Traffic down 60% - about to cry, please help
-
Hiya guys and girls,
I've just spent 6 months, a lot of blood sweat and tears, and money developing www.happier.co.uk.
In the last weeks the site started to make a trickle of money, still loss making but showing green shoots. But then on Friday the traffic dropped due to my rankings on google.co.uk dropping.
Visits:
Thur 25th april = 1950
Fri 26th april = 1284
Sat 27th april = 906
So it looks like Ive been hit with some sort of penalty. I did get a warning on the 20th april about an increase in the number of 404 errors, currently showing 77. I've now remove the links to those 404 pages, ive left the 404 pages as is, as was suggested here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools. Could that be the reason?
We have spent a lot of time on site design and content. We think the site is good, but I agree it has a long way to go but without income that is hard, so we have been struggling through. Any ideas on the reason/s for the penalty?
Big thanks,
Julian.
-
Yes that all makes total sense.
It's a real shame that google are so harsh on new sites. New sites need traffic from google like a baby needs oyxgen, and without it they might not be able to survive.
Happier is self funded and about 6 months old, and still losing money every week. I've thought about pluging the plug a fair few times. I'm not sure how much more money to invest, I might be just throwing good money after bad. Sorry whinge over.
-
There's an SEO debate going on right now about whether Panda is less likely to hit established brands. My position is that yes, it is more likely to impact small/new brands and sites. Perhaps once your brand is more established and you have a lot of comments on more of these pages you can try removing the noindex.
Without a full audit I may be missing something, but I hope this helps!
-
Firstly I would like to say a big thanks, your advice and thoughts are greatly appreciated. It has taken the pressure off me a bit, I was panicing but now I'm just a little worried.
I will talk to the tech guys today about noindexing the single deal pages and using a simliar layout to the code pages plus the comment layout from facebook. I don't really want to it as those pages are great for the long tail, checkout the traffic to hotukdeals.com who have a single page for every code and every deal, e.g. hotukdeals.com/deals/adidas-vintage-airline-bag-50-off-15-00-adidas-co-uk-1542011
But I can't afford to carry on with the current drop in traffic so have to make same changes fast.
Man do I hate google at the moment, they rank so much crap and obvious spam in their serps, but penalise a site like happier.co.uk on we have spent a lot of time carefully designing, adding quality content and playing by the rules.
-
The easy questions first: no, I don't think meta descriptions have anything to do with it. Google just crawls in spikes, especially if it detects a higher rate of change than usual. It's generally nothing to be concerned about.
As for thin pages, I think it's fine that you make the distinction between deals and codes. As a user, it just feels like "codes" are more valuable. It's a good idea. You have pages for each large brand, which is hugely important. Categories are also fine, as long as you don't multiply them endlessly.
I'm mostly concerned with pages like this:
http://www.happier.co.uk/deals/marks-and-spencer/3-pack-cotton-pyjamas-10-ms
I'd handle all of these as dropdowns like you seem to be doing on the home page, and make it like these pages never existed. I don't think this will hurt you much, either. I doubt anyone Googles, "deals on 3 packs of cotton pyjamas," and even if they do Google will pull up the text on brand pages.
As for the comments on these deals, see how Facebook does them. Load the first 3 most recent, then have an option for "show all comments."
I would personally put all NSFW content, or anything close to it, behind an authorization wall, then store the authorization in a cookie. This might hurt your rankings for these types of deals, but I feel like it would be well worth it to avoid being classified as someone dealing in adult content. It's unlikely to happen, but it's totally not worth the risk.
Again, I think your site will be fine if you keep at it, even in it's current shape. You know your industry better than I do, but from an SEO perspective I'd make these changes. Think about them and let me know if you see a flaw in them.
-
Hey Carson,
I really appreciated you taking the time to give such a well considered answer. It does make total sense. I feel the same that it's less likely to be a problem with links (which have built naturally and in an ethical way, therefore it would be really harsh to get a penalty for links).
I agree the problem could be thin pages, however to add a little more info into the mix.
