May last year my sites orgainic listings, and therfore visitors, plumeted. Why?
-
Hello,
May last year my site took a major fall. I am unsure why, and it's time I found out why. Recently I have rebuilt the site from scratch, except for the urls and content, and it's starting to turn back.
What is the best method to go about understanding just what caused the decline? What are the options I have?
See the image for a graph of the all-time traffic. http://i.imgur.com/uL93yPj.png
My website in question is: www.ditalia.com.au
Thanks.
-
Thanks guys, this does seam like a good place to get answers and help in my area of expertise--design and layout.I have had a couple of SEO people work on backlinks and they say they didn't do any black-hat stuff. But, I guess I will find out during this research and fix.
-
Did you get a manual penalty notice in Webmaster Tools?
-
I haven't had any penalty notifications from Google at all. (other than some 404 errors)
-
Have you examined your link profile closely for obvious spammy, dubious, unrelated links?
-
I will check this.
-
Are your inbound links heavy with keyword anchor text?
-
I will check this.
-
Is your textual content unique and give value to your visitor?
-
Yes, every page is unique, however, I have not check for plagiarism--if others have stolen it from us.
-
have you changed your meta content?
-
Only recently when I made the new site--about 4 weeks ago. They weren't change just before May 2012.
-
is the drop relating to certain keywords
-
Pretty much all of them.
MOZ has scanned my site and is displaying data about it now so I will start researching the links, determine their quality, and research how to
Any advice you have would be much appreciated.
-
-
Michael's questions are spot on but based on the timing and a quick glance at your anchor text profile I think it's pretty safe to say you were hit by Penguin. I'd assume there was some shady link building done to your site in the past through a link-blast service or some black-hat SEO.
Your site has a ton of links with the anchor phrasing of "wedding dress" or some variation thereof. I would suggest that you do some research on Penguin penalties and how to clean them up and definitely check Webmaster Tools for penalty notifications.
This is a good community to stay close to throughout this process. There are a ton of helpful people here who can help with questions along the way.
Good luck!
-
It might tie in with either Penguin or Panda updates, although content is Panda and Penguin is links (URLs).
- Did you get a manual penalty notice in Webmaster Tools?
- Have you examined your link profile closely for obvious spammy, dubious, unrelated links?
- Are your inbound links heavy with keyword anchor text?
- Is your textual content unique and give value to your visitor?
- have you changed your meta content?
- is the drop relating to certain keywords
- how have rankings stacked up over the past 2yrs - have they fallen?
You need to examine closely so that all your work doesn't fall flat 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
-
Www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion_async.js what is this url doing on my site?
Hello Guys, I am using google tagmanager and i have configured adwords in tag manager now what i find is that this link - www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion_async.js showing on my homepage not in view source but when i do inspect element at that time it appears. So do you think after using google tag manager still i need to use the given link? Thanks, Raghu
Reporting & Analytics | | raghuvinder0 -
Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?
My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product. Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same. I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Large event site - how should I structure my URLs?
Hi guys, I'm working on a new website which is consolidating a number of existing event sites into one. The existing sites use a variety of URL structures: www.eventsite1.com/events/event-name www.eventsite2.com/festival-program/event-name www.eventsite3.com/event-name This inconsistency has led to issues with tracking category usage properly in analytics - for instance, with eventsite3.com, events fall within categories (www.eventsite3.com/category-name) but as soon as you drill into an event detail page (www.eventsite3.com/event-name) from the category page, the category is lost to analytics. This is compounded when one event lives within multiple categories, as I can't figure out which category is the most effective for a particular event. I've seen other event sites establish a canonical URL for a primary category, display it in the URL (i.e. www.eventsite4.com/primary-category/event-name) yet still let that event get hit via the secondary categories (www.eventsite4.com/secondary-category/event-name). This way, the categories get passed to analytics without any duplicate content issues (i.e. via the setting of canonicals) Basically, I want to make sure that whatever instruction I give to the devs for the new site re: URL structure is correct from an SEO perspective and analytics perspective. Do I even need to worry about having the category in the URL? Can someone please help me with this? Hope this makes sense Cheers
Reporting & Analytics | | cos20300 -
Google Analytics-Unique visitors?
Does organic search data show unique visitors or all visits? For example, if someone ( a single person) visits my site multiple times after searching the same keyword phrase, does that show in my analytics data as 1 hit from that keyword, or all hits? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RickyShockley0 -
Does anyone know what's happened to google analytics -> traffic sources -> SEO -> queries many of my accounts are showing a drop to zero in the laste few days
Howdy mozzers It's in the question title really. Zero impressions showing for the last few days on. Multiple accounts Any thought out there
Reporting & Analytics | | Big_Partnership0 -
When one of my sites returns a ranking that consistently reads "No Data", what does that say about the site?
I am getting "No Data" reads for some of my sites - I personally think it has to do with the site's construction - especially the landing page... I inherited this site to do SEO - it was not created with on site SEO in mind - please help if you can sites are: www.storagesanangelo.com www.storagemidland.com Should I get webmaster to remove the big map graphic and add text and pics instead... Sure appreciate brilliant thoughts - even about yetis and beer
Reporting & Analytics | | creativeguy0 -
Setting Up Google Analytic with Sub Folder Sites
What is the best way of setting up Google Analytic for a website that has many sub folders? The main site is example.com and it has 40 sub folder sites like example.com/uk example.com/France etc etc Would it be advised to track a single domain in Google Analytic then create filters for the sub folder sites. Filters > Include traffic from > Sub directories Also with this method is it possible to view overall incoming website stats for everything? Previous experience would be great with this thanks 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | daracreative0 -
Something strange going on with new client's site...
Please forgive my stupidity if there is something obvious here which I have missed (I keep assuming that must be the case), but any advice on this would be much appreciated. We've just acquired a new client. Despite having a site for plenty of time now they did not previously have analytics with their last company (I know, a crime!). They've been with us for about a month now and we've managed to get them some great rankings already. To be fair, the rankings weren't bad before us either. Anyway. They have multiple position one rankings for well searched terms both locally and nationally. One would assume therefore that a lot of their traffic would come from Google right? Not according to their analytics. In fact, very little of it does... instead, 70% of their average 3,000 visits per month comes from just one referring site. A framed version of their site which is through reachlocal, which itself doesn't rank for any of their terms. I don't get it... The URL of the site is: www.namgrass.co.uk (ignore there being a .com too, that's a portal as they cover other countries). The referring site causing me all this confusion is: http://namgrass.rtrk.co.uk/ (see source code at the bottom for the reachlocal thing). Now I know reach local certainly isn't sending them all that traffic, so why does GA say it is... and what is this reachlocal thing anyway?? I mean, I know what reachlocal is, but what gives here with regards to it? Any ideas, please??
Reporting & Analytics | | SteveOllington0