Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?

[DougRoberts]

I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic.

This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks.

The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT.

When I investigated I found:

• There had been no changes/updates to the site in question
• There were no messages in GWT indicating a manual penalty
• The number of pages indexed shows no significant change
• There are no particular trends in keywords/queries affected (they all were.)

I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery.

The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.)

Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?)

Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url.

The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been.

This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities".

Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned.

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[DougRoberts]

Well the good news is, after all that, the development server is now safely behind authentication and the level of traffic to the site has returned to previous levels for the last three weeks. Fingers crossed it won't be going anywhere.

It has been a wake-up call for the client though and it's started some useful discussions. Every cloud...

Thanks for the support!

[JaneCopland]

I hope not, for your sake! 13 hours later - do you see any new downturn?

[DougRoberts]

Ad then, just as I say that - I see the following article:

Google's Update From Last Week Reversing Itself?

Sigh

[DougRoberts]

Tracking rankings on this site is pretty impossible. Keywords/queries sending traffic are completely dependant on that day/week/months news stories. (I've come in late to this one - the client isn't tracking any specific keywords.)

Traffic appears to have suddenly reverted to "normal". Yesterday's traffic was right back to where we'd expect it to be and today is looking pretty good too. I'm looking to see if there's a similar correlation with SERP volatility (which I'd guess you'd expect if there was an algorithm update at play...)

I still feel as if I'd put my money on the large volume of links moving around.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Doug,

Ah - sorry, I misunderstood about the links disappearing and the rankings suffering on the same day. I am not sure how quickly Ahrefs updates - it might be slightly quicker than Moz, but we're still talking a possible couple of weeks in between. That would be enough to cause rankings and traffic to go down if those links, despite being dynamically generated, were helping before.

Is the significant improvement in traffic coming with improved rankings that you can track? It's incredibly frustrating to have lost keyword data in times like this - you're relying on the rankings you're already tracking through tools like Moz to see which keywords are on the rise...

[DougRoberts]

Hi Jane,

As is all to frequent - it's a bit like hitting a moving target...

I don't believe there have been any other changes to the site, but I can't confirm that with anything approaching absolute confidence.

The one thing to be aware of is that links to this site are generated automatically based on the way news articles are tagged on "sister sites". This means that there's a considerable ebb and flow of links pointing to the site.

The development site that was pointing all these links additional links to the target site has now been placed behind some authentication (this happened a week or so ago). Even though some of the links from this site had be rediscovered before that was done - there was no sign of any upswing.

Nothing that I'm aware of has changed, but over the weekend/today we're now seeing a significant improvement in organic traffic (it's too early to talk about a recovery though.) GWT is also started showing a lift in the impressions too. We'll need to see what happens over the next couple of days.

I don't think that the disappearance of the links happened on exactly the same day as the site lost it's traffic. All I can tell is that ahrefs reported the -17k links on the same day. I've not been able to establish when exactly the links were removed. (Important lesson for the web developer here - make sure you keep a decent change-log!)

Following David's tip off, I did a bit of digging around any updates that may have affected things.

Mozcast showed a couple of days of activity on the 17/18th and Rank Ranger had an indication of an update at the same time. Serpmetrics etc also had similar indications.

Unfortunately I've not managed to get any info on the kind of sites/pages that were affected or what features they might have had in common so it's hard to say whether we're looking at the impact of a update on google's side or whether it's the links/local changes that are the cause. (Or some combo of the two!)

The good news is that it's been a wake-up call to the client. They now realise that the site in question has some significant weaknesses that need to be addressed and can't/shouldn't just rely on these "unnatural" links from their sister sites!

"Keep calm, don't panic and don't over-react!"

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[JaneCopland]

Hi Doug,

Checking in on this one - has there been any change in the traffic, or have you uncovered any more information (especially regarding any other updates that might have affected the site) that could have had an effect during that time?

Losing a large chunk of links can hurt a site, but it would be incredibly quick for the link loss and traffic loss to happen on the same day. It would take Google the day to note that all 17k links were gone, then you're probably looking at a number of days for that to actually play out in search results.

[Kingof5]

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-brewing-18447.html

[DougRoberts]

Hi David, do you have any details? If this is the case it would be nice to compare sites and see what the common factors might be.

[Kingof5]

Many people had big drops around the same time period, so likely an algorithm update that impacted you.

[DougRoberts]

I don't think it's affected any anchor ratios. The is a huge level of diversification in the anchor texts used. 17k out of 900k isn't a large proportion.

The interlinking from sister sites has been in place for a long long time - it's not something that's been added recently.

I've dropped you a PM.

[MattAntonino]

I understand client confidentiality - if you want to PM me the link to look at privately, I'd be happy to.

That being said, anchors finally get too high?  Did losing 17k knock them WAY out of whack?  (Anchor on the other links was 18%, now 35% or something?)

"links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites" = this could definitely be the issue as well.  I have a few ideas but hard to tell without knowing just a bit more.