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.seotoolninja.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"?
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
-
Sudden drop in organic traffic after migration from Django to Wordpress.
I have seen a sudden drop organic reach in a particular page of our website www.hackerearth.com/innovation earlier this was www.hackerearth.com/sprint. I although understand that it happens while migration but it has been a while we did the migration. The migration happened around May month. Something similar has happened to our blog. Earlier it was a blog.hackerearth.com now hackerearth.com/blog _Could anyone suggest me what could be the possible issue for the drop in traffic? _
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rajnish_HE0 -
A specific keyword has dropped from #1 in Google to nowhere at all...
Hi guys, I hope you can help. We have a large ecommerce website which has different domains for each language - GB, USA, DE, AU & CA. I've been working my way through the errors that have been flagged in Moz and today I noticed something quite worrying. One of our strong keywords has dropped from 1st place to nowhere at all. However, the Canadian version is ranking in the UK desktop search and our mobile site is appearing in the desktop search too. The keyword is 'personalised macbook cover' and the page in question is https://www.mrnutcase.com/en-GB/personalised-macbook-cover/ I'm confused as this page was ranking brilliantly a couple of weeks ago and now it's nowhere to be seen. We've added alternate and canonical tags to distinguish which site is mobile and which site is desktop. We've also submitted a sitemap so that it takes into account all of the languages. There are no harmful links and we've changed the content of the page across each language. I've attached what appears in the SERP's in the UK. (there is the mobile version ranking at the top and the Canadian version further down the page) Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Danny webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=personalised%20macbook%20covers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyNutcase0 -
Drop in SERPS and little movement after redesign
I took over a project in mid-March 2015. Rankings went from 5th page to roughly #11 - #13 (but never into first page). Launched a redesign on August 15, 2015. Rankings dropped from #11 - #13 down to #20. Weird part: On 3 different Mondays since Mid-August, I have noticed that the rankings shoot back up to about #11 in the morning, then drop back down to #20 by the evening. Three questions: 1. Has anyone seen a drop like this after redesign? (Assuming you kept the same content, just different layout). 2. Did it seem like the redesign resulted in some sort sandbox effect, where the rankings wouldn't move for a period of time? 3. Any advice on how to get it moving again? Or is this just a function of time? Ps. The interior pages are moving well. domain: getinjuryanswers.com KW: San Diego Personal Injury Lawyer, Personal Injury Lawyer San Diego I understand these are hyper-competitive terms. What puzzles me is how calcified the rankings appear to be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Site recovery after manual penalty, disavow, SSL, Mobile update = but dropped again in May
I have a site that has had a few problems over the last year. We had a manual penalty in late 2013 for bad links, some from guest blogs and some from spammy sites. Reconsideration requests had me disavow almost all of the incoming links. Later in 2014, the site was hit with link injection malware and had another manual penalty. That was cleared up and manual penalty removed in Jan 2015. During this time the site was moved to SSL, but there were some redirect problems. By Feb 2015 everything was cleared up and a an updated disavow list was added. The site recovered in March and did great. A mobile version was added in April. About May 1st rankings dropped again. Traffic is about 40% off it's March levels. Recently I read that a new disavow file will supersede an old one, and if all of the original domains and URLs aren't included in the new disavow file they will no longer be disavowed. Is this true? If so, is it possible that a smaller disavow file uploaded in Feb would cause rankings to drop after the May 3 Quality update? Can I correct this by disavowing all the previously disavowed domains and URLs? Any advice for determining why the site is performing poorly again? We have well written content, regular blogs, nothing that seems like it should violate the Google guidelines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robertjw0 -
Is it OK to dynamically serve different content to paid and non-paid traffic from the same URL?
Hi Moz! We're trying to serve different content to paid and non-paid visitors from the same URL. Is this black hat? Here's the reason we want to do this -- we're testing a theory that paid ads boost organic rankings. This is something we saw happen to a client and we want to test this further. But we have to have a different UX that's more sparse and converts better for paid. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon_SEO0 -
Will SEO cause a drop in the number of impressions?
