Can anyone see what hurt me in my traffic

[cbielich]

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/

I need some fresh eyes on this traffic of mine. I have compared the dates to when updates have been rolled out (panda, penguin, page layout, top heavy, etc...) and I cant match these dates with any of them. Can anyone maybe shed some light to my traffic drops and recovery then traffic drop again and see if there is a correlation with any major updates?

• Dropped Jan 22 2014
• Dropped April 4 2014
• Recovered August 25 2014
• Dropped September 18 2014

google-analytics.jpg

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah - it doesn't seem to match known updates, but it's certainly dramatic movement. This isn't some seasonal shift or cyclical thing - these are clearly steep climbs and drops. We don't know the dates of most of the Panda data refreshes, but we do pin one at Sept. 23, 2014, so even that's not lining up cleanly here.

Are you seeing a lot of losses in the long-tail? The site doesn't seem to have much authority, but you've got 10K+ pages indexed, and I strongly suspect that many of them may look thin to Google. It feels Panda-like, for lack of a better word, even if it isn't quite Panda (maybe just a very strong filter). Meanwhile, if the links you have our problematic at all, you could be hitting a double-whammy. It might not be a single update, but you could be getting hit by a number of different changes over time. The trend-line certainly isn't promising.

My concern is the individual definition pages, like:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/barrio/

While it looks to have a lot of content, the definitions come from online dictionaries (or, at least, are shared with them), and the examples seem to be drawn from publicly available web pages. So, it's very possible that each element on these pages looks duplicated across the web to Google. With a strong link profile, it might not be a problem, but if you're struggling on links and with content, the odds could end up stacked against you.

Truthfully, you may have to see where your strongest ranking pages are (are they top-level or long-tail) and consolidate. If you've taken losses on individual word pages and most of your traffic is coming from pages like this:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-a/

...then you might want to consider not indexing those lower-value pages and focusing on what's working. This could help concentrate your link equity on a stronger offering. It's a difficult choice, but I don't think you're looking at a technical problem here or a clear, single-shot penalty. I think you're looking at a systemic problem.

Looks like you've got a chunk of 404s in your category pages, too, such as:

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-z/10-letters/

Not sure what's up there - if you're trying to de-index those, or if there's a technical issue.

Unfortunately, I suspect this is a complex, multi-layer problem and there probably isn't a single solution. I hope I'm wrong, but that's my gut feeling at a glance.

[cbielich]

I just saw that every one of my dictionary word pages 280,000+ of them all had a list of anagram words on them ranging from 10 to 50 of them and they all contained links like this

[[the word]](/dictionary/word/[the word]/ "check and see if [the word] is in the scrabble dictionary")

[the word] represents the specific word. "Scrabble Dictionary" was my main and hardest hit keyword. Could this have been spammy to Google? That title contained scrabble dictionary in it and it could have been on each one of those 280,000 pages at least 10 - 50+ times?

[cbielich]

Well the biggest change I did in the last week was completely refresh my site to a new responsive design. I made sure all my canonicals and redirects are setup properly and checked them 10 fold.

Some changes I have done over the last few months was focus on Panda related issues and noindexed about 90% of my site. This was after the traffic drops and not before. The reason I did this was for instance all my dictionary pages get their definitions from an API provided from another site called wordnik. Since that would be considered duplicate content I went ahead and did that.

Example Page: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/test/

I also did the same for all my quotes and sentence examples as well since all those would be considered duplicates. Everything else is original content which used to rank very well. Because of all the duplicate content I thought that possibly could be an issue...no changes yet.

Went through my backlink profile and got some links removed that I suspected spammy as well and disavowed ones I could net get removed and were very spammy.

That is where I am at so far. I used to rank very well in my niche for years and during the Panda/Penguin days is when my rankings tank so I was suspecting that had something to do with it. At this point I have tried so much I feel like there is nothing else.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

During the low traffic periods, did you make any changes to the site to try and recover? Was any additional link building performed? Anything else outside of the new site design? And do you know when that happened?

Your backlink profile certainly isn't the worst I have ever seen, although a bit of a disavow wouldn't go amiss with some of them, and I wouldn't necessarily be jumping the gun thinking that you have been hit by a penalty.

Where is your traffic at right now?

-Andy

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would take a look at your backlinks - you have a TON of backlinks coming from sites that look just like yours. I am using Majestic data in my quick scan. From there you can decide which links you wish to remove or disavow. This is something you need to take care of.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[cbielich]

This is strictly organic / google

No changes that I am aware of, but at the time I had a old site design. I have a new one now

Never had a manual action

I annotate when I make changes so I had none then

I am strongly suspecting Penguin even though the dates don't line up but I have to wait for the refresh before I know

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Is this strictly organic traffic? Did you make any changes on these days pertaining to GTM and GA?

Did you check and see if you have any manual actions? From here on out, if you do any changes to your site or properties, annotate it so you can watch changes perform.

Hope this helps - good luck!