We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?

[skjorte1974]

Hi Mozzers!

Need some help/advice

I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19^th may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about.

A few observations / thoughts;

• It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed?
• Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange …
• We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time?
• Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before.

Any feedback would be appreciated

Thanks!

Mike

[gazzerman1]

Take a good look at some of the pages you have indexed here

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://superbetting.com/forum/&num=100

Decide what should not be there and remove them with a noindex. This will help with quality Score.

Then do a fetch in Webmaster Tools to speed the indexing up. That should help you on your way.

Disavow all the crap links ASAP

[skjorte1974]

Hi Tom,

I follow you on the link profile but I honestly don't think we've been that aggressive

Yes, we've been hit with numerous spammers and have been trying to clean up but not good enough I suppose. Will look into that one.

Mike

[TomRayner]

Hi Mike

I'm looking at your link profile now and there are quite a few links in there that could be perceived to be unnatural (what betting site doesn't have these though, right?  Used to work for a big brand in-house myself), however, I'm with you in being concerned about these Russian links and anchors.

It looks like your forum has been getting spammed massively.  I can see russian anchors with anchor text like "useful links" and "useful products" - I can even see some Minecraft anchor text in there.  It almost looks as though someone is using your forum to build forum links to rank their spam site.

Have you had trouble recently with spam hitting your forums?  I worry that some people have been ploughing your forum with spam - and thus your site with spammy links - and it may have had a negative effect.