-
We wanted to only display voucher codes, and not stuff the page with "deals" that add no extra value. We felt only showing codes in the codes category was a better user experience, than something like this: vouchercodes.co.uk/johnlewis.com - who just fill the page up with "deals" when there are no codes available - e.g. this is what we currently do http://www.happier.co.uk/codes/john-lewis - do you think it would be better to add a few "deals" even though the person visiting this page is looking for "discount codes"?
-
The deal page template is similar to the market leader's - e.g. hotukdeals.com/deals/rowntree-jelly-tots-randoms-160g-64p-pick-mix-150g-74p-fruittella-4pk-55p-mentos-1540682 - hotukdeals.com are in the top 100 sites in the UK according to alexa
In summary, I had considered the issue of thin pages before designing Happier.co.uk and knew it could be an issue, but there is only so much content user's want about a deal or code, and the market leaders seem to rank very well, so felt it would appear almost spammy to fill the pages up with more content, which I understand is opposite to normal advice for webpages.
Not sure about the nsfw content - I know we list sites like ann summers which is a high street brand in the uk which sells sex toys, etc, but as a high street brand I thought they were ok, plus everyone in this niche lists their codes and deals. But users can add content to happier.co.uk so I'm not 100% if more nsfw content is listed, I will check that out.
There are some crawl stats from GWT that spike on the same day our traffic drop, e.g.
Normal kilobyes downloaded per day about 15000, on 27th april it peaked at 45164. See attached image.
And finally, I was told that my IT guys fixed a problem with the meta descriptions the day before the drop in traffic, on most pages with the codes category, previously the meta desc what a templated one, but a handwritten one was in the db but not being used. So they changed that and now the handwritten one is being used. Personally, I can't believe that google would drop traffic to a site just because the meta desc was changed, especially as they are not suppose to use that in ranking a site.
So for the long reply but sometime a lot of info is needed, google is such a tricky beast these days. Here is a summary of my questions:
-
Do you think it would be better to add a few "deals" even though the person visiting this page is looking for "discount codes"?
-
Do the crawl stats, especially to spike in kilobytes per day, point at the problem?
-
Could changing the meta description be the cause?
Thank you for your time,
Julian.
-
-
Hi there,
I'm sorry that your site isn't doing as well as you'd like. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this!
First, I've dealt with a LOT of link penalty questions, and I don't think that's what's happening. Consider, for example, that you have a ton of links for your Frugal 100 program. If you were slapped by Penguin, you would almost definitely not be ranking for "Frugal 100."
If your traffic is down - and SearchMetrics doesn't see it that way - please remember that it could just be fluctuation and SERP volatility that newer sites are prone to. Google tests, gives, takes away, and then gives back.
If you've been penalized (and I'm kinda doubting it), it's probably because of Panda. You have a LOT of really thin pages with little or no content on them and a heavy template. Can you add more content per page or scale back on the template space for individual deals? Do each of these deals need their very own page? I'm not sure, but a lot of deal sites don't do that.
I also noted that you have some adult deals on your site. Do keep in mind that Google might choose not to show the site for SFW deal-related terms if it thinks your content has a lot of NSFW stuff on it.
I hope this helps. Your site doesn't feel like most sites that get penalized - it seems useful to the people it serves. I think you'll be just fine in the end
-
I thought it was now normal for google to send out a "unnatural links" email, e.g. http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-on-how-to-locate-unnatural-links-pointing-to-your-web-site-148190
in the article is says "As you know, Google has been sendingunnatural link warnings to Webmasters for about a year now." dated 13th feb 2013.
So can it be a link penalty without a link warning email? By the way the links are natural and certainly not from thousands of sites, GWT is showing links from 292 domains.
-
No, Google won't tell you the specifics, but I agree this is from the quick building of links in a short amount of time.
-
if it was to do with links would I have got an email from saying that they found unnatural links? Then give me a chance to sort the problem out. Because I didnt I assume that links are not the problem.
