Organic Traffic dropped 50%. Anyone want to have a stab at why? (URL listed)
-
Just curious what the pro's on here think is the reason why our site got hammered recently.
The URL is www.jobshadow.com. We've got gobs of quality content that had been ranking for quite a few keywords. Even one from Rand himself http://www.jobshadow.com/interview-with-seo-and-seomoz-founder-rand-fishkin/
Rankings for even the exact match domain keyword 'Job Shadow' have been pummeled. Anyway, we've got a pretty solid link profile I would think.
We also have a very high user time on the site, thus suggesting the organic traffic was engaged when Google ranked us for those keywords.
We have lots of unsolicited inbound links and even recent ones from PBS. I'm not really sure what it takes to please the "machine" at this point. Curious as to what everyone here thinks.
-
Hey Thomas, thanks for the input. The dictation is a little rough so I'm not 100% sure how to respond. We do have a wide variety of careers on the site, and thus links coming in from a wide variety of sources.
As far as .edu links. We do have a lot of those as well. Colleges see value in the site for their students and link over.
I guess Google sees differently:). If there's no way to help the algo see that then so be it. But if it's something we could do differently I'm all ears. Thanks again.
-
Thanks Jesse. The only message in GWMT is a notice that my traffic took a big drop. Not a why, just a heads up ha.
-
I have a guess as to why you can't buy this recent update by Google. You encourage students to always link back to your website regardless more so-called cited. Because web designers or anybody that puts their URL on the footer or in a lot of websites gets penalized and cools gotten Penalized because it is seen as some sort of manipulation especially if he's a real students of any sort and you're putting your URL on their domain that's in edu that's a
that they weren't earned link then
Google has always been very protective of the dot EDU domains and any company having any interest in having links on them. So they will always penalize The company that is requiring a lot of links on the dot EDU site and you clearly state please remember to psych us. All that is fair I do agree to say you have to many people do it it turns into the exact same effect as a web designer it also turns into the exact same fact that is a edu Link scheme. I'm not saying that's what you're doing I'm just saying that's the way that Google's looking at most likely. Probably why you're losing so much traffic. I would definitely think about the relevancy of the student or other persons workplace to your company I know it's jobs and everything like that but This is simply a guess at this point. I'm gonna look over your site and make sure there aren't any errors or anything blocking the Google bought from indexing your site. And if you would let me get back to you in about an hour so I will do this analysis for anything that could be Laurenrae by not allowing the fuck to crawl and let you know about that.
This is a quote from your site below.
PS please forgive any glaring grammar or word issues I have been doing this by dictation on a mobile phone so I sincerely apologize for the mistakes.
Thomas
Hi, thanks for the kind words. Most of the interviews going forward will have people’s names associated with them, as well as their Twitter feed(if applicable) along with a link to their site with some info about them(have a look at the most recent 6 or so interviews). Given the information is found on http://www.jobshadow.com students should continue to cite this as their source(along with any other sources required by the teacher obviously).
That being said, many interviews will continue to be anonymous. We ask financial questions that some people aren’t comfortable sharing publicly(and sometimes people are very candid about other aspects of their jobs). And since we all work for a living getting solid financial data is a must for young people considering careers. Plus we want to keep the interviews uniform in nature so people can know what to expect with each career profile they read.
-
Yikes. So this happened recently? Say, right around 5/22 ish?
If so, my conclusion has to be a Penguin hit. Have you received any messages in GWMT?
I'm not sure why you'd be Penguined. I just took a peek at your backlink profile and it looks pretty solid. You have a high PR and a decent DA. Although I'm surprised your DA isn't higher with a PR of 5. I see sites with a DA of 49 and PR of 2 all the time... This is confusing to me.
I'm sorry I don't know what to say but I'm curious. Please keep us posted on your findings if it is Penguin related. It would mean there is some other factor that I have yet to consider going into this algorithm..
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
-
Lost Wikipedia page and dropped heavily in rankings. How many of you aware of and experienced this?
Hi all, We lost of our Wikipedia page for 2nd time and we dropped in rankings 2nd time too. I got confused first time whether Wikipedia was the actual reason as we had couple of major changes in our website. But recently it's been clear that losing Wikipedia page is the culprit as we have no website changes around these days. How many of you aware of this and experienced this? Please share your views. Hope this info will help you. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Anyone else notice a global Google cache issue?
Im noticing a huge % of pages on my sites and those picked at random from Google searches, high traffic pages from big sites like booking.com have not been cached since 22nd Oct by Google. Anyone else noticed this or got insight on it? Andy
Algorithm Updates | | AndyMacLean0 -
Anyone have experience with using HTTPS compared to HTTP and how it could affect rankings?
Are there any negative or positive effects of using https over http when it comes to rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | classifiedtech0 -
When was the last algorithm update? One of my pages has dropped significantly this week
One of my pages dropped 22 places last week and I'm not sure why - can any body give me some suggestions to why this might have happened?
Algorithm Updates | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
Where is Bing traffic?
According to http://mashable.com/2011/04/11/bing-search-growth/, Bing has almost half the market share compared to Google. Yet Bing organic traffic on my main site is exactly 2.8% of Google organic traffic. Is there some low-hanging fruit I am missing or do you guys have the same results as me?
Algorithm Updates | | metadata0 -
Organic Rank Volitility
Does anyone else see their organic rankings fluctuating wildly. I have been tracking a few key keywords by literaly typing them in each morning and looking at results. The pages I have been doing this for where without any doubt affected by Penguin as you can see the huge drop in traffic directly correlated to the Pegnuin deployment. What is strange is one day these phrases will be on page one position 3 and two days later but on page3 to 5 or not ranked. Four days later back on page 1. These are wild fluctuations so it appears to me that I am observing Penguin tweaking ? Just wish the tweaking would stop on one of the days were our phases for this particular site are on page one. Most people would check rankings weekly, monthly or quarter and would not perhaps be observing these crazy swings? Thought?
Algorithm Updates | | freestone0 -
TripAdvisor multiple listings
Why do certain sites for example TripAdvisor rank for their multiple international sites e.g TripAdvisor.co.uk, TripAdvisor.com, TripAdvisor.fr, TripAdvisor.de etc for a English search phrase ? From my view point they are just spamming the index with the same content. These searches are performed on google.co.uk
Algorithm Updates | | NeilTompkins0