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
-
Similar pages on a site
Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
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 -
Sudden traffic down after mobile site
Hi to all. I have a huge problem about my web site traffic. We published our mobile site version under mobile domain in m.etilercerrental.com. And we published mobile site sitemap under main site such as sitemap-mobile.xml and notify google from webmaster tools. After a while whole site traffic gone down so badly. Almost 60% gone down which doesnt make sense. Mobile sitemap is hosted under desktop site. And we didnt add any link to switch sites between mobile and desktop version. We automaticly redirect between desktop and mobile versiyons by detecting useragent. One another this is we have announcement section in dekstop version but we dont have it in mobile. But we are not making any redirection to mobile site when user visits the announcement section even by mobile phone. Because we are not displaying it in mobile version.
Technical SEO | | gkhnrtk
One last this is we are making redirections automatically and not asking user preference such as showing a link in the bottom of page to switch sites betwenn mobile and pc version. While developing mobile site we followed instructions in this https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/?hl=tr For find the details I would like to give you some site urls. Site Url : http://www.etilercarrental.com/
Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap.xml
Mobile Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap-mobile.xml0 -
Https Cached Site
Hi there, I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout. Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore? Thanks! Bianca
Technical SEO | | TheBatesMillStore0 -
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 -
404 Error from site - is this normal?
I have been trying to clean up any 404 errors. We keep getting the following: URL /include/vdimgck.php referring domain http://www.856d.c@m/plus/feedback.php rendered domain unclickable by adding the "@" since I do not know if it is safe. I just turned off the trackbacks and pings in the blog since I saw it was producing duplicate content and from what I read it is not worth keeping those with Wordpress. is vdimgck.php anything some here instantly recognizes ? It tops all our 404 errors, seems like a lot of requests. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
How can i increase my website traffic
Hello, my boss has decide a build website we have more than 12500 products in ourwebsite its mtscellular.com, im new as seo but im confused and need help i want to know how somebody help me to increase my website traffic
Technical SEO | | jimmylora0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1