Massive Google results fluctuation pattern

Here's a challenge for the real SEO experts:

My well established website regularly experiences massive fluctuations in Google traffic which have formed a distinct pattern unrelated to site updates.

Every 6 - 8 weeks or so, my traffic either massively increases or decreases depending on what the previous fluctuation was. You will see from the attached analytics that there is a very pronounced pattern to this which I am completely unable to explain. This month my Google traffic has dropped from over 2,000 referrals per day to just 320 in the space of 48 hours!

The increase or decrease switch seems to coincide with other people reporting Google dance activity and since my website is rarely updated with anything other than more content, I am pretty sure it is nothing to do with any updates made.

I do not go on link building binges, and in fact any activity on the website is consistently fairly minimal.

My webmaster tools looks pretty clear except for a few warnings about some duplicate content as a result of splitting my comments on to multiple pages but that has always been the case and nothing has changed.

The site has been up and running for over 4 years so it's not sandbox. I'm not doing anything black hat and am not buying links or engaging in spammy activity.

What on earth could be causing this? These massive drops are really hurting my revenue.

In case you want to check out the site, it is www doyouremember .co.uk
I have a forum on a different subdomain ( forums doyouremember .co.uk ) which has a more or consistent referral level over the same period.

I thought I was pretty clued up on SEO but this has got me beat...

 

You should dig a little deeper into your analytics stats to see exactly where the drop is occurring. You should notice a big difference in the keywords sending you traffic. Knowing the exact keyword(s) causing problems could tell you more about the problem.

One strange thing I noticed with your website is that Google only reports 81 backlinks while Yahoo sees about 2500. That is a huge difference. Perhaps you just don't have strong enough links to have more stable rankings.

In the past Google had a problem with urls that include 'id='. They have likely changed that by now, but it might help to have better page urls.

Another problem I see with your website is that the AdSense ads dominate some of the pages. This could get you flagged as being a 'thin affiliate'.

That duplicate content issue might be a bigger problem than you think as well. You should try to fix that if possible.

 

Thanks Vansterdam - that's all great advice, which I will address, but I'm not sure that explains the massive up 2months - down 2months - up again - down again fluctuations in Google referrals. All the issues you identified have been in place for number of years with no changes then suddenly in the last 18 months or so it's been up and down like a yo-yo with enormous shifts every few weeks or months.

Any other thoughts on this?

 

Although the problems have existed for a while, the way Google deals with those problems may have changed. You did say that that you see other people talking about Google dancing around the same time that you see the drop in traffic. So you may have a similar problem as some of those other people. It may be worthwhile to compare your websites to some of those other websites experiencing the same fluctuations. See if they have other issues such as duplicate content, dominant adsense or other ads, etc. That timing may be key to diagnosing the problem.

Another issue with your website that I just noticed is that several pages have the exact same meta tags. Google doesn't particularly like that situation.

One other problem is that your homepage is accessible at both http://www.doyouremember.co.uk/index.php and http://www.doyouremember.co.uk/ You should setup a redirect for that issue.

The 2 month fluctuation is tough to explain. Perhaps Google has some kind of 2 month phase for certain penalties or something to do with providing results from different data centers. It could be that Google was just doing 2 month tests of a certain algorithm change. Was your traffic fairly consistent before March 2008?

Just try to fix as many of these issues as possible. Any one of those problems could be leading to these fluctuations.

Also try building more backlinks on a regular basis. You already have some very strong links, but your link profile could be even stronger. Try submitting some articles and maybe a paid press release. If your link profile is strong enough, minor algorithm changes won't affect you as much as you will have all your bases covered. Then if Google decides they don't like certain links, you will have other links to fall back upon.

 

ITs simple, this happens to most websites, I have over 100 I know trust me. You need higher quality back links to keep a stable position.

 

Is the traffic spiders or people?

 

There is something else going on here besides "google fluctuation".

All of my sites traffic is steady. Whether its 50 visits a day, or 10,000 visits a day. I have never seen anything like what you posted in those screen shots.

One thing I can think of, is too much interlinking between sites on the same IP. If you have a server with several sites on it, try not to interlink too much.

Besides that, I do not know.

 

Very interesting post!

 

How about you take a different approach.

The next time it happens, or if it is happening right now, go to your keyword section in GA and observe which keywords are affected.

Then, do a research in Google and check if the search count for the keywords have changed. Secondly, go to Google and once again check the competition for the keywords and see if you can find a pattern.

It so happens with certain keywords, that they are only active during certain months and dead during others.

Pardon me if I am wrong.

 

even i had a large drop in google traffic from 6k to 1k PR remained same 3

 

Vansterdam, you really go extra mile to explained as much as you could about Remember's website. I believe what you pointed out there might be some of the things that curses the dramatic effect on Remember's web traffic. Those things need to be fix in order to see what's the next item google is going to come up with...

 

Some great suggestions (especially vansterdam) so thanks all for your input.
Based on the previous trends I expect my traffic to suddenly come back again at the next update in around 6-8 weeks. That gives me plenty of time to try and fix some of the issues that you all identified and see if I can keep the traffic high this time.

Great to have your help guys and gals - if I remember, I'll post a follow up in a couple of months so you can see the outcome.

 

Holy crap, your stats look like a roller coaster, lol. That is odd though.

 

Yep I've never seen stats like them and I'm keen to find out if anyone else has seen the same.

I just checked my keyword traffic in Analytics and it seems that my top 50 or so keywords are mostly unaffected but my site is optimised for the longtail and consequently the bulk of my traffic comes from the 30,000+ other keywords which have been hit hard.

I do have a few other interlinked sites on the same server. I think there are about 23 sites on the same server that link to DoYouRemember. Is that a problem? Would I be better off just removing the links from all those sites?