Puzzling drop in search referrals.
-
Hello All,
A few weeks ago I posted in the Q and A believing I had received a google penalty due to a sudden and considerable drop in referrals...
http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penalty-8
... so I dug right to the bottom of my site and did a complete review of all my links. After clearing all the potentially problematic links, I wrote a very descriptive reconsideration request to google. 10 days or so later I received a 'no manual spam action found' response, which I guess is a good thing but now begs the question- what has gone wrong!?
Over the past 4 or 5 months I've been doing some heavy work on the SEO of my site, www.madegood.org. This has all been white hat stuff (as far as I'm aware), and have been using my seomoz pro account to monitor progress. I've done lots of reading on the subject so think I'm up to scratch on most general good advice, in terms of link building and site structure. I've always tried to create very high quality content and have been building some great links from very authoritative sites including The Guardian newspaper and Sheffield University. My pro dashboard is telling me that my link analysis history is improving, despite my keyword performance declining.
Is there anyone that can do a deep review of my site? I'm happy to share my analytics/webmaster tools etc info with you if that is helpful? I'm totally lost here and am becoming disheartened with all the hard work I've been putting into the SEO for my site.
Thanks so much in advance, any help is gratefully received. Of course I can provide more info should you need it.
Will
-
Hi Will
I just want to make sure by "referrals" - do you mean organic search traffic, or do you mean actual referral traffic from other websites?
I can give you some suggestions for your site, but I think what you'll really want to do is use segmentation and your data to isolate specifically where the traffic loss is coming from.
- Start by looking at the "mediums" - does one drop more than the other? Direct traffic ok? Is it just organic search traffic that dropped?
- Then dig deeper - is it's organic traffic, is it a particular keyword? Is it a particular page?
- Also, see if you can isolate an exact day - or did traffic drop gradually.
- Also, look at desktop vs mobile traffic - maybe something happened there.
I'd also suggest looking into webmaster tools data. Traffic loss is an effect of many possible causes;
- lower search volume due to seasonal fluctuation etc
- a drop in rankings - did any of your main keywords lose ranking?
- less clicks. you can rank just as well but get less clicks from some reason
So - dig into that and try to isolate one particular traffic source/keyword/landing page.
-
- -
Now, regardless of what you mind, I see some things that you might want to fix.
- I see there's a site at .com that relates to the main .org site. Does this receive any traffic? I think you might be best to 301 redirect .com to .org - there could be potential duplicate content or confusion there as it's a similar site.
Backlinks
I looked through some of your links in OSE and found a few that could be hurting (or at best, no longer helping: ie devalued)
- viennacyclechic.at/tag/winter/ - are these image links in the sidebar ads? This site needs to nofollow those, as Google requires nofollowing any paid links ("ads").
- peak-hives.co.uk/ - the sidebar in "other links". this could be totally natural, but it seems a little misplaced (different topic, kind of random?).
- hotvsnot.com/Sports/Cycling/ - not terrible, but possibly among a set of links that are not helping anymore.
The good news is I don't see anchor text issues, just the placement of some of these links. What I'd recommend here, is;
1. Remove any links that you can that might seem oddly-placed or out of context. Any ad space you're paying for, make sure that site is nofollowing them.
2. Continuing building new links! I think you had a pretty good idea on some of those - using photos to get links, related industry sites etc. Start here.
Hope that helps!
-Dan
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
-
How get google reviews on search results?
Hi, We have good google reviews. (4,8) Can we get this rating stars also on our organic search results ? Best remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcoz0 -
Submitting URLs After New Search Console
Hi Everyone I wanted to see how people submit their urls to Google and ensure they are all being indexed. I currently have an ecommerce site with 18,000 products. I have sitemaps setup, but noticed that the various product pages haven't started ranking yet. If I submit the individual url through the new Google Search Console I see the page ranking in a matter of minutes. Before the new Google Search Console you could just ask Google to Fetch/Render an XML sitemap and ask it to crawl all the links. I don't see the same functionality working today on Google Search Console and was wondering if there are any new techniques people could share. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abiondo
Anthony1 -
Natural Fluctuation in Search Traffic
This is going to sound like a weird question... I'm curious to know whether there is a natural fluctuation in the actual number of searches being made online each week. It would be great to relate this to the performance of my own organic traffic each week. For example, if organic search traffic is down 10% week on week, is that because search in general is down 10%? Has anybody ever looking into this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ausmed0 -
How Google organic search results differ in Local Searches?
We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ? For eg 1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" 3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rajeevEDU0 -
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 -
Recent ranking drop followed by strange behavior in SERPS
Recently on the evening of August 5th almost all of the keywords our pages ranked highly for dropped by anywhere from 5 to 8 pages. The only activity during this time was an article that had been picked up by a major news outlet and then was apparently copied onto other sources with links to our domain and article. More puzzling though is rather than simply having the same page show up lower for a keyword, in a number of instances a different page is now shown for the result, often with less or no relevance to the keyword. In some cases, for a single keyword phrase we've seen as many as 10 different pages rotated throughout the day when performing a search. Prior to our rankings falling, we've never seen this behavior.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianQuinn0 -
SEOMoz and Facebook Graph Search
Are SEOMoz looking to integrate Facebook Graph Search (the web search section) into the product? At the moment we can measure and track rankings for Google, Bing/Yahoo, but not Facebook graph search. What are the general thoughts among the community? Do you think it will be adopted as a real search engine? I'm not overly concerned - I reckon it will take a lot to change people behaviour and have them moving away from the other search engines. It's throwing up some interesting results though in searches!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
Keyword search in Google Adwords
Hello all, I would like to use the Google Adwords Keywords search tool, in order to start working in the structure of my website and targeting the right keywords. I am targeting all the world, all languages, global monthly searaches but: I have the doubt which filte I should use: broad?, exact? or phrase?I am using "braod" but I do not know if I should use exact instead for keyword selection. Would you recommend me any other tool instead of Google Adwords Keywords Search for keyword analysis? Thank you very much Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalcocer20030