Since the 6th June there has been a serious drop in search impressions and clickthroughs in my GA + webmaster accounts.
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Since the 6th June there has been a serious drop in organic search impressions and click throughs in my GA + webmaster accounts for my website. This leads me to believe my site has been punished for something?
Where would be the best place to start diagnosing the issue causing the drop in search traffic?
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Very interesting! I'm not sure if this explains some of my problems or not but very interesting that it happened on around the same time as my search traffic declined.
I also run another site with a similar amount of traffic in a different industry that has been uneffected. I have dilligently tried to create good content and generally good link building practices for both sites but one has been punished and the other not.
One site is a hotel website with twice weekly blog posts and the other (with the problems) is more actively changing - a blog based on renewable energy/solar power/innovation/design etc with new posts every 2nd day.
I'll be continuing to build good content for both sites while scratching my head as to where I went wrong here + hope things will turn around...
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Is there a reason why you're putting content on other sites instead of building up your own site? Original, quality content that earns incoming links will beat putting out spun text and questionable backlinks any day.
You might want to start your own thread here in Q&A with specific questions. If you can give a URL, that'd be even better, then we can all take a look at it and give you some advice.
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read this from yesterday. It happened on June 5th.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-bigfoot-update-aka-dr-pete-goes-crazy
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Hey, looking in the tools here is always a good way to start.
My situation is similar, but not quite the same...
I have the issue of not GROWING my traffic.. My ranks appear to be dropping, but not so much my traffic.
That fact alone^ is weird enough in itself.
I have built a few spun text links in the last month.. basically a week before the update... I have a strong feeling that is the problem.
I have been diversifying my anchor text though.
These days that seems like it could be the reason my rank is dropping a little (according to 2 years ago SEO mindset), but it could also be because of the types of backlinks I am using...
I have decided to just start pushing a bunch of content out there on a ton of different sites and start seeing which ones rank better.
I am feeling so scared and lost these days, I really wish there was a better solution that could work for everyone.
Meaning that I wish that small start ups could still compete a little bit with some of these huge companies..
By the way, it is important to note that we actually sell a product on our website, and are not out to just get traffic for Adsense clicks, etc.
Anybody have a helpful direction that can help for us??
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No problem, are you in the type of business that has a peak and down season? If so it might just be a natural ebb and flow of your industry. Wish I could be more help. Let me think about it for a few and see what else I come up with. Good luck.
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Thanks for the tips Joel!
There doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary in the backlinks - as in there don't seem to be any new ones? While a few keywords have shifted down but not dramatically. The site is still indexed by google (I haven't received an e-mail) and a google site: search returns urls from the domain. The page scores a speed of 91/100 (firebug). The organic search traffic coming into the site is now 1/10 of what it was last week... The investigation continues....
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First I would audit the site using the tools here on seomoz. Check out the back links and see if there is anything out of the ordinary, then check your rankings for your main keywords and see how they've been impacted. Also you will want to see how long your site takes to load, visitors don't like waiting more than 10-15 seconds for a page to load. Also make sure your site hasn't been deindexed by google. did you receive a message from google saying there was an issue?
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