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
-
What do you think about my new site?
Hi everyone, I'm looking for a review for my new site www.interlive.it Could you please let me know what do you think about the work that I did for my site. I'll be very happy to receive your suggestions. Regards, Mike
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
Webmaster Tools Links To Your Site
I logged onto webmaster tools today for my site and the section 'Links to Your Site' is showing no data. Also if I search using link:babskibaby.com it only shows 1 link. My site had been showing 500+ links previously. Does anyone know why this is?
Technical SEO | | babski0 -
Major drop in visitor numbers?
Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service . We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress. What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits? Would appreciate feedback.
Technical SEO | | AllieMc0 -
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 -
What is wrong with my site?
I have been working hard for over two months on my sites in seomoz and have seen some nice results in some (www.etraxc.com/ and www-my-etraxc.com for instance. Still I am really frustrated by www.classroomconnection.us/. I cant even get on the first page with the search term "classroom connection." i would love some help on this one. On a related note, does it help to have links to YouTube videos about the content? If so, how do I ensure that this piece is working well for me? Thanks a ton!
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
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 -
Google not visiting my site
Hi my site www.in2town.co.uk which is a lifestyle magazine has gone under a major refit. I am still working on it but it should be ready by the end of this week or sooner but one problem i have is, google is not visiting the site. I took a huge gamble to redo the site, even though before the refit i was getting a few thousand visitors a day, i wanted to make the site better as i was getting google webmaster errors. But now it seems google is not visiting the site. for example i am using sh404sef and i have put friendly url in the site and on the home page it has its name and meta tag but when you look at google it is not giving the site a name. Also it has not visited the site since october 13th Can anyone advise how to encourage google to visit the site please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
301 an old site to a newer site...
Hi First, to be upfront - these are not my websites, I'm asking because they are trying to compete in my niche. Here's the details, then the questions... There is a website that is a few months old with about 200 indexed pages and about 20 links, call this newsite.com There is a website that is a few years old with over 10,000 indexed pages and over 20,000 links, call this oldsite.com newsite.com acquired oldsite.com and set a 301 redirect so every page of oldsite.com is re-directed to the front page of newsite.com newsite.com & oldsite.com are on the same topic, the 301 occurred in the past week. Now, oldsite.com is out of the SERPs and newsite.com is pretty much ranking in the same spot (top 10) for the main term. Here are my questions; 1. The 10,000 pages on oldsite.com had plenty of internal links - they no longer exists, so I imagine when the dust settles - it will be like oldsite.com is a one page site that re-diretcts to newsite.com ... How long will a ranking boost last for? 2. With the re-direct setup to completely forget about the structure and content of oldsite.com, it's clear to me that it was setup to pass the 'Link Juice' from oldsite.com to newsite.com ... Do the major SE's see this as a form of SPAM (manipulating the rankings), or do they see it as a good way to combine two or more websites? 3. Does this work? Is everybody doing it? Should I be doing it? ... or are there better ways for me to combat this type of competition (eg we could make a lot of great content for the money spent buying oldsite.com - but we certainly wouldn't get such an immediate increase to traffic)?
Technical SEO | | RR5000