Massive drop in Google traffic after upping pagecount 8-fold.
-
I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy.
It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage".
It's been online for 4+ years.
Historically, it's been made up of:
-
a single home page
-
~50 "category" pages, and
-
~425 "book list" pages.
(That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.)
On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight.
If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page:
http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805
..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page:
http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116
Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries.
And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google.
(Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...)
Here's the problem:
For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable.
And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today.
And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem...
So:
1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight?
2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority).
3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors.
What else?
Thanks so much, help is very appreciated.
Peter
Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. -
-
Thanks for updating on your findings. That is interesting, but glad you got it sorted.
-
And now another update. About 1 week after removing all the new content, search traffic came right back to where it was. So clearly Google was mad at me. And now they're not. Sigh. Stupid Google.
-
UPDATE: I've removed all the new pages from my site in hopes that it will turn around my losss is search traffic. I'd still like an expert opinion on the matter in general.
-
Indeed, I looked at Webmaster Tools -- no duplicates.
As far as Canonical, while I know and love that feature, I don't think it's relevant here. These pages aren't different URLs for the same content -- they're segments of content taken from different pages, stitched together in a new and useful way.
I think, if this is the problem, that it's the fact that 95% of the new pages only have 1 item of content on them and it's a piece of content that appears elsewhere on the site.
-
Hi Peter
I agree Matt Cutts wasn't very clear as providing a solid number, but I actually consider what he said about relativity. "..if your site was 1 day .. um you know nothing, then the next day there is 4 million pages in our index" seems to me like he was hinting a percentage rather then a hard number. In your case you increased your site by over a 1000% with no new content.
From a useability standpoint it maybe awesome, from an SEO standpoint it may not. I can't say for sure the best way to handle it, but if it was me I would not throw away the benefit to my users, I instead would look to see if I can canonicalize any of these pages to prevent lower the burden on Google to try and differentiate one page from another.
Have looked at your Google Webmaster Tools to see if they are seeing some pages as duplicates?
-
Don, thatnks for replying. In answer to your questions:
-- Yes we added all the pages to the sitemap.
--As far as the content being unique, no -- not one word on any of the pages is unique. But the aggregation of the information onto those pages is unique and helpful to the end user. For example, say you had a site full of movies that won Oscars -- winners of 2010, all movies that won Best Director, all movies that won best Music, etc. Now imagine you'd like to see all the Tom Hanks movies that have won Oscars. There are a number of Tom Hanks movies scattered across the lists but there's no easy way to see them all at once. So generating a list of Tom Hanks movies that won Oscars is easy and useful. Only problem is, about 95% of the time when you generate such lists, you'll generate them for actors that were only in 1 Oscar-winning movie... hence a bunch of pages that are of little use. But why would that hurt traffic to all the pages that HAVE been of use for the last several years?
That Matt Cutts video was interesting... but I'm not sure if there's a clear answer there. he said 100+ pages at once is fine. But 10,000... maybe not. So what about 4,500?
-
Hi Peter,
According to Matt Cutts as long as the content is quality / good / unique you should not have been dinged.
You watch his answer to a very similar question on youtube here.
Now what is interesting is you went from 500 pages to 4000 pages. That is a huge update in terms of what your site has been offering so there maybe something going on there.
Did you submit all these page in a sitemap to Google? and by nature of these pages was the content unique or snippets of the inner content?
I will add a story about our how I handled a similar situation and maybe give you something to ponder. We have an o-ring size look up section on our site, the urls being generated are dynamic and number in the thousands, due to the combination of sizes, materials, and hardness. I did not tell Google about these links in the sitemap, rather just put a link to 8 main materials in the sitemap and then let Google discover the dynamic urls on their own.
After 6 months I noticed that Google was actually treating many of the deep pages as duplicate content, so I used rel='canonical" to direct the juice to the top material pages. Our traffic and SERP ratings went up for these pages.
I tell that to illustrate what I learned, having more pages isn't always good, in my case a nitrile as568-001 oring page isn't that different from a nitrile as568-002 oring page, and while they are certainly different sizes you can find information on either one from the nitrile as568 page. The smart thing I did was not flooding Google with thousands of new pages, the dumb thing I did was not canonicalizing the deep pages to begin with.
I will be interested in what others have to say on this subject, and I hope this helps.
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
-
Page drops from index completely
We have a page that is ranking organically at #1 but over the past couple of months the page has twice dropped from a search term entirely. There don't appear to be any issues with the page in Search Console and adding the page on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url seems to fix the issue. The search term we're tracking that drops is in the URL for the page and is the h1 of the page. Here is a screenshot of the ranking over the past few months: https://jmp.sh/akvaKGF What could cause this to happen? There is nothing in search console that shows any problems with the page. The last time this happened the page completely dropped on all search terms and showed up again after submitting the url to google manually. This time it dropped on just one search term and reappeared the next day after manually submitting the page again. akvaKGF
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | russell_ms0 -
Does Google want contact numbers in the meta description?!
