Massive Drop in Google Traffic, can't find the reason

Okay well the site I worked for used to get excellent traffic but on March 2nd the traffic slide like 75% and now we almost get no google hits. Google used to give us about 2100 hits a week on average, now we get less than 100 typically, and that's still a week. So I hope you can see why I'm a bit distressed over the situation. Google and it's affiliates are the only ones who have dropped, all other links are still doing well and fluctuating within normal bounds.

Nothing happened around that timeframe.
We still put up content just as frequently.
We aren't being scraped as far as I can tell, but I don't really have any resources aside from Google itself to find anything (and it hasn't.)
All the links are good, there was some spam links at one point but they were all listed with nofollow and have been totally removed.
Sitemap is being uploaded regularly, no errors.
All links go to relevant places.

Things that are possibly the culprit:
We posted a ton of stuff that day, more so than usual.
We occasionally quote sources or post press releases, since we frequently do commentary. But we didn't do it any more on that day than any other, in fact, we did less.

We've continued to try to push the site, get it listed more places, focus more on keywords, optimize the site better for google, but nothing is working.

Does anyone have any ideas? I would post a link but I don't think that's allowed. I'm fairly desperate at this point considering how long it's been and we've yet to see any significant rebound. If there is any other information anyone needs, I'll get that to your promptly. I really appreciate any help.

 

You should dig deeper into your stats to see which keywords are sending less traffic. You should compare the keywords sending traffic before and after March 2nd. Then check the rankings for any keywords that are not sending as much traffic now. If you posted a lot of stuff on your site that day, that might be the cause. When you make major changes on a site, Google often temporarily drops rankings.

 

Yea, I've looked into that already. The problem isn't one high value keyword, It's all of them. All the long existing keywords on our site dropped at minimum 30% from google, some as much as 95%. Even if they were devalued somehow (even though some were new), I don't think I would see such a cataclysmic drop in traffic so suddenly. We don't focus on a single keyword either, our traffic for the most part has been broad and has been hit across the board. We've continued to produce new content focused on current events/stuff like we always have, but they aren't producing anywhere near the levels we used to, and we can't seem to climb out of this huge drop in traffic.

All I can figure as that google changed their algorithm and we just got hit extremely hard, but it seems we should have bounced back a bit, but we haven't, especially considering changes we've made to improve SEO and everything, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

 

Post your link as www(dot)example(dot)com(slash)whatever... It's hard to give you any useful information without having a URL and the keywords you used to rank for.

My guess is that it has nothing to do with anything you've done on the site. It could be that it's not a penalty at all, and simply due to a change in their algorithm. There were some changes to Google's algorithm around that time which I believe that were related to discounting links from directories or something (can't remember off the top of my head)... If that were the case, for example, and if a large part of your backlink profile is comprised of directory links then your rankings could have been hit by such changes.

But would know better once we have a list of URLs and the keywords they used to get a lot of traffic for.

 

Okay well my website is: www(dot)blog(dot)fommy(dot)com

Our sites traffic was generated fairly naturally originally, we didn't submit to any directories. I have done so now, but they haven't helped much apparently, but it hasn't been long. So I doubt that the cause is directories being devalued.

We blog about mobile electronics (smartphones specifically) so most of our traffic comes from searches about new or about to be released devices (well, it used to). So the keywords typically deal with hot devices in the market when we talk about them.

I'm just talking about Google traffic though, otherwise our traffic has been mostly the same. I can't really provide you with a list of keywords effected since we have over 1300 keywords listed in analytics and they seem to have all been hit. Our site has been going a while now and we typically post about 5 articles a day during weekdays, so we aren't at a shortage of content.

 

That's the nature of Google and the other SE. They change something and then the traffic gets all funky. As long as you haven't done something illegal then it will come back. That change usually last a few days to a few weeks.

 

Google has been updating the algorithm perhaps this is why you no longer have the same rank in SERPs.

 

How many phrases are you link building towards?
If you are only building towards 1/2 phrases it is possible you received a Google penalty which can happen if you have an unnatural link profile. I have sites that dropped in the rankings as I only built towards 2 phrases and it doesnt look natural. Alter up the anchor texts abit to achieve greater variety.

