Lost over 65% of organic visits since Sept - Please help

[isntworkdull]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to SEOmoz, i am here because i dont seem to be getting any actuall help from my SEO company, so am trying to figure this out myself.

I have done a quick analysis using google analytics and have gone from 13441 google organic visitors in Sept to 4527 google organic visitors in March.

(see attached image GA Sept - March)

Visitor numbers seems be to fairly stable in sept, oct, nov, and perhaps a slight decline in Dec, but then on Jan17th seems a big drop, and i have never recovered...

(See images GA - Oct, GA - Nov, GA - Dec and GA - Jan )

I am at a bit of a loss, i have heard about google penalties, but there are no warnings in my webmaster tools about this, the only warning i ever got was a message on Dec 24th which read :

http://XXX.co.uk/: Big traffic change for top URL

Search results clicks for (my site) have decreased significantly.

The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates. However, if you have recently made significant changes to the content or configuration of your site, this change may be an indication that there are problems.

This is not a penalty notice is it? its simply google telling me i have lost a lot of traffic?

Strange thing is December's traffic was pretty much fine, so do not understand why i got this message, when the drop in traffic happened a month later.

I've been racking my brain for months trying to fix every little possible issue i can find with my site (its not nice, when you do not actually know what google has decided it doesn't like about your site!) but nothing seems to be helping, i've been hiring content writter's as i found loads of websites have copied a lot of content, i also decided maybe the product descriptions are being classed as duplicate so again have got in content writter's to re-write hundreds of product descriptions (all this is costing me an arm and a leg)... Nada!

Then today, when doing this google analysis (see image GA Sept - March) i noticed two sites, i have renamed them on the image to:

XXX-1.co.uk & XXX-2.ecomm-search.com

XXX-1.co.uk was a test server where i could play around with code on  my website before i actually implement changes, usually i delete all the files after i use it... but it looks like i forgot to do that.... the site is a complete copy of my website (but obviously a version where you can not actually process an order) but all the pages still have canonical links back to the proper website... Just in case this was causing issues, i have 301 redirected the site back to my main site... Is this wise? or should i just delete the site?

XXX-2.ecomm-search.com is a search company i was trialing as i wanted to improve the search functionality on my own site, however the search features are hosted on their site... I was told it has no bearing on SEO as its not indexed... however if google is seeing refferalls coming from that site, which is basically a duplicate of my search pages but with better functionality, could they be considering this a duplicate content issue?

If anybody can give me any advice at all about above questions, or in general about what happened on Jan 17th (as i see from web search's many people were affected but i can not seem to find people who actually know what google did) i would be very grateful.

Thanks

James

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[isntworkdull]

Hi EGOL,

Thanks for the link, i went through the quiz, and a couple of things jump out at me...

First it talks about "thin content" being lots of images then a little writing, or just a few paragraphs of text and lots of images on a page...

The majority of my pages are like this, we're an ecommerce website, so all product categories have many images and little bits of text etc...

I dont think there is too much i can do about that one, as i'm not about to try to pioneer a new way of designing ecommerce stores! lol

However, another issue it pointed out is links from "blogs / directories" etc that have keywords in the anchor text... Well i have loads of these, i know my SEO company does link building for me, not too sure how much of it involves directories, but i'll have to speak to them and perhaps get them to stop (remove if possible) them...

To be honest this has opened up a hole new can of worms for me lol, what a mine field SEO is ahh... Just looking at anchor text causing websites to drop in rankings makes me wonder, what about the links that are not on directories / blogs etc... do you get punished if they also use key words in anchor text? I mean, i appreciate google saying it doesnt look natural, but who owns / updates websites that hasnt heard of SEO and would not use a keyword as anchor text if linking to someone? I know if i link to a website, the anchor text isnt just the brand name.

Also, what about if your brand name is a keyword, i heard before google was giving less weight to companies who use a keyword in their URL... but wouldn't this mean they have no choice but to give a little extra weight to companies with the keyword in their domain.... as now the anchor text can be their brand name... and a keyword...

OK i'm straying... getting back on track... if the issue is being cause by this anchor text / keyword ratio... how can one go about fixing this?

