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Thanks! Well I would not think this abnormal if it was a shift between a few position.. Even to 25.. But as an example today i have had about 20 KW out of my list of 150 that went up 197 positions EACH back to their regular or better 2-6 ranking then  I have another 40 KW that are still further at a ranking of 200 or further. Every day is about the same yo-yo effet. I do see a general drop as well with some KW that slowly went down the 25.. So it feels like I am getting hit by some kind of weird randon update. But I am also wondering if this has to do with my ranking tracker..

Organic traffic is down 47% to LY for march...  I am trying to get it better, but it is hard to keep track of progress with such variations..

Id love to hear if anyone knows more about this case..

So.. For the last several weeks (I noticed March 11th), we are having some weird ranking drops. Our keywords will drop overnight from their usual position between 2-6 to further than 200 and then be back to normal a couple days later.

We use Sheerseo to track daily ranking.  I track about 15 KW everyday and noticed it happening then. Is this part of the recent changes?

I am just really puzzled that we are seeing drops and then going back to normal and then drops again.  It is hard to know where you stand with such drastic differences day to day.

Any ideas?

When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site.

I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down.

At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping!

Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed?

Thanks!

We are well into development of a hotel affiliate website (using Expedia Affiliate Network), and I know there are many challenges to SEO when using an affiliate system - one of the biggest being how to handle duplicate content.

Outside of blog posts and static marketing pages, the majority of the textual content is contained in hotel descriptions. We will be creating unique descriptions over time, but we are a small team and this will be a lengthy process.

My question for you mozzers, is whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions?

Thanks for any input!

Thanks! I am not sure how to look at ISPs of the visit. As far as email newslrtter, it was always done with mailchimp and tracked as such I believe (in campaigns).

Well yes and no. It depens on the time frame. We have seen a drop of traffic all over recently (after the new panda/penguin updates) but at the time the switch occured (Sept 21 2011) and for several months after that, other traffic types were up which was consistent with what we were experiencing before the direct traffic drop. No switch in sources.

Direct traffic starts dropping overnight sept 21st
Referrals start dropping about Oct 18th
Organic search is up and doing fine the entire time, but not showing a spike

Now numbers are different, but the environment is different, which is why I choose to look back at last Fall to try to identify what happened.
Hubby is looking into services we might have stopped using that might have been the cause..

Hi, yes I mean actual direct traffic , not search related. No outside mktg was done so it cannot be that. Newsletter increased since then, so not that either.

Search on brand term is doing ok, but direct traffic is WAY down. 
I thought it could be the way google assigns direct now vs then.. But cant find any info to substantiate that. I would accept a double digit drop but the fact it happens overnight, just seems weird..

I am attaching the graph to show what I mean...

QCkRW

Hmm.. Well It is not that It is just surfacing, it is just that I am asking around only now

I have a sitemap and no problem for page indexation. The pages that are losing the most traffic are still indexed. no issue with that.
We also have no errors 400 or 500 recorded on GWT..

Given we apparently had a previous SEO dude use link exchange network on us (yeah I know nothing better than getting f**ked and paying for it)  we do fall in the penguin a bit and did fall a bit in the panda updates, but more in a slow manner, losing positions one at a time, rather than being dumped to page 5 or 40 overnight. Though I dont see what that would have to do with direct traffic loss??

I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying.

My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic)

I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue.

I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers.  Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue.

The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before.

Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend).

Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening?

Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
Any thoughts?

Thanks Donnie. Yes, I completely believe that the right attitude is what you are talking about above. I guess I am just trying to understand the rhyme and reason to it all because, while I believe in the long term it is not all about SEO, and it is more about the user and their experience (and conversion!), at the end of the day, they are not especially following that motto and yet something is working in a very strong way for them. So while I fully intend to apply the best to my own work, I do want to understand the reasoning in what I am doing or not doing, and the whys of the result I am and will be getting.
Basically figuring what the "good" is of what they are doing  Somehow it is taking me a while LOL