My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
-
Hi all,
We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower.
One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www).
Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August.
We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor:
- We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks.
- Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day.
- GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact.
- Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google?
This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl
Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for this. When you had the linking issue, did you traffic drop suddenly or was it gradual? Were only the mislinked pages deranked or were all pages on the domain deranked?
-
If you have one of the typical applegate programs they are duplicating your content, competing with you in the SERPs and giving you a big load of worthless to dangerous links.
That's my opinion.
-
It looks like we were hit by this algorithm update described by Matt Cutts:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-four-15705.htmlHe says it is designed to remove duplicate domains from search results, but we still show several times on the first page for some searches and have dropped completely off on many others.
I think this update must have included some Panda elements, or triggered a reevaluation that we fell into because our site is still being indexed.
-
I did take the quiz and got a big fat "maybe."
Our strategy with this site was to nail long tail terms and it worked very well for a while. This is an ecommerce site so I don't think it is out of place to have a lot of item and listing pages. However we do generate several variations of each item page because our products have size, color and shape permutations, and unlike other sites in the same space, we have unique pages for all of those combinations. The pages are different, but perhaps not very significantly. We have had success with this strategy on another site which has not been penalized, though we stepped up the number of item listing pages substantially on this one.
Traffic seems like it may be recovering slowly but you might be right that we are being overly aggressive on the number of generated pages.
-
They are follow links. How does this differ from shopping comparison sites?
-
I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. [...] Do you think this could be hurting me?
Are these followed links? If they are followed links, if they are not hurting you now they have a high chance of hurting you in the future.
-
Hi
I have the same problem. We launched a new site in June and had started to see traffic increase 25% per week. Last week my traffic dropped by 50%.
I use PRweb and send regular press releases to industry magazines to build backlinks. I have also signed up with Applegate who list my stock on their website. I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. The links go back to the individual product pages. Do you think this could be hurting me?
Thanks
-
Consider uploading images that are correctly scaled. You have large images and then you scale them smaller, That means you are loading half a megabyte of images too much.
Also, apply lossless compression and make them smaller without losing any quality.
The subdomains would have hurt your rankings.
It could be another site linked to you with the subdomain and that started the problem, because you didn't already have it handled.
About 5 years ago, a big site linked to us, but they screwed up all the story URLs and my system knew what they really wanted it, so it provided the content. Google trashed all of our listings. It took a month to work out what the problem was, and it took months to recover.
-
we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.
As soon as I see this my BS meter goes off.
Is all of this unique and substantive content? If it is duplicate or thin then you could have a panda problem.
If I was you I would take read about Panda and take the quiz at MyTrafficDropped.com
That might help you understand what's happening.
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
-
Hi. Has anyone seen a drop in their PA recently? We have over 40 clients and 80% dropped and it has been like this for the past 2 months. I wanted to check if other websites are also experiencing this drop or is it just us?
I'm specifically asking for drops happened in the last 2 months, because before that we had a normal trend. Some websites would go up in their PA rankings and some would drop. But seeing 80% of our clients drop like this is just weird. Just wanted to see if other market leaders are also having the same issue so I can stop attributing it something X-Filish! Our clients are all .EDUs if anyone was wondering. Also the maximum drop has been 4 points in a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AP_Search0 -
How to come back from reverse SEO penalization, and how to find out more about it?
Hello, We are currently researching the case of a client that suffered greatly after a campaign of reverse SEO. In a short spam of time (about 6 months) thousands of foul links were created pointing at this site, and as a consequence, it got an algorithmic penalization, and organic traffic dropped almost by half. Does anyone has any experience with this kind of situations we could learn from? Obviously, we are already proceeding to disavow such bad links, but we'd also love to get to know who is behind this. Is there any way of finding out who or what company originated these links. Many bad sites were specifically created to harm this client's reputation, but the registrant is privacy protected. We could at best find out where these sites are hosted. Is there any way we could progress further in finding out more about this? We are talking of a campaing carried out by someone who knows their way around SEO, and which took at least 6 months to a 1 years of constant spammy bombing. Any leads will be greatly appreciated. Regards 5yFVjCI
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClaudioHeilborn0 -
Drop in Indexed pages
Hope everyone is having an Awesome December! I first noticed a drop in my index in the beginnings of November. My site drop in indexed pages from 1400 to 600 in the past 3-4 weeks. I don't know the cause of it, and would like the community to help me figure out why my indexing has dropped. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to read this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BSC0 -
Google Mobile algo traffic issue?
Hello, I have just been approach by a website owner - site isn't mobile friendly in any way - and they've seen a significant fall off in traffic since 23 Jan... backlink profile is clean (and no linkbuilding undertaken) - nothing else has changed... - more than half their traffic is via mobile devices and they've lost a good 1/3 of their traffic - and drilling deeper it's their organic traffic that's been hit. Anybody else seeing similar? edit... for reference: https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-released-mobile-algorithm-think.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
My website has dropped in the rankings drastically. How can I get it back up the SERPs?
I manage a website that I took over 6 months ago - the site was sitting happily on page one of google so I haven't had to do much to keep it there - other than a few onsite improvements. However, last week the site dropped off the SERPs. The site is http://www.pro-techairconditioning.co.uk/content/home.html Could someone please suggest reasons for this and ways to solve the problem? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising0 -
Website keeps dropping in ranking with no visible penalty.
Hi everyone! I would really appreciate your help on this! The website URL is: www.gipsydharma.com It has now been over a year, but we're finding it very difficult to start ranking for any useful keywords. Some keywords like: leather boots / boots for women / handmade clothing at some point went up to page 20, but have now dropped again below page 50. Now, most of our traffic comes from social media so the business is going OK. But the question still remains, what does Google have against the above URL? Its not a super amazing website, but it provides unique and engaging content and has zero spam. I also don't think its over optimized, but I may be wrong on this. Recently, I've also noticed that the Domain Authority has also been going down, it was 46 at some point and now its 40. There's no visible penalty and all the pre-Penguin links (of which there weren't that many, I think) were cleaned up months ago, without Google suggesting that. There are very few keyword rich backlinks and a lot of them come naturally anyways. So again, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GipsyDharma0 -
How to know if your site has been penalized by Google
Hello, One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ogdcorp
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site. While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month) I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content. Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool? Thanks0 -
Newish site dropped out of rankings - is this normal?
I've got a small, 3 month old site that was ranking for a few low-competition keywords. Then, yesterday, it dropped out of the rankings almost completely. The only way to find it is to google the URL/site name, and then it does come up. There are pages in the index, they're just not ranking like they did two days ago. I'm not doing anything black hat or even slightly shady - just writing articles and clean link building. Is this a normal part of the Google process? I've never seen it happen on any other sites I've been involved with.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damoncali0