(updated) Huge Drop in Traffic Related to DMCA...?
-
(update: How would I know if someone has filed a DMCA Takedown Request? There is no message on Webmaster Tools. The reason I ask is because a few months back my client's old SEO threatened him with copyright infringement, and I believe the date of the threatening letter coincides with our drop in traffic. Coincidence?)
We've been increasing traffic for a pest control client on a very consistent basis throughout the year. However, in October we noticed a drop but I honestly didn't dig too deeply into the issue. In November we saw another drop...a very large drop...in traffic. Since September, we've lost 50% of search traffic.
We've lost specifically branded search traffic, which baffles me. What are some reasons for losing branded search traffic? I've consulted the client and asked if there is anything happening within the business that I should know about, but things seem to pretty normal as far as he can tell.
We are also losing rankings dramatically. We've had two locations on Google Places pending for over a month, which I've consulted Google about but, of course, have received no response.
The strangest part is that SEOMoz is showing our errors on site have increased dramatically, when we have done nothing new or different over these past few months. It's been business as usual, and yet we are losing traffic, rankings, and errors have gone up.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! http://www.MagicPest.com
Thank you!
-
Yep, this definitely is an issue that we are painstakingly working through. The old SEO really did a number on their content. Thanks so much!
-
It has to be something related to their recent algo updates.
This little chunk of text might be your problem as it is showing up on most pages - http://screencast.com/t/3SakXPlpL.
1. This is duplicate content.
2. It also looks like keyword stuffing
3. More than the suggested amount of links
4. Google might be viewing it as an excessive and unnatural internal linking strategy
I can't guarantee this is the main cause of the problems, but it might be contributing to it. Google's just getting way more picky about this stuff
-
Thanks Streamline Metrics! Yes, the drop has been across all keywords. I've checked our branded rankings and they have remained the same as branded traffic has decreased. And yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools and do not see anything fishy, although it does appear that Google is crawling less pages, though not sure why. It's got to be the recent Google updates.
-
Usually a drop in branded traffic can be attributed to a change in offline advertising, such as ending TV or radio commercials or flyers in those coupon magazines. But if the client says everything has remained the same, then I'm not 100% sure what to tell you without actually digging into the data. Did you notice a similar drop in non-branded keywords? Or only branded terms?
Have you claimed your site in Google Webmaster Tools? Have you gotten any messages from Google about possible penalties (usually from unnatural linkbuilding), site errors or even possible malware?
Also, there have been several Panda updates/refreshes the past few months, which may have had an impact on your site if you have several pages with low quality content.
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
-
My ranking drop after migrating to https
Hey, I have migrated my website from http to https. But, all my ranking is dropped from first page to 3 or 4 page or some keywords are disappeared. I have redirected all my urls to https and done everything properly. Please help me. My website is justinterio.com
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore1 -
Organic Traffic Down March-April 2016
Hello MOZ Community! I have been scouring the web to try and assess what may be responsible for our sites traffic decline which fell off quite suddenly between March and April of this year. While I have heard of two specific things that may have impacted us: The Mobile-Friendly update (April 2016) Phantom Update (May 2016) I would like to share what we have tried to uncover ourselves, and would welcome your thoughts/feedback on what may have happened, thoughts on repairing the rank damage, and in general. In May we noticed a large cooling off of our organic searches from Google, the largest a >30% occured in June, but on average we're seeing a trend of 23% less visitors from organic search than only months prior. Paired with this was a decrease in overall visibility, like a number of pages were struck from indexing. The number of URLs ranked in the Top 100 listings dropped by ~ 32% at the beginning of April We review our visibility with SISTRIX's Visibility Index tool, which showed a visibility plummet of almost 50% between mid-March and mid-April Traffic, until towards the end of July, early August has remained low and now only really returning to normal levels in the past few days. All that said, we're puzzled by what would cause such a sharp decline in visibility > organic search. Regarding the known/unknown Google Updates, while our primary site is responsive, we do have a number of old help/support pages that are not responsive – So that is one theory, but I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you have, or to know if anyone else experienced a drop within the same timeframe.
Technical SEO | | kernewein0 -
Best tool to find Related keywords with a Keyword provided.
Hi, Best tool to find Related keywords with a Keyword provided. Basically i want to give a keyword and find all related keywords we can use to write articles. Also any way we can find what keyword a page is getting traffic based on? Thanks
Technical SEO | | skandlikp90 -
How can you tell if you were hit by the Pay Day Loan update in 2013?
Hi All, I have a feeling that our site was hit by the Pay Day Loan update in 2013. We have a website offering serviced apartments - I have seen lots of talk in forums about porn, apartment rentals and finances being among the websites hit by this update. Can anyone offer any advice on whether this is the case and what action might be needed in order to get this penalty taken off our site? Thanks guys! Laura
Technical SEO | | Citybase0 -
301 redirect to WWW on a 2 year old website with good SERPs and organic traffic?
Hi everyone, Recently someone pointed out that my website can be accessed in both ways i.e. by typing www.example.com or example.com. He further added that Google might identify this as duplicate content and penalize my website. So now I'm thinking about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess method. But my website is 2 year old now and I'm getting some decent traffic from Google. Will this redirection have an adverse effect on my rankings? Is there any other way to resolve this issue? I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic. Any help would be very much appreciated. P.S. Currently Google index my website pages with WWW.
Technical SEO | | nicksharma040 -
HTTP to HTTPS Transition, Large Drop in Search Traffic
My URL is: https://www.seattlecoffeegear.comWe implemented https across the site on Friday. Saturday and Sunday search traffic was normal/slightly higher than normal (in analytics) and slightly down in GWT. Today, it has dropped significantly in both, to about half of normal search traffic. From everything we can see, we implemented this correctly. 301 redirected all http requests to https (and yes, they go to the correct page and not to the homepage 😉 ) Rewrote hardcoded internal links Registered/submitted sitemaps from https in Bing and GWT Used fetch and render to ensure Google could reach the site and also was redirected appropriately from http to https versions Ensured robots.txt does not block https or secure We also use a CDN (though I don't think that impacts anything) and have had no customer issues with accessing or using the website since the transition.Is there anything else I might be missing that could correlate to a drop in search impressions or is this just a waiting game of a few days to let Google sort through the change we've made and reindex everything (it dropped to 0 indexed for a day and is now up to 1744 of our 2180 pages indexed)?Thank you so much for any input!Kaylie
Technical SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Steady, but continous Google traffic drop. Help?
I am facing a steady, but deteriorating Google traffic drop and i am struggling to find the real reasons. The site is in the video entertainment niche. Here is some data regarding the site in general: Site redesign happened around June We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago) GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic Removal of old content during August Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure) Robots file disallows only search-generated pages No sitemap errors or warnings 2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs Thank you and appreciate your help. wyOyoA9
Technical SEO | | dimicos1 -
301 Re-direct as referral traffic
So we have this site set up in analytics as www.domain.com and then analytics is showing the referral traffic as coming from domain.com and I just wanted to make sure I'm right in the theory that Google is counting the 301 as a different site and showing what is otherwise direct traffic as traffic coming from domain.com. If that's wrong let me know. Otherwise I'll just go through with that theory since no one on any forums that I could find had an answer to it.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0