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
-
Drop in Rankings
Hello Webmasters, My site has incurred a sudden dip in rankings across sections. We conducted an analysis and have observed the following two major issues: Unnatural Links Penalty: Our site was issued an Unnatural Links Penalty on May 23. Basically, we have both 'http' and 'https' versions of our website registered on Webmaster tools. Initially, the warning showed up on the 'http' version and thus we started a cleanup by extracting the linking domains and have also filed a reconsideration request once all the spammy domains were removed and rightly disavowed. Recently, we got another manual action warning on the 'https' version regarding the unnatural links. So we have started with the cleanup activity right away. While analyzing this issue, we came across another major problem regarding the two versions which is our next concern and is mentioned below. https Canonical Issue: For more insights, we went through our site’s content and found that our website is following the below pattern Our 'http' version of the webpages get 301 redirected to the 'https' version. This 'https' version again has a canonical pointing to the 'http' version thus creating a loop. To conclude, I request your valuable learnings and thoughts on the following: Which of these issues are likely to have affected our website’s ranking Which version is likely to be preferred by Google (https or http) in our case
Technical SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
So weird sudden drop in rankings
Hi All, ok so at the beginning of July we launched our new website, SEVEN weeks later we have dropped completly off all rankings what-so-ever, (except brand) but weirdly if i pan between browsers we dont use (for saved searches/cookies etc) sometimes the rankings show up where they used to be. Whats strange is we get crawled daily but it took seven weeks for our rankings to drop, ive done all testing i can - no manual actions, no updates when we dropped (15th Aug) no real differences in webmaster tools, no crawl errors, no massive rise in 404s, 500s etc etc, im really a bit stumped! Any help would be mucho appreciated in diagnosing this stumper!
Technical SEO | | Kennelstore0 -
Traffic drop 98% in two days
I changed my theme on April 12th and within 24 hours my traffic plummeted 98%. I have also seen a huge difference in my keyword ranking. A few things have been tweaked, but with no results. I need to get to the bottom of this fairly quickly. Do you have any recommendations of a trustworthy someone I could hire to dig deeper and find out what the %#^!$@ is going on? I didn't see that SEOmoz does the "hire and let us check it" thing. Of course, if anyone has any free suggestions...I'm open to those as well. 🙂 Thanks Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
How to handle mobile site with less pages than the main site?
We are developing a mobile version of our website that will utilize responsive design/dynamic serving. About 70% of the main website will be included in the mobile version. What (if anything) should be the redirect for pages not included in the mobile version of the site? Also - for one specific section users will be redirected from that page to the homepage, what is the redirect that should be used for this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
One large site or a few microsites?
Hi, I have a client who runs a professional expo company and wants to redo his website. Right now he has one website that has the following sections: expo company info, wedding show info, electrical wire show info, fishing show info. My question is, when I rebuild the site would it be better to do one site or four microsites?
Technical SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Site dropped after article submissions
I have a site about back pain. The name is lower back pain relief. It has a lot of content on how to treat back pain with natural remedies. I paid for botw.org and yahoo directories as well as submissions from submit edge. My site was doing well within a few months. I was floating around at the bottom of page two for "lower back pain relief" and lower back pain. I found out about Unique article wizard. I started using that to write and submit articles. Now, my website is not ranking anywhere. I submitted a request for reconsideration to Google. They said no manual action had been taken. The question: How long does this penalty last? Is that website toast now? I think it was penalized for using the anchor text too much or adding too many links at once. It has been penalized for about 6 weeks now.
Technical SEO | | Naturalhealth150 -
Will training videos available on the "members only" section of a site contribute to the sites ranking?
Hello, I got asked a question recently as to whether training videos on the deeper pages of a website (that you can only access if you are a member and log in) will help with the sites ranking. On the SEOMoz software these deeper pages have been crawled as far as I can tell with errors reported on pages from the "members only" section of the site, leading me to believe the members only pages and their content will contribute to the sites overall ranking profile. I have suggested uploading the informational videos on the main pages of the site for now, making them accessible to all visitors and putting them in a more obvious place to encourage more sharing and views, however I've also said I would check it out with some experts so any information will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks 🙂 Charlotte
Technical SEO | | CharlotteWaller0 -
Site revision
our site has complete redesign including site architecture, page url and page content (except domain). It looks like a new site. The old site has been indexed about thirty thousand results by google. now what should i do first?
Technical SEO | | jallenyang0