Ranking and Traffic Down after HTML Improvement

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by cowy, Jul 4, 2012.

  1. #1
    Hello fellow webmasters,

    Just like most people, I tweak HTML improvement in Google webmaster tools because there is notification that GWT tells me that I have duplicated Title tags and Meta descriptions. The mission success, but not with the traffic, I lost about 50% of my traffics. I have checked with google analytics and the statistic pretty much the same (ie percentage of traffic source, search term used by visitor, etc) the only difference is the volume is now reduced to 50%.

    What I did is adding the last three lines of robots.txt, removed 404 link (with URL removal) and deleting tag display in the post (Now my post not showing tags). Here is the last three lines I added in robots.txt
    Disallow: /tag/
    Disallow: /*?postcomment=true
    Disallow: /*?comments=true

    Is there something wrong with what I do? Now I have changed back the tweaking to the last setting except the URL removal. Do you think it can to get my traffic back? Did you experience the same problem like me?
    Any advices and comments will be appreciated

    Thanks :)
     
    cowy, Jul 4, 2012 IP
  2. cowy

    cowy Peon

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    #2
    Anyone suffered from similar problem?
     
    cowy, Jul 6, 2012 IP
  3. william10

    william10 Peon

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    #3
    Check once again file name or content problem. If you change the file name or content, that will affect ranking.
     
    william10, Jul 8, 2012 IP
  4. shadoze

    shadoze Well-Known Member

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    #4
    You didn't say how much time has elapsed between your changes and the rankings drop, so it's possible your traffic could return. But as a general rule I wouldn't take SEO advice from Google. Most of what Google tells you to do doesn't validate as being the right way using real world testing.
     
    shadoze, Jul 8, 2012 IP
  5. extraspecial

    extraspecial Member

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    #5
    You shouldn't disallow tag because your probably most of traffic comes from tags.
    You better remove all disallows you have added on robots.txt

    Disallow: /tag/
    Disallow: /*?postcomment=true
    Disallow: /*?comments=true
     
    extraspecial, Jul 9, 2012 IP
  6. Nomikhokher

    Nomikhokher Peon

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    #6
    check your robot.txt file.
     
    Nomikhokher, Jul 9, 2012 IP
  7. Traffic_Masters

    Traffic_Masters Well-Known Member

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    #7
    Cowy have you checked your HTML and CSS is WC3 Valid?

    Check out http://validator.w3.org

    This can play a part in google search engine - same as page load times!
     
    Traffic_Masters, Jul 9, 2012 IP