Unexplainable drop in traffic
-
Hello Mozzers, I am new at Moz and certainly hope you can help me!
I used to consider myself very knowledgeable in SEO since I had hundreds or maybe thousands of keywords very well ranked on Google Guatemala (www.google.com.gt) for more than a decade. That was until a year ago: November 8th, 2019... On that date, all of my rankings plummeted, never to return.At first I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried, so I started doing a bunch of things:
-
Reworked the pages (except home page) to make them responsive (I used to have two versions of each page, one for desktop and one for mobile).
-
Removed the ads from the pages to make them faster, thinking it could be due to the speed (even if my competitors sites were slower!)
-
Fixed thousands of 404s
-
Disavowed thousands of bad domains and spammy URLs (I never bought a single link but there were thousands of links from forums, theglobe network, etc)
-
Removed more than 12,000 members from my own forum who had never posted anything: about 4000 of them just had created a profile to include a link to different extenral sites.
-
Fixed a few other technical aspects...
Nothing helped. In fact, my rankings have kept going down. My content is good and unique, my site has good DA but still I get outranked and buried by several sites which don't have as much information as I have.
There are NO manual actions against my site according to Search Console. As I mentioned before, I have never bought any backlinks, so all of my links should be natural (although there were thousands of links to my forum from spammy sites which I disavowed).
So, I am frustrated as I really don't know what the problem is. I am giving you 3 examples of Keywords and URLs of pages that were number one for years, and now are not even on first page, so that you can see them and tell me your thoughts about what may be happening:
-
KEYWORD: VOLCANES DE GUATEMALA
URL: https://www.deguate.com/geografia/volcanes/Los-volcanes-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 5th page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help. -
KEYWORD: MINISTERIOS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/politica_ministerios/Los-ministerios-de-Guatemala.shtml Note: was #1, now is on 2nd page. Removed all the ads to see if it would help.
-
KEYWORD: LEYENDAS DE GUATEMALA URL: https://www.deguate.com/artman/publish/misterios-leyendas/las-leyendas-mas-famosas-en-guatemala.shtml Note: Was #1, now is on 3rd page. It's stuffed with ads, as it doesn't seem to matter wheter my pages have ads or not, and since I lost my rankings on thousands of pages at least I can probably generate a little more income like that.
Thank you so much for the help you can provide!
-
-
I thought it was just a hickup from the Google Algorithm, but as days turned into weeks I became very worried
Free Stuff Request Form ==> https://freestuffsng.com/request-free-stuff/
-
I don't know why its happening but the same issue was happening with my site about action manga. In august 2019 my site was deranked after google algorithm update and after the 10 months when i forgot my url. Its again appearing in the top search results of SERP's. Thats very strange for me
-
We are facing a similar issue with our website's Organic Traffic. The main reason is now Google is now more focusing on Core Web Vitals. These Core Web Vitals are directly affecting Ranking & Organic visits. Therefore, Kindly also check your Core Web Vital issues in Search Console.
**Follow these path to find Core Web Vital Issues: **Login Google Search Console -> Enhancement -> Core Web Vitals
I have already created one thread for help https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/how-can-i-solve-core-web-vital-issues-for-mobile-desktop
Edit: ReadManga.fun
-
Hi there,
Have you guys tried the Panguin Tool (no affiliation) to see if your websites have been affected by changes in Google?
https://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/
Hope this helps.
-Zack
-
Hello Haris6464, happy to hear your site is appearing again.
Can you tell me what you did? What do you mean by "when I forgot my url it's appearing again"?
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
-
Site dropped in search for 95% after 18-19 feb
Hi people. I have a client which holds a escort agency website operating in Amsterdam the Netherlands. Please take note that Escort Agency is legal and holland is a liberal country with permit and all, so just trying to point out that it's a perfectly legal crafted business. To the point: we are seeing a 95% drop in traffic (basicly back to barely 10 clicks a day) after 18 to 19 feb. We've inspected the incoming links, and we did see some things going on that where not quite healthy. At first a banner was bought on a dutch advertising website. On their behalf, this sitewide banner got published with a follow on roughly 132k of pages. That was strike 1 (i think). After tossing this in disavow for temporarily basis and informed the advertisal website to put any sitewide link to nofollow in the first place, nothing changed. We found a 2nd site doing the same mistake. Frankly the banner got exposed on roughly 100k of pages on which some of 'm where barely 2 days old. Strike 2. Solved this by putting it in disavow for the time being and asking politely to put the banner again, nofollow. We cleaned out any incoming potential spammy links by using disavow. The data we obtained was a mix of google webmaster itself and moz profiling. However we're one month further now, and the graph is still a big phat flatline. What is going on? I've noted that, one other sites, which share the same brand, but completely different websites / subnets / content and all, has the same threatment going on showing a huge drop from 18th of feb 2019 and is unable to recover. We cannot see anything 'bad' actually going on @ webmasters and there is no manual action taken. So we're kind of stuck now on a site that was my project but now completely fell into oblivion and hurting someone's business. The url is https://www.qualityescort.nl/ - anyone has a reasonable advice to this issue? full.jpg full.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jvanderlinde0 -
Redirecting traffic to https
Hey! i was wondering, should i force all traffic to https address? i know that overall a better secured website will rank better since it earns more trust from users which means less bounce rate and the list of benefits is endless..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
but should i FORCE ALL traffic to a https? or maybe only force a http to https? or not at all?2 -
When "pruning" old content, is it normal to see an drop in Domain Authority on Moz crawl report?
