Google now #3 in my traffic, behind Bing and Yahoo

Yikes! For the first time (per Google Analytics), Bing and Yahoo have both slipped slightly ahead of Google in bringing me organic traffic. Man, I wish I could somehow get out from under these algorithmic devaluations I've received from Google, but have not received from Bing or Yahoo.

 

Traffic from any search engine is a good thing. Maybe you could focus more on Yahoo and Bing to bring your traffic up there?

 

this dosnt happend very often, isnt your site penalized in google serp?

 

No manual penalty. Just the SERPs drop from Penguin and Panda, probably mostly due to the devaluing of thousands of worthless directories.

 

Yes that can be reason, anyway are you using webmaster tools?
If google penalized your site, you should recive message there. But I think that you already know

 

Have you found any tips Jim? I am in the same boat I think as you are in. I did a Disavol a while back but only took off 500 links.

Just seeing if you found any good tips

Chris

 

colochris, I've gone in and manually removed most of my (worthless) social bookmarking sites, keeping a few good ones like reddit. And I've disavowed a ton of worthless directories. Time will tell if this helps.

 

Is it the site yourname dot org?

Since you made changes to tackle Penguin (if it was that) has there been another Penguin update? (The last one was 4 October 2013, I don't remember if you were hit before or after then..)

 

Yes, ryan, that's my site. And I was hit well before then. No manual penalty, just apparent devaluations in the algorithm changes. I admit, I did have a ton of low-quality directory links and social bookmark links from back when these things were (naively) considered "good" SEO. I removed the social bookmarking links in June 2013 and did two disavow submissions on the directory links since then. I can't recall the exact dates on those, but I suspect one was before 4 October 2013 and one after. Here's hoping.

 

Why yikes?

A lot of people don't get any traffic from Bing/Yahoo so even though a Google penalty is annoying, if you're getting traffic from Bing/Yahoo things can't be all bad?

 

Have you been living under a rock? Google basically owns the search engine market. Would have thought this would have been obvious for someone with "SEO" in their screen name.

 

I never said the situation was perfect. I said that things aren't all doom and gloom. I guess your glass is half empty, then?

If you are suggesting that people should only focus on Google and not pay any mind to Yahoo/Bing then that is bad advice, in my opinion.

Plenty of people have overcome Google penalties either through changing their methods or from starting with a new domain and taking less risks. OP can do the same, while also generating traffic from the other, smaller SE's.

 

I didn't say that.

 

Is it every page that is not performing as well? What % of your traffic is from smartphones and tablets?

Anyway, I am not going to look at your backlinks (as from all I have read you have removed/disavowed all the bad ones), but rather look at your on site. When you find your pages in Google, do you sometimes notice that the titles have been re-written? I noticed this with yours. Sometimes Google is trying to improve the title, other times it is to add branding. My suggestion to you is to choose a brand and use this throughout your titles, social media and other marketing. On your pages.

"<page title> | <branding>"

Except for your home page, which would be "<branding> | <slogan>" or similar to that (but branding first).

Also, in your titles, use "|" to separate the branding and page title and "-" within the page title. I hope that makes sense. (I'm not posting an example, in case you would rather keep your site private.)

Also, take a look at your meta descriptions - it is your sales pitch in order to encourage people to click through. For this one page I am looking at right now, Google not only re-wrote the title, but also the snippet in the search results. I can understand why it did - the meta description does not include keywords relating to my search query (and page title). It was more of an expansion of the title. You could either rewrite the meta descriptions or remove them entirely and let Google select what it things is best. This [meta descriptions] won't change ranking, but might change click throughs.

I do not see how you are encouraging engagement on your site. I do see you are using Google+ (at least a personal account), but you are not using it as a two-way street. Does the site have its own Google+ page (if you make one, wait a few days and then set a "vanity URL", you should be able to get your brand's by then, without having to add random characters)? Facebook? Twitter? Make sure people can at least easily share to social media, in particular even some of the important paragraphs on your pages. I am sure that there will be ones people can relate to and want to voice their own opinion about, or even that infuriate them and they want to rant. In the end, it's all good.

Yes, this might not seem to deal with Google issues, but it is about freshening your site up, making those shares and mentions easier for visitors. Look at your site and your competitors, is there something that you are all not offering that people would like?

You are maybe not using the best platform for this and I would recommend finding a CMS that you are comfortable with, that has good social media, comment handling (moderation, spam filtering, etc). I would also recommend avoiding WordPress (for reasons too long to go into here). However, migrating such a site would be a lot of work, so it might not be something you want to do.

It can be. Yahoo!/Bing don't seem to handle spam as well as Google does - I have a site I ran a load of experiments on and on Google it vanished out of existence (Penguin), but on Yahoo!/Bing it is on the first page (the last time I checked). However, that brings very little traffic as it isn't often searched there compared to Google. Well, not that I care anyway, the site serves a purpose of being my lab rat.

 

Some great suggestions, ryan_uk. Many thanks. I'm currently about 60% through a winter-long project of rewriting each of my ~290 pages and reformatting them in some new software. That occupies my limited (age 70) energies fully at the moment. But when I complete this important project, I will definitely look into implementing suggestions from your post. Very helpful. Sincere thanks.

 

The real question is (as Danasurvey pointed out) has your traffic increased or decreased?

Too many have Google-on-the-brain If you're doing something that POs Google and your Google traffic drops to half, while your traffic from MS/Yahoo goes up 10x-keep doin' it

 

Congratz man. I tink its ok to have different traffic sources. Only Google would be a little too risky - so easy to be devaluated by Google!