-
Google is probably not happy with your link building, I would try to contact some of the links that are not relevant and ask to be removed. I don't know if that will be the best way to spend your time considering the 28,000 new links in 3 months. Maybe some positive social signals would take some of the suspicion down, I think to make 28,000 links seem natural your would have to be trending and going viral on the social networks but even some small work may help.
-
Vouchercodes and hotukdeals have been around for many years and therefore got a considerable amount of authority. What is your traffic like on weekends? I used to run a deals website similar to your own and traffic was always down on the weekend because people would use it more during the build up to the weekend.
-
Hi Rich,
28000 sounds a lot but if a site adds us to their blogroll and they have 28000 pages that would account for all the links.
We done the following types of links building:
- Top quality content, e.g:
- http://www.happier.co.uk/blog/apple-ripping-off-everyone-apart-from-americans-average-iphone-5-international-mark-up-32-samsung-s3-11-3153 (got a link from guadian.co.uk)
- http://www.happier.co.uk/blog/the-frugal-100-awards-2013-edition-2741 (this is where a lot of links can from, all from related niche blogs, they either mentioned us in a post or added a badge to their right nav)
- http://www.happier.co.uk/blog/the-uk-economy-a-billion-here-a-billion-there-1530 (this got a few quality links)
- http://www.happier.co.uk/blog/20-of-the-best-positive-psychology-blogs-of-2012-113 (a few quality links)
Also we have done, some guest posting on related and quality niche blogs, listed the site on some directories (not many), and some general out reach.
-
You appear to have aquired an aweful lot of links in a very short time. A look on Majestic SEO is telling me you have gained 28000 in the last 90 days, how have you been going about link building?
-
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the answer.
Yes it an affiliate site, but these types of sites can do amazing well in terms of rankings and traffic, check these two:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/vouchercodes.co.uk#
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hotukdeals.com
and of course http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/retailmenot.com
They are all similar sites. Maybe linking out from the homepage was not a great idea, but I thought it was user friendly, e.g. user see a code, so they click and go directly to merchant and get the code instead of going to deeper page, then get the code. In fact, I just checked and that is just how retailmenot.com works, which to my knowledge is most popular coupon site in the world.
I'm still dazed and confused.
-
i doubt that is the reason for your drop in all honesty, i'd suggest if you can redirecting to a category to avoid any issues though.
Id suggest adding more value content to the front page, at the moment its just a link-out affiliate site, these don't usually do amazingly well in search - you are adding a blog and forum that is great but maybe look at surfacing them on the front page if you can to add some depth to the site other than via the top nav.
other than that without delving into your stats and GWT i can't say too much.
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
-
Sudden drop in organic traffic after migration from Django to Wordpress.
I have seen a sudden drop organic reach in a particular page of our website www.hackerearth.com/innovation earlier this was www.hackerearth.com/sprint. I although understand that it happens while migration but it has been a while we did the migration. The migration happened around May month. Something similar has happened to our blog. Earlier it was a blog.hackerearth.com now hackerearth.com/blog _Could anyone suggest me what could be the possible issue for the drop in traffic? _
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rajnish_HE0 -
Need help with Robots.txt
An eCommerce site built with Modx CMS. I found lots of auto generated duplicate page issue on that site. Now I need to disallow some pages from that category. Here is the actual product page url looks like
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nahid
product_listing.php?cat=6857 And here is the auto generated url structure
product_listing.php?cat=6857&cPath=dropship&size=19 Can any one suggest how to disallow this specific category through robots.txt. I am not so familiar with Modx and this kind of link structure. Your help will be appreciated. Thanks1 -
Complicated Duplicate Content Question...but it's fun, so please help.
Quick background: I have a page that is absolutely terrible, but it has links and it's a category page so it ranks. I have a landing page which is significantly - a bizillion times - better, but it is omitted in the search results for the most important query we need. I'm considering switching the content of the two pages, but I have no idea what they will do. I'm not sure if it will cause duplicate content issues or what will happen. Here are the two urls: Terrible page that ranks (not well but it's what comes up eventually) https://kemprugegreen.com/personal-injury/ Far better page that keeps getting omitted: https://kemprugegreen.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-attorney/ Any suggestions (other than just wait on google to stop omitting the page, because that's just not going to happen) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
301 redirects broken - problems - please help!
