My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
-
Hi all,
We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower.
One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www).
Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August.
We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor:
- We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks.
- Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day.
- GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact.
- Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google?
This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl
Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for this. When you had the linking issue, did you traffic drop suddenly or was it gradual? Were only the mislinked pages deranked or were all pages on the domain deranked?
-
If you have one of the typical applegate programs they are duplicating your content, competing with you in the SERPs and giving you a big load of worthless to dangerous links.
That's my opinion.
-
It looks like we were hit by this algorithm update described by Matt Cutts:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-four-15705.htmlHe says it is designed to remove duplicate domains from search results, but we still show several times on the first page for some searches and have dropped completely off on many others.
I think this update must have included some Panda elements, or triggered a reevaluation that we fell into because our site is still being indexed.
-
I did take the quiz and got a big fat "maybe."
Our strategy with this site was to nail long tail terms and it worked very well for a while. This is an ecommerce site so I don't think it is out of place to have a lot of item and listing pages. However we do generate several variations of each item page because our products have size, color and shape permutations, and unlike other sites in the same space, we have unique pages for all of those combinations. The pages are different, but perhaps not very significantly. We have had success with this strategy on another site which has not been penalized, though we stepped up the number of item listing pages substantially on this one.
Traffic seems like it may be recovering slowly but you might be right that we are being overly aggressive on the number of generated pages.
-
They are follow links. How does this differ from shopping comparison sites?
-
I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. [...] Do you think this could be hurting me?
Are these followed links? If they are followed links, if they are not hurting you now they have a high chance of hurting you in the future.
-
Hi
I have the same problem. We launched a new site in June and had started to see traffic increase 25% per week. Last week my traffic dropped by 50%.
I use PRweb and send regular press releases to industry magazines to build backlinks. I have also signed up with Applegate who list my stock on their website. I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. The links go back to the individual product pages. Do you think this could be hurting me?
Thanks
-
Consider uploading images that are correctly scaled. You have large images and then you scale them smaller, That means you are loading half a megabyte of images too much.
Also, apply lossless compression and make them smaller without losing any quality.
The subdomains would have hurt your rankings.
It could be another site linked to you with the subdomain and that started the problem, because you didn't already have it handled.
About 5 years ago, a big site linked to us, but they screwed up all the story URLs and my system knew what they really wanted it, so it provided the content. Google trashed all of our listings. It took a month to work out what the problem was, and it took months to recover.
-
we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
As soon as I see this my BS meter goes off.
Is all of this unique and substantive content? If it is duplicate or thin then you could have a panda problem.
If I was you I would take read about Panda and take the quiz at MyTrafficDropped.com
That might help you understand what's happening.
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
-
Rankings dropped 71% in Google and 65% on Mobile
My rankings just tanked big time. The only problems are #1 Canonical Tags #2 Missing H-1 Tags, #3 URL too long. Are these high priority items now? I just lost a ton of page one rankings after very high rankings for the past 6 years.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Huge Search Traffic Drop After Switching to HTTPS - No Recovery After Couple of Months
Hi In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%). We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543 We fixed the redirects to 301 Double-checked the sitemaps Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com) Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.) We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etakgoz
We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS. It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving. In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?0 -
How do I get the sub-domain traffic to count as sub-directory traffic without moving off of WordPress?
I want as much traffic as possible to my main site, but right now my blog lives on a blog.brand.com URL rather than brand.com/blog. What are some good solutions for getting that traffic to count as traffic to my main site if my blog is hosted on WordPress? Can I just create a sub-directory page and add a rel canonical to the blog post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn0 -
Ranking dropped off massively: 25 August
HI have been working on the site http://www.schoolguide.co.uk/ we had something odd happen around the 25 of August our ranking just tanked. Now there was no warning in webmaster tools. Moz weather forecast didn't show anything crazy. We didn't do anything major to site. The site lost pretty much all it's long tail ranking and about 5% of the indexed pages. What could cause this? The only thing of prominence we did was get a link from huffington post article. Thanks again everyone Ed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdBen0 -
Domain authority dropped 4 points in a week!
I don't understand. I am continually blogging, optimizing, creating new landing pages, getting awesome inbound links... Traffic has even been up dramatically in the past two months. I checked the DA on Monday and it was 59 and today it is 55. What?? Help! http://www.howlatthemoon.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa1 -
Does duplicate content penalize the whole site or just the pages affected?
I am trying to assess the impact of duplicate content on our e-commerce site and I need to know if the duplicate content is affecting only the pages that contain the dupe content or does it affect the whole site? In Google that is. But of course. Lol
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Declining Organic Traffic despite PR, links and engagement
I have a client site that launched last June and rebranded this February 2012 as http://49thshelf.com The search traffic since Feb has been steadily declining despite some great campaigns to drive traffic and engagement. April down 40% vs. Mar May down 37% Jun down 51% Jul 16% We have a couple of challenges. The site is the only collection of Canadian-authored titles. It's like an Amazon of only Canadian titles. But it's not ecommerce, we direct traffic to other vendors like Amazon or the publisher to buy. We have 40,000 unique products on the site and the descriptions are primarily supplied by the publishers, which means it's the same content on the publisher site as Goodreads, Amazon and anyone else they share data with. Those big players like Amazon and Goodreads use user generated content to alter the descriptions but we don't have that level of activity on the site. Members create reading lists, the editorial staff curate collections on the homepage and there are interviews, blog posts and guest posts. No black hat SEO, no bad links that I can see. Great organic membership growth and interactions. Good activity from social media sites to the site. Good, trusted links from news sites and legit blogs. I don't know what to do to improve the organic traffic. July is the first month that we haven't seen 40-50% drops. Any advice is welcome, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SoMisguided0