I'm still learning much about how things work. I customized a blog for a friend's online magazine. Existing domain with PR4 which it kept with new google pr. Traffic in Sept, when it went live, averaged 35 daily visits according to stat program that came with the host. Oct 162 average visitors, Nov. blew me away with a daily average of 3103 visits, much of the traffic from google. It was higher than that, steadily climbing to over 7000 visits a day, then traffic suddenly dropped to a couple of hundred daily visits. When I google the name of one of her posts, her site did not show up in the top few pages, although there were several blog posts on other sites linking to hers in several top positions. That particular post included 100 resource links. Could adding that many outbound links at once, be the source of the drop in google traffic? Should I nofollow her post? Any thing else I should check? Thanks, Heidi
Heidi, It's hard to give you specific advice without seeing your blog and checking for various possible issues. I can tell you, though, that Google's guidelines state that you should not put over 100 links on a page. ~Adam
Thanks Adam, This blog post with all the outbound links is at http://wemagazineforwomen.com/100-grants-loans-scholarships-for-women/ I wish she'd done the links as text links, but not that does not solve the too many links issue. Traffic dropped about 17 days after the post. The blog structure is a little different, all 100 links never appeared on the front page together. So when she posted 100 resource links in a post, that could have caused the drop. If I add nofollow to that post and any others with too many links, it may solve the problem, or do we need to send apologies to google? I gave the blog a makeover mid October. Heidi
Heidi, Yeh, you've got 229 links on that page. Def too many. As far as I know, though, Google doesn't penalize sites for having a page with too many links. I really doubt that is the issue. I see the blog is relatively new. Sometimes Google gives new sites pretty good rankings at first, then drops their rankings back down. If that is the reason for the traffic drop, the only solution is work on quality SEO tactics to increase your rankings over time. Another thing you should probably check is that you have 15,700 pages indexed by Google - do you really have that many pages? Are most of them empty or duplicate pages? Another item - you have no PR. Why didn't you get PR in the update? You have plenty of links - were they in place well before the update? ~Adam
Thanks Adam. That one post has no pr http://wemagazineforwomen.com should be showing a PR4, I did spy a page or 2 with pr3. Wordpress site, google is so weird, I got 9930 indexed pages when I just looked, yet when I click on page six of google results it says 59 pages, that sounds about right. Yahoo indexes 92 pages. Some where file uploads to blog which no longer exist. Quality SEO tatics would be of help I'm sure. Thanks. Heidi
Did you customized the website layout or did you also change the internal structure (URL and hyperlink links)? As if you have changed the internal structure, yes you will experience a new SERP ranking. It is always advisable only to change site external layout (like graphics, template) when you are already having a good SERP and traffic Besides the above explanation, you must also take note that Google also recently update its page rank and SERP algorithm. Especially for blog industry, many was penalized for suspected link selling and even those who does not also was penalized. My Final Advice: If you do not sell links and have changes the site internal structures, revert back to its original. Then wait. If it does not get back its SERP as before, then your site might has been wrongly penalized. Go to Google Webmaster tool, if you do not have an account create one. Then manage domain and look for a link on the right hand side that states something like "Request for consideration". Click that and inform that your site do not sell link and have ensured "no follow tag" for your outbound links. Certainly of course you must do the no follow tag before doing this. Regards
Didn't change the permalinks, urls, just the graphics, theme, and that was before traffic jumped up. Not selling links, although there are a lot of links. Want to keep do follow on comments, but not so many outbound links. I'll have to play with this and see what works. Thanks. Heidi
It seems that you have a good SERP for that month that you have huge traffic from Google. A good SERP position can help your site more exposed.
Google is always changing its algorithms, whats happening here is perfectly normal I would look at the competitors and see whats going on with them, look at your serps(search engine results page) and cross reference it with Googles webmaster tools to see what keywords people are clicking though to. Check out if alot of pages have dropped rank or gone supplemental. -ninja
Could easily be the case. Nothing really changed in way blog was being run when sudden traffic drop. Number of links, not sure it is the issue either, but thinking posts like ones with 100 links and other areas of blog, may be good places to put no follow links. I did not add analytics to this particular site. Thanks again, I see the value in tracking keywords linking to site in serp's, and placement of website. Not my favorite thing to do, although a good thing to do, I'd rather be playing with the graphics, css, theme. Blog is not mine but belongs to a friend. Don't enjoy keyword research and tracking enough to do it for free or pay or another person. I recommended that she have her SEO people check it out, if she doesn't have such, find one. I do want to know enough that design of blogs help not hinder seo efforts. Heidi
It's been a long long ago post, but it's happening to me now. I'm using wordpress and the changes i made was putting categories to subcategories. Original Cat_a, cat_b, cat_c, i put them all under a parent category A. Will this impact the google serp?