Traffic has dropped from my site.
-
Hello,
I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this.
The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com
Does any one have any ideas that can help?
Thanks
-
Thanks for the nice words Ryan and I am above now
-
Google recommends around 100 however they say they will crawl 10K + so I wouldn't worry at all.
-
Thanks Sha, appreciate you taking your time to give me feedback. Will look at implementing your points. Thanks.
-
Thanks for your help, I will give it a go and see what happens.
Quick side question, would this page (just created) have to many internal links, or isnt that ever a problem?
http://www.comparebestodds.com/news/2011/09/upcoming-rugby-world-cup-fixtures
-
Sha,
I'm sorry but I don't think the link profile is big enough yet to be drilling down into these kind of areas, he said he is losing a small amount of traffic, not that he had tons and now he receives none.
1. True however the link profile is only small so it'd probably not of been focussed on that much so far.
2. True again but same as 1.
3. This is only a VERY small ranking factor and for you to even suggest this as a reason as to why his traffic has dropped by 90% is quite ludicrous.
4. You've mentioned this already, nice link though
I'm not attacking you or saying that you are wrong, actually, all your points are 100% correct however with such a new site and the amount of traffic being so small and with a such a small link profile, I think the suggestions above are too advanced at the moment and the problem lies elsewhere.
If you look at the crawl date, then the traffic decrease happening around now also makes perfect sense because Google has had time to drop you down the rankings for example.
-
Hi Jon,
While it is difficult to pinpoint exact reasons for traffic fluctuations without detailed information on the site, there are some things that come to mind.
First, since one of the pages you mentioned relates to the Rugby World Cup, I would check the originating country(ies) for the traffic. It is quite possible that the visitors were interested in betting on matches involving a team or teams who have been eliminated, or whose playing schedule has been less frequent in recent days.
Also, when I took a look at the Metrics for your site in Open Site Explorer, I noticed a few things that could certainly be negatively affecting your rankings.
1. The anchor text distribution for the small number of external inks that you have is quite narrow. This Whiteboard Friday Video gives a good explanation of using a diverse range of anchor text.
2.All of your links are followed. Cyrus gave a good explanation of the negative correlation for high percentage of followed links in this video.
3. When checking the load speed of your home page with the Mozbar, I see that it took 13.5 seconds to load the entire page. The impact of page load speed is also mentioned in the video on negative ranking factors above.
4. All of your external linking root domains are from dot com domains. This means that your link profile does not really have any diversity. Justin Briggs wrote a great blog post which explains the signals that search engines take into account when looking for low quality sites. In the explanation he talks about the importance of a diverse natural link profile.
My guess would be that a combination of all these factors is responsible for your drop in traffic. While the playing schedule is not something that you can control, all of the other things can be improved with a little work.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
In terms of Social Bookmarking, it MAY help but it's pretty positive. Try Digg.com
-
I'm just glad I noticed it
I think this is your problem to be honest and the rest of the site is fine but as your site is currently as it is, I would expect fluctuation anyway.
I think you should see Kieran's comment below and follow the steps, there is no need for me to repeat everything when he has done such a good job below. I'll take credit for the spot but I think Kieran deserves credit for his willingness to expand in detail.
Thumbs up to Kieran from me.
Regards, Ryan.
-
Hi irldonalb,
Thanks for your comment, I am a little unsure what you mean? This is the cached page in Google
it looks like it all loads fine, but there is a Google logo showing a 404 in the news section, would that effected the whole page indexing? the news is just pulled in through an xml reader, would it be worth removing the news from the page?
What Social Bookmarking would you recommend to get Google to re-cache my site?
Thanks for your help
Jon
-
I'd tend to agree based on your response with irldonalb and your post is quite pertinent as there is an YouMoz Blog by chadburgess post that doesn't exactly point to this (it is realted to noindex but the tactics to get back on Google eyeline are still relevant)
To possibly (badly) summarize some of his tactics that relate to you
- Create some fresh content 1-X pages depends on your capacity and do some internal linking and Google will see this.
- Get some social juice going with your links and recruit some help of friends and associates to spread the word.
- Resubmit your sitemap to Google Webmasters
The full post is here and it is quite an interesting one - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/accidental-noindexation-recovery-strategy-amp-results
Good luck with it and report back with your success levels..
Kieran
-
If you do a cache check on your homepage then you'll see a logo come up that normally means a 404 error on Google so I think there was some problem with the latest cache, either on your side or Google's. I would recommend Social Bookmarking to get Google to visit your site and re-cache and I think then, everything should stabilise.
-
Hi Kieran,
Thanks for your reply.
The main keywords I am focusing on at the moment 'Rugby World Cup, Best Odds, Best Betting Odds, Compare Odds'
The page that were getting the most traffic from search engines were...
http://www.comparebestodds.com/rugby-union-betting/world-cup/rugby-world-cup-fixtures.php andhttp://www.comparebestodds.com/The site is 2 years old, but about 9months ago I did a complete rebuild and fresh content as I made lots of errors.
Last week I was getting 60 unique visits per day, and this week I am down to 5 unique visits.Appreciate your help.Jon.
