Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?
-
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.
-
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!
-
I hope not, for your sake! 13 hours later - do you see any new downturn?
-
Ad then, just as I say that - I see the following article:
Google's Update From Last Week Reversing Itself?
Sigh
-
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.
-
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...
-
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!"
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
Many people had big drops around the same time period, so likely an algorithm update that impacted you.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Doing large scale visual link/content analysis
Hi i currently have a list of about 5000 URLs i want to visually check quickly, to identify decent content. I'm currently opening 200 at a time with firefox, more than 200 it gets really choppy and slow as you would expect. I was wondering if anyone knew any other ways of opening a large amount of web pages. It would be sweet if there was a tool which can scan a list, add the webpages to a pdf/powerpoint and send them back to you for analysis. Kind Regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0080 -
My Website Has a Google Penalty, But I Can't Disavow Links
I have a client who has definitely been penalized, rankings dropped for all keywords and hundreds of malicious backlinks when checked with WebMeUp....However, when I run the backlink portfolio on Moz, or any other tool, they don't appear anyone, and all the links are dead when I click on the actual URL. That being said, I can't disavow links that don't exist, and they don't show up in Webmaster Tools, but I KNOW this site has been penalized. Also- I noticed this today (attached). Any suggestions? I've never come across this issue before. xT6JNJC.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Site Redesign - Inbound Links
Hello all. What would be some of the best practices or good resources on site redesign while maintaining inbound links? We would hate to have the natural, organic links to the site we have generated over the past 3 years to all of a sudden become broken. The domain is not changing but the URL structure very well may. For example, www.domain dot com/blog/postabouttopic which has many inbound links may move to www.domain dot com/news/blog/postabouttopic Is it a matter of simply using 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages? Is there any issues to be aware of when having hundreds of 301 redirects? Is there a best practice? A good site that explains this in detail? Thank you for your time! Have a great day!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S2RSolutions0 -
My warning report says I have too many on page links - 517! I can't find 50% of them but my q is about no follow
if we put 'no follow' on some of these links does that mean the search engines won't index the no follow pages even if those pages are linked to from elsewhere? no link juice will flow from the page with the (no follow) links on? Just trying to understand why my rankings have dropped so dramatically in the last 6 weeks or so since we redesigned the site, and it might be that now we have too many links on the homepage. This is the page http://www.suffolktouristguide.com/ All suggestions appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahinSuffolk0 -
Best way to find broken links on a large site?
I've tried using Xenu, but this is a bit time consuming because it only tells you if the link sin't found & doesn't tell you which pages link to the 404'd page. Webmaster tools seems a bit dated & unreliable. Several of the links it lists as broken aren't. Does anyone have any other suggestions for compiling a list of broken links on a large site>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Nobody Can Answer This? What Can Google Tell About Videos?
I uploaded a video to youtube one time and then went to upload it again, but saved differently with different tags. Youtube rejected the second upload as being the same as the first. Really, it was the same... just a different file with different tags. Now, I was thinking about making and uploading some similar but not identical videos for embedding on some web pages. Was thinking I'd make the voice overs different, but the images mostly the same montage. Do you think Youtube/Google will see it as the same video? I kind of assume that it didn't fly when I first tried it some time ago because youtube was looking at the audio in the way it can make a transcription. Do you think if the audi,o, file name, tags were different, it wouldn't matter if the video was the same? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010