Reading up it seems like there's complete free reign to enter what you want in the meta description and they are not considered a direct ranking signal However I have added contact numbers to the meta descriptions for around 20 reasonably high ranking pages for my company and it seems to have had a negative effect (taken screen grabs and previous rankings) More strangely when you 'inspect' the page the meta description features the desired number yet when you find the page in the serps the meta description just does not feature the number (page has been cached and the description does not carry on) I'm wondering whether such direct changes are seen as spam and therefore negative to the page?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing1 -
Traffic going down in all sites in a niche
Hello, A client has three Ecommerce sites in a niche. Because of competition and a (possibly) non manual penalty due to doorways and paid links (though I think it's mainly competition too) our traffic is going down. What are the keys to increasing traffic at this point. Feel free to include tricks that cost money. A Hrefs (I love Moz though!) has some neat content tricks. Please give me the best tricks in the industry to increase traffic. We're adding content to the main site of the three and maybe that's what to focus on, but we're having trouble driving serious traffic with the content. We need serious traffic. We are experts in our field and capable of almost anything as far as information goes in our field. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Have just submitted Disavow file to Google: Shall I wait until after they have removed bad links to start new content lead SEO campaign?
Hi guys, I am currently conducting some SEO work for a client. Their previous SEO company had built a lot of low quality/spam links to their site and as a result their rankings and traffic have dropped dramatically. I have analysed their current link profile, and have submitted the spammiest domains to Google via the Disavow tool. The question I had was.. Do I wait until Google removes the spam links that I have submitted, and then start the new content based SEO campaign. Or would it be okay to start the content based SEO campaign now, even though the current spam links havent been removed yet.. Look forward to your replies on this...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Google Reconsideration Requests no problem... So what do I do next?
Hi all, So I recently filed a Google reconsideration request - but it came back saying "No manual spam actions found" - ok, so that's that. But from what I've read, if we have been hit by Panda for duplicate or thin content, we wouldn't know - in other words, Google does not report it as it is an algorhythm penalty as opposed to a manual one. So what are my options - do I wait until the next Panda update? when can that be? Or do I start over on a fresh domain? Input and views appreciated. thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Oh sh@t Wetherby Racecourse has been de indexed by Google :-(
Dio mio! Wetherby racecourse <cite>www.wetherbyracing.co.uk/</cite> has been de indexed by Google, re indexing request has been made via webmaster tools and the offending 3rd party banner ad has been stripped out. So my question is please. How long will it take approximately to re -index?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nightwing
And is it true re submitting an updated xml site & firing tweets at the ailing site may spark it back into life? Grazie tanto,David0 -
It Shows as "google results" but it's an incoming links, is it spaming me...?
Hello everyone I have 2 issues to share: 1) We have a site (personal-loans.org), In the past few weeks we notice that there are sites that have links to our site and we get traffic from them but...! when you go online to these sites they show you that all they do is provide "google search" results, because we where in first page on the results we had hits there as well what leads me to think that this is the reason we are at page 7 now after yesterday the ranking was at page 4. these are some of these sites so you can see it: internetpayadvances.com fastlivecashadvance.com assistancemoney.com scoutcashnow.com officialpayday.net Does anyone else got to see anything like that...??? I have many more links like that, these are only 5 out of 9 that had hits yesterday only, site traffic went from 250-300 to 63 a day... For the same site - it was on google search results 1st page and ranked 4-7, even after the big penguin changes. What we did notice is that A LOT of non related sites like surfing (yes ocean surfing) and sites that had no content AT ALL - all the text was inside of an image and ranked 3! 3rd on payday loans search result. (and the rest was and still just looks the same with different content...) Google say they want quality but does not do homework for the 2nd largest search for keywords such as loans and payday loans market, same goes for the cash advance. Please help, need your advice.... Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Yonnir0 -
Local Listing Spam - Why is Google Missing this?
I have a competitor that ranks in Google Search for a Top Dollar Keyword in the organic rankings with the normal result, however just below that it shows another result that contains the Local City Name followed by their business name. In the URL they have domain.com > Local and below the description data it shows a map for a totally different location as this competitor only has one location... Once clicking on the link I found that it has everything in the title, description and h1 and body content in footer that talks about the local area but not their product. and when you click the breadcrumbs you can go back to a directory of all the other cities and states they are targeting with doorway pages with the same layout however the anchor text is cityname+keyword How are they getting away with this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ben-HPB0