 

I'm still relatively new to SEO, but I link to quite a bit, linking to sources/products/etc. We've never targeted just a couple keywords for links or anything else. I probably do reuse the same anchor text quite a bit though (click here for X, etc).

The problem is that it's already been more than a couple of weeks, it's going on 3 months.

 

They do bring up a good point... If you're trying to rank a URL for "Blackberry Curve" you don't want every incoming link to have "Blackberry Curve" as the link text... I'd say maybe 40-60% of the time use the exact phrase you want to rank for... But then you also want lots of variations of that link text on the remaining incoming links... like "the Blackberry Curve", "learn more about the Blackberry Curve", "Curve by Blackberry", "the Curve by Blackberry", "Blackberry phone", "Blackberry smart phone", "Curve", "the Curve", etc. These will all help you rank for the phrase "Blackberry Curve" only to a lesser degree... But it looks MUCH more natural.

PS: I'm sure you already know this but I NEVER use "Click here", "Buy now!", "Get Started", etc. as link text... It only helps you rank for the search phrases "Click here", "Buy now!", "Get Started", etc. which are not going to help you at all.

 

Okay thanks for the advice, these are for links in general, for outbound links or for links leading to our site? We don't have much in the way of people linking to us, and I really have no control of what they put as the anchor text.

 

I never knew links had an actual effect on the page they were originating from. I only thought they impact the SERPs of the receiving page of the link.

 

Hello,
Sometime there are big Google serp shakres but the key is keep working in backlinks and new content There is not secret about it

 

Ok, this is only my opinion but my first thought on that blog is you have a big group of linked keywords at the bottom of your website. My initial thoughts on that is it could be classed as spam (although i would like to know if others agree with that). If that was picked up as spam then it could have caused you to drop dramatically from the search engines.

Also there are a few other things you should be doing for on page seo:

-search engine friendly urls
-unique meta tags per page
-use H1 tags (your H1 tags are currently commented out)

 

Thanks, I doubt i can get them completely pulled though, I've already asked that they cut the links down by half, but the company doesn't want to. I'm not the site manager, just one of the writers trying to improve the blog and pass things up the ladder. I could probably make them nofollow though, would that help?

As far as URLs go, I doubt I could get that changed at this point. I could change the setting in Wordpress I suppose, but I'm a bit afraid of tons of links being modified and having to be manually updated through hundreds of posts.

I did unique meta tags for a while, but I was told repeatedly that these things were useless, is that true or not?

Yea, we don't use the H headers much, I'll see if I can start doing that more. But what do you mean by commented out?

Thanks for all your help.

 

Even with nofollow tags it could be seen as keyword stuffing. My personal recommendation would be to create blog posts that contain those keywords withing the post content and you can then link those keywords to the main store. Make the content good english and quality information. You could put maybe 3 or 4 keywords in one blog post. This will increase the quality content of the blog aswell as keeping the keywords there. It also may encourage more users to click on those keywords.

Use the wordpress built in permalinks to apply the rewrite of the URLs. All existing links will be automatically redirected to the SEF URL form so you won't lose any functionality. Google permalinks to get more infomation.

Most people say they are fairly useless. However i think it adds to the whole unique content of a page scenario. If it helps google identify it as unique content, it is more likely to get indexed and ranked. I updated these on a website i have recently and it has increased the number of indexed pages significantly.

If you view the page source you will see the following code:

<!--<h1 class="blogtitle"><a href="/"></a></h1>-->

This means it is classed as code comment, not readable or actionable code. Why its like that or how to fix it would be down to the person who built the website.

 

Maybe the websites that link to you have been penalized and are now giving you less link juice which is costing you your traffic.

 

Well, we really have no one linking to us. We have some comments posted on forums, but they are all nofollow. The only links to us are mostly from the main domain. We don't want to do link exchanges though, we're kinda hoping people will link to our content, which hasn't worked out yet.

 

Okay well, I managed to update the titles to H1 instead of H2 tags, but they looked terrible and were huged so I changed them back. Is there a way to make H1 tags look like H2 tags?

 

a typicall situation for exactly no reason, same happs to me in feb and in march i found my pr drop from 3 to n/a. yesterday am down in serp badly and soon it will happ again to my pr after some weeks.