Hello, I have been a member of the Moz community for a long time. I very seldom ask questions here but this time I really need your help to make sure I will not make mistakes that will negatively affect my site. My site monetizes according to the number of impressions visualized by the users who visit it. I now want to try to optimize it by using all those nice SEO techniques I have learned through Moz. My goal is to make sure that if I use the various SEO strategies, I will still be able to obtain the high number of impressions I get now. If not, I prefer to leave the situation untouched and I will not start optimizing the site for SEO. Please kindly read the situation below and give me a little support to make sure I am doing the right thing. I would like to ask for your professional advice to solve and issue related to duplicate content. Please visit my site: www.chhedonna.it. The sitemap has indexed 21.890 articles, but if I digit the command 'site:www.chedonna.it', I obtain 158.000 results.I believe that the duplicated content has emerged due to three errors I would like to indicate in order for you to tell me whether my interpretation is correct or not: The article writers made a mistake in that although the content of the articles is different, they have employed the same title for all of them. Therefore, you can see 5 articles with similar/duplicated Tag Titles but the content of said articles is different. For example, http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto and http://www.chedonna.it/attualita/cronaca-rosagossip/2012/12/03/heidi-klum-senza-trucco-e-parrucco-foto-2/ are different articles (i.e., the content of the articles is different from each other) that have been published using the same titles. If I inserted the 'follow-noindex' tag to 3 of the 4 duplicates, as shown in the example above, would that be a solution? I fear that if I did insert the follow-noindex, I would cause a drop in the number of impressions visualized by my site's users. It is important to point out, in fact, that I monetize the site via the number of impressions I generate. Therefore, it is fundamental that I do not compromise the number of impressions that the site gets, if I try to optimize it for SEO reasons. On the other hand, I believe that the idea to operate via a 'rel canonical' would not be right, considering that the content of every post having the same title is different, that is, the articles are different even if they focus on the same topic. Also, I would not find it beneficial to use a '301 redirect', since the number of duplicated Titles Tags is very consistent. 2. The second error concerns the duplicate content due to the images that have been included in the articles. For instance, http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-donna-di-mondo/fare-la-valigia/2012/08/06/campeggio-vacanza-in-liberta/attachment/tenda-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2012/12/04/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2/ http://www.chedonna.it/che-miss/2013/03/15/tatuaggi-fiore-di-loto-significato-e-foto-2/attachment/tatuaggio-fiore-di-loto-2-2/. I could solve this problem by preventing the media indexing. But I fear that this would produce a very high number of '404 error' messages. If such a thing did happen, my site would stop monetizing overall and I cannot allow this to occur, as you can understand. My very important question is the following: if I prevent the indexing of the photos, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions that my site would normally generate? 3. Duplicate content generated by the indexing of archive subpages. For example: http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/ http://www.chedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page2/ http://wwwchedonna.it/tag/angelica-e-ferdinando/page3/ If I prevented the media indexing, will I get in return a drop in the number of impressions and many 404 errors? Thank you very much for taking the time to help me sort out this very important issue. Cheers, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Blocking some countries and redirecting that traffic
Hi there, I have a video site, which is on CDN and is really expensive to run. So I want to block most of the countries and only keep HQ ones. I wonder if there's a difference if I just block them and show blank page, or if I show them a page with text and let's say a link to a different site or if I just simply redirect to some other site. Do you think I can still get good ranking on google on countries that I don't block?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
Big Drop in Traffic, No change in Position
Penguin 2.0 was a great update for one of my biggest client. A website that was using terrible black hat techniques and ranked first on the most important keyword in my clients niche got kickt from the SERP's and my client jumped from 4th to 1st. The jump in traffic was enormous and on top of that 5% of the traffic converted instead of the usual 2,5%- 3% on other traffic. Untill July 2nd. Traffic from the keyword dropped by 80% while we were still in position 1, after a lot of digging I thaught I found what caused it, Google booted the keyword from their autofill. My question is if anyone has seen a removal from tthe autocomplete making that big of a difference in search volume.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Laurensvda1