[isntworkdull]

ok i just googled it, and i think your talking about google "places", this has no effect on what i am talking about, i only registered for google places about two weeks ago, so i have never been on the local listings...

Correct me if i have misunderstood please

[MarieHaynes]

By local listings I mean the maps or Google places listings.  These are the ones that come up for local searches such as "plumber in seattle".  They have their own algorithm.  If you have a Google places page and you have over optimized it then it can cause your site to drop out of one of these listings and then appear in the organic listings (the non maps ones).

[Chris.Menke]

I'm guessing link rot or something to do with upstream links.  Majestic SEO may give you some insight into what back links may have disappeared prior to you losing traffic.

[isntworkdull]

Hi Marie,

Can i ask what you mean by "local listings"? Sorry, just no idea what you are reffering to, and if there is a chance it can be part of the cause, i really need to learn

thanks

[MarieHaynes]

My guess (and it can only be a guess without a thorough investigation) is that this is not Panda, Penguin because the dates don't match up with the dates of algo changes.

It could just be a regular algorithm change.  It could be competitors beating you.

It could be that you've dropped out of the local listings.  I've seen a number of sites that have had that happen to them recently.  A drop from local can take you from #1-3 or so to the bottom of the page quite easily.

[isntworkdull]

Most are not massive drops, from say 1st or 2nd to position 8 / 9 (note i'm talking about on Page 1 position)...

Some are all over the place as i mentioned in this thread : http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-it-me-or-google

Kind of shocking how many less visitors you get moving 6-7 positions down the first page ahh...

I've been going through WMT fixing what i can, nothing jumped out at me as a big issue, a few crawl errors etc (when this first came to my attention) i did notice my sitemap was very old... i.e i hadnt updated it in almost a year, obviously thats upto date now.

[Bondara]

Ok,

So we know from your charts 16/17th Jan is when the real drop happened, we know it's not just a handful of keywords it's basically everything down and we know you haven't received a warning so it 'might' not be off the back of a penalty.

What's the drop like in keyword positions in the search engine, we talking a drop from Page 1 to Page 2 or Page 1 to Page 150?

Also in WMT's if you look at the Health tab, flick through some of the sections, see if anything is out of the ordinary around the time the traffic dropped.

EGOL knows what he is doing, so if anything follow his guidance as well.

[EGOL]

Determine the exact date of your traffic drop if possible.  If your traffic tanked on a specific date that is valuable information.

You might have a Panda problem which is from thin content or duplicate content.

You might have a Penguin problem from links that Google does not like.

There are other penalties that could have hit your site.

I would go here.. take the quiz and see if you can determine if it was Panda, Penguin or something else.  http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/

If this is an important site I would hire someone who knows how to diagnose and recover penalized sites.

[isntworkdull]

Hi Bond,

of the top 25 keywords...

1 down by 62% (not provided key word)

2 of them down by approx 35%

1 down by 133%

1 down by 150%

19 of them down by 200% or higher

1 of them up by 40% - This is my brand name

[Bondara]

In Google analytics go traffic sources -> All Traffic -> click Google / organic -> Secondary Dimensions (dropdown) -> Traffic Sources -> Keyword

Now compare the 16th and 17th Jan with the same range in Dec.

Are all keywords massively down or is it a hand full?

[isntworkdull]

Hi Chris,

Drop in traffic is happening for all keywords... but mainly only to do with the home page...

by that i mean nearly all our traffic comes through the home page, apart from one or two other pages... the key words for the other pages have not lost any ranking... only any search where our home page use to do well, is now suffering...

No changes were made to the site during Nov / Dec or Jan... so i dont think it was an on site issue... apart from the duplicate content issue (which was that lots of websites had copied our homepage "introduction to" messgae... so we have since had that re-written...

[Chris.Menke]

Is the drop in traffic happening for keywords across the board or for specific keywords?   From the graphs you gave, it looks like a change in your traffic pattern started in November and your decrease in traffic may have started as early as late that month, too.  Doesn't really look like a penalty, though.  What changes had your seo's been making prior to that time.

[isntworkdull]

Just PM'd the URL to you... Didnt want to post it here

[BeardoCo]

Unless I missed can you attach the real URL of your website or PM the URL.