Hi, I have a bit of an issue... Around a year ago we launched a new company. This company was launched out of a trading style of another company owned by our parent group (the trading style no longer exists). We used a lot of the content from the old trading style website, carefully mapping page-to-page 301 redirects, using the change of address tool in webmaster tools and generally did a good job of it. The reason I know we did a good job is that although we lost some traffic in the month we rebranded, we didn't lose rankings. We have since gained traffic exponentially and have managed to increase our organic traffic by over 200% over the last year. All well and good. However, a mistake has recently occurred whereby the old trading style website domain was deleted from the server for a period of around 2-3 weeks. It has since been reinstated. Since then, although we haven't lost rankings for the keywords we track I can see in webmaster tools that a number of our pages have been deindexed (around 100+). It has been suggested that we put the old homepage back up, and include a link to the XML sitemap to get Google to recrawl the old URLs and reinstate our 301 redirects. I'm OK with this (up to a point - personally I don't think it's an elegant solution) however I always thought you didn't need a link to the xml sitemap from the website and that the crawlers should just find it? Our current plan is not to put the homepage up exactly as it was (I don't believe this would make good business sense given that the company no longer exists), but to make it live with an explanation that the website has moved to a different domain with a big old button pointing to the new site. I'm wondering if we also need a button to the xml sitemap or not? I know I can put a sitemap link in the robots file, but I wonder if that would be enough for Google to find it? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Domain Migration of high traffic site:
We plan to perform a domain migration in 6 months time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I read the different articles on moz relating to domain migration, but some doubts remain: Moving some linkworthy content upfront to new domain was generally recommended. I have such content (free e-learning) that I could move already now to new domain.
Should I move it now or just 2 months before migration?
Should I be concerned whether this content and early links could indicate to google a different topical theme of the new domain ? E.g. in our case free elearning app vs a commercial booking of presential courses of my core site which is somehow but not extremely strongly related) and links for elearning app may be very specific from appstores and from sites about mobile apps. we still have some annoying .php3 file extensions in many of our highest traffic pages and I would like to drop the file-extension (no further URL change). It was generally recommended to minimize other changes at the same time of domain migration, but on the other hand implementing later another 301 again may also not be optimum and it would save time to do it all at the same time. Shall I do the removal of the file extension at the same time of the domain migration or rather schedule it for 3 months later? On the same topic, would the domain migration be a good occasion to move to https instead of http at the same time, or also should we rather do this at a different time? Any thoughts or suggestions?0 -
Traffic impact from switching hosting.
Good Afternoon! Does anybody know what sort of impact I can expect to see from switching hosting? Not only that but how long it takes to come back from that sort of thing? Our website has steadily been dropping since I took it over about a month ago. I have been slowly, tediously trying to prune the bad stuff, and one of our issues is with out host. Any thoughts would be great! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Clean URL help!
Hi all, In short, i'm looking to redirect examplepage.html to examplepage .I've got rid of the .html, sitewide this morning. However I want to redirect Google & people who have bookmarked the old url structure. Currently if you have the extension on or not, it will show in your browser. I'm wanting /examplepage.html to 301 redirect to /examplepage I've gone the normal way I'd do it by adding in .htaccess: Redirect 301 /examplepage.html http://www.example.com/examplepage I'm assuming it isn't redirecting as the example.html page is no longer... what is the way around this? Thanks for any help! In firefox the error of the page is: The page isn't redirecting properly Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
DMOZ help
So yesterday I got a DMOZ editor account. I would like to know if Google indexes the editor profile pages on DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor= here are some examples http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=thehelper http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=raph3988 http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=skasselea I would like to know if it is worth while to build up this page so it will pass link juice. And can anyone tell me how frequently Google crawls for new editors (if that's possible?)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raph39880