After reading several posts about the benefits of pruning old, irrelevant content, I went through a content audit exercise to kick off the year. The biggest category of changes so far has been to noindex + remove from sitemap a number of blog posts from 2015/2016 (which were very time-specific, i.e. software release details). I assigned many of the old posts a new canonical URL pointing to the parent category. I realize it'd be ideal to point to a more relevant/current blog post, but could this be where I've gone wrong? Another big change was to hide the old posts from the archive pages on the blog. Any advice/experience from anyone doing something similar much appreciated! Would be good to be reassured I'm on the right track and a slight drop is nothing to worry about. 🙂 If anyone is interested in having a look: https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots [this is the category where changes have been made, primarily] https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/keyboard-shortcut-editing/ [example of a pruned post]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc1 -
Traffic and keyword drop
Hello, On one of the sites that I manage - http://www.zalikihotel.gr/ , there was a significant decrease in keyword positions over the last 10-15 days. Sample screenshot is attached. Some of the keywords even dropped for 17-18 positions. From the end of April, organic traffic dropped by 30 percent. Website is mobile optimized, so that shouldn't be a problem. In the last 3-4 months, we had traffic increase. Domain authority went up by 3 points after the last index. On-site SEO was completed, and currently I'm focusing on link-building and working on bringing back to life forgotten social media. Does anybody knows what might be the case for this negative affects on our site? Do you think it's a temporary fluctuation or not? Thanks in advance. 8dSBELm.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | socrateskirtsios0 -
Significant drop in web rankings
We have two websites and last week we had a significant drop in search engine rankings. Some of these search rankings we have been top 3 for the past 5 years and now we are not in the top 20. Last weekend we changed our hosting provider and IP addresses for the first time in over 7 years. Now is there a way we could work out if we have been hit by the latest Penguin update or if the change in hosting / IP has caused these drop in rankings? I would appreciate any thought or ideas at all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Need to move highest content pages into a sub-domain and want to minimize the loss of traffic - details inside!
Hi All! So the company that I work for owns two very strong domains in the information security industry. There are two separate sections on each site that draws a ton of long tail SEO traffic. For our corporate site we have a vulnerability database where people search for vulnerabilities to research, and find out how to remediate. On our other website we have an exploit database where people can look up exploits in order to see how to patch an attackers attack path. We are going to move these into a super database under our corporate domain and I want to ensure that we maintain or minimize the traffic loss. The exploit database which is currently on our other domain yields about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. It is obviously OK if that traffic goes directly to this new subdomain. What are my options to keep our search traffic steady for this content? There are thousands and thousands of these vulnerabilities and exploits so it would not make sense to 301 redirect all of them. What are some other options and what would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
Dropped 50 places for Page Title Change
Hey Guys, I've got a keyword set that is really annoying me. You see on the 19th July I changed my page title for the home page to what I thought would be something more competitive and instead of climbing from rank 9/10 I dropped out of the top 50. So I waited 2 weeks to see if it changed and it just stayed out of the top 50. After two weeks I changed it back again and I've been out of the top 50 ever since. I havnt made any real significant changes to the site as I've held off waiting for the keyword ranking to return but I dont think it will. I was trying to improve the keyword phrase "bahamas all inclusive" for the website www.smallhope.com. I'd managed to get on to page 1 rank 9/10 depending. I changed the title; from "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive" to "Bahamas All Inclusive Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive" This is really bad for us and I'm not sure what to do. I had a whole plan in place starting with the Title and moving on to the H1 tags, but now I'm not so sure. I've put everything on hold. If this was you what would you do to get back to page 1? Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
UK Company Major drop in traffic & rankings on one primary keyword since March
I am helping out a small UK company who have had a sudden drop in organic search traffic since March 24th. Investigation highlights some issues with the site,e.g. Potential canonicalization of home page, a few html errors, some inbound links to the /index.html version of the homepage rather than /. But, nothing particualrly major and nothing that is different to pre-March 24th. The indexed pages looks ok in Google (although Bing is ranking the non-www version of the homepage) but this does not appear in Google's index. Searches for the company name on Google.co.uk show it as top result & some keywords are ranking reasonably well (based on homepage). Selecting blocks of text from the homepage and it ranks #1, but its Google rank for the primary keyword has gone from #2 pre-March 24th to not in the top 100 results since. SEOMOZ is grading the page A for the keyword which appears prominently on the page & keyword is the first characters of the title. It is not a particularly competitive keyword. Adding UK to the keyword and the page is Google.co.uk ranked #3. It's almost as if they are being penalised for a single keyword which I've never seen or heard of before. Any ideas? ** The company has never carried out any SEO - white hat or black hat. The site is perfectly normal, nothing dodgy or concerning about it at all.** Thanks in advance for your advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110