-
Hi Jon
How old is the site and what keywords / niche (well it is clear betting) were you ranking for? FRom a quikc OSE check your site is just developing.
Kieran
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
-
Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to: Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or... Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)? Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of? Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
Technical SEO | | TheKatzMeow0 -
What can i do to stop my site from dropping in the rankings
Hi, we were number one in google for the keyword lifestyle magazine but now our magazine website www.in2town.co.uk is doing very bad in the rankings. One week ago we were around 8 then we went to 12 and now we are on the third page and i am not sure what is happening. We wanted and needed our home page to rank for the keywords of lifestyle magazine, lifestyle news but none of these keywords are doing very well with google can anyone please point me in the right direction so i can stop my site falling any further I am not sure if the home page is properly optimized but i have never had trouble with it before many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Questionable Referral Traffic
Hey SEOMozers, I'm working with a client that has a suspicious traffic pattern going on. In October, a referral domain called profitclicking.com started passing visits to the site. Almost, in parallel the overall visits decreased anywhere from 35 to 50%. After checking out profitclicking.com more, it promises more traffic "with no SEO knowledge". The client doesn't think that this service was signed up for internally. Regardless, it obviously smells pretty fishy, and I'm searching for a way I can disallow traffic from this site. Could I simply just write a simple disallow statement in the robots.txt and be done with it? Just wanted to see if anyone else had any other ideas before recommending a solution. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
Can backlinks from advertising cause a traffic drop?
Hi, I recently noticed that our organic traffic has started to drop and maybe coincidently our adwords traffic has increased. I was asked to investigate the drop. I know that from the google update that unnatural backlinks would be penalized so I thought it might be the backlinks from a site that we advertise on because of the sheer number we have required from them in the last month. Would you think that would be the cause? if not, what could it be? and if it is, how do I go about correcting it as fast as possible? Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | digital.moretogether.com0 -
Help fixing the traffic drop that started on 4 September 2012.
I'm happy to be a part of this wonderful community here and request help analysing my situation and would appreciate suggestions to fix the issues I'm facing. First, The Website Setup - We've a WordPress powered technology blog on main domain - http://www.crazyengineers.com & community forum on /community/ In the last 60 days, I've made following changes to the site that might have gone against us. 1. I added a sidebar to all the pages of our community forums to offer more useful information to the users, like recent threads, our latest exclusive interviews etc. 2. I added a descriptive welcome notice on all the pages of community at the top. 3. I added two ad-spots above the fold, didn't hurt user experience (IMHO). 4. I removed a LARGE number of unwanted tags from our WordPress blog that offered no value to visitors; resulting into Google Webmaster Tools reporting a large number of 404 - Page Not Found errors. Point To Note: Since September 4, I've been noticing significant drop in our traffic to the 'community' forums. The traffic is down almost 40-50%. Corrective Measures I've Taken - 1. Made sure that all the removed tags show proper 404 HTTP status. I added a search box to the 404 pages so that users have opportunity to find what they're looking for. 2. Removed the two ad-spots and placed only one 728x90 leaderboard above the fold. 3. We never engaged in any black-hat SEO techniques, link-building or content-copying. I double checked whether there are any suspicious activities reported in GWT but haven't spotted any. I'd really appreciate analysis of what might have really gone wrong and the direction in which I should proceed to recover our traffic.
Technical SEO | | TheBigK0 -
Site Purchase and 301
Hello, I just started working with a new client. Since then the client has purchased another company. We have re-branded the new companies home page and 301 redirected the rest of the site's links to the corresponding pages on the holding companies site. Since then the rankings have tanked. I looked at both companies back link profiles and realized that they are quite spammy from the last SEO contractor they hired. That said, the site was ranking fine until last Friday. I was wondering if anyone had seen temporary rankings decrease after 301ing a domain to a different site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TargetClick0 -
Penalities in a brand new site, Sandbox Time or rather a problem of the site?
Hi guys, 4 weeks ago we launched a site www.adsl-test.it. We just make some article marketing and developed a lots of functionalities to test and share the result of the speed tests runned throug the site. We have been for weeks in 9th google serp page then suddendly for a day (the 29 of february) in the second page next day the website home is disappeared even to brand search like adsl-test. The actual situalion is: it looks like we are not banned (site:www.adsl-test.it is still listed) GWT doesn't show any suggestion and everything looks good for it we are quite high on bing.it and yahoo.it (4th place in the first page) for adsl test search Anybody could help us to understand? Another think that I thought is that we create a single ID for each test that we are running and these test are indexed by google Ex: <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/w08ZMPKl3R or</cite> <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/P87t7Z7cd9</cite> Actually the content of these urls are quite different (because the speed measured is different) but, being a badge the other contents in the page are pretty the same. Could be a possible reason? I mean google just think we are creating duplicate content also if they are not effectively duplicated content but just the result of a speed test?
Technical SEO | | codicemigrazione0 -
Site Structure question
when deciding the Site structure for a e-commerce site Is it better to keep everything mysite.com/widget.html or use categories like mysite.com/Gifts/widget.html
Technical SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0