been able to optimise a website enough to rank well in my local areas, but lately every time I optimise a website based on MOZ recommendations the rankings are just dropping and dropping... I haven't focused any efforts on backlinks, but a few sites have gone from the first page of SERP to 2nd and continue to drop... I have 2 example sites: https://www.documentmanagementsoftware.com.au/ - optimised for "Document Management Software" - was initially ranked no.7 in google AU, now it is no.16 after my efforts. http://www.tmphysio.com.au/ - optimised for "canberra physiotherapy" - was no.6 now it is dropping to no.9 after 'optimisation' Any help or insights would be extremely helpful as I feel hopeless!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
DA dropped 7 pts in one week as well as our competitors. Is something going on?
We have consistently had a 70 in DA and now all of the sudden we are at a 63 as well as seeing the same considerable drop among our competitors. This was odd as I have not seen this type of drop in DA since being with the company. Any ideas are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeaverMike0 -
Spike then Drop in Direct Traffic?
We've been doing some SEO work over the last few weeks and earlier this week we saw a large spike in traffic. Yay we all thought, but then yesterday the traffic levels returned to pre-celebratory levels. I've been doing some digging to try and find out what was different Monday and Tuesday this week. Mondays are usually big traffic days for us anyway, but this week was by far the biggest, and Tuesday was even higher still, our best day ever. After some poking, I found that the direct traffic followed the same pattern as our overall traffic levels (image attached). The first spike coincides with an email we sent out that day, but the later spike we just don't know where it came from? I understand loosely that direct isn't easily traceable, but can anyone help us understand more about this second spike? Thanks! ayqL2wi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Wordpress to HubSpot CMS - I had major crawl issues post launch and now traffic is down 400%
Hi there good looking person! Our traffic went from 12k visitors in july to 3k visitors in july. << www.thedsmgroup.com >>When we moved our site from wordpress to the hubspot COS (their CMS system), I didnt submit a new sitemap to google webmaster tools. I didn't know that I had to... and to be honest, I've never submitted or re-submitted a sitemap to GWT. I have always built clean sites with fresh content and good internal linking and never worried about it. Yoast kind of took care of the rest, as all of my sites and our clients' sites were always on wordpress. Well, lesson learned. I got this message on June 27th in GWT_http://www.thedsmgroup.com/: Increase in not found errors__Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. Investigating these errors and fixing them where appropriate ensures that Google can successfully crawl your site's pages._One month after our site launched we had 1,000 404s on our website. Ouch. Google thought we had a 1,200 page website with only 200 good pages and 1,000 error pages. Not very trust worthy... We never had a 404 ever before this, as we added a plugin to wordpress that would 301 any 404 to the homepage, so we never had a broken link on our site, which is not ideal for UX, but as far as google was concerned, our site was always clean. Obviously I have submitted a new sitemap to GWT a few weeks ago, and we are moving in the right direction... **but have I taken care of everything I need to? I'm not sure. Our traffic is still around 100 visitors per day, not 400 per day as it was before we launched the new site.**Thoughts?I'm not totally freaking out or anything, but a month ago we ranked #1 and #2 for "marketing agency nj", now we aren't in the top 100. I've never had a problem like this. _I added a few screen grabs from Google Webmaster Tools that should be helpful.__Bottom line, have I done everything I need to or do I need to do something with all of these "not found" error details that I have in GWT?_None of these "not found" pages have any value and I'm not sure how Google even found them... For example: http://www.thedsmgroup.com/supersize-page-test/screen-shot-2012-11-06-at-2-33-22-pmHelp! -JasonuhLLtou&h4QmGCW#0 uhLLtou&h4QmGCW#1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlene-Wingfield0 -
Affiliate Links Added and Site Dropped in only Google
My site was dropshipping a product and we switched to an affiliate offer. We had three 4 links to different affiliate products. Our site dropped the next day. I have been number 1 for 6 months, has a pr 6 and is 2 years old. It has been 2 weeks and the site hasn't jumped back. Any suggestions on how to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkash0 -
Rankings for keyword variations dropped over weekend?
One of our clients has seen significant decreases over the weekend for a number of keyword variations. There have been no significant site changes, no crawl errors reported and our competitors don't seem to have been affected. The decrease has coincided with the launch of a display campaign, but surely this is just coincidental? Any thoughts would be appreciated...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zealmedia0
