Sudden Major Decrease in Impressions

My website impressions as viewed in my Google Webmaster Tools have been around 20,000. However beginning on 10/30/2012, my impressions dropped to near zero. My website is http://www.strongfamilies.us. I have only been making very minor text edits to my site, nothing that would cause alarm. Webmaster Tools doesn't indicate any warnings suggesting that they are penalizing me. I placed a thread on Google Webmaster Tools Forum about this problem getting little to no help. Can anyone tell me why my impressions dropped and what I can do to increase them? Thanks.

 

I think you've posted in the wrong category. To get the best response, you need the SEO section.

I didn't bother going past your meta tags:

As this is an indication of bad SEO.

 

Thank you for your response. However the number of keywords in the meta tags haven't changed since the impressions decreased. If anything, the number of keywords were reduced.

 

Google's algorithms change though over time. It may have taken a while for Google to notice, but you are definitely using too many keywords. Every single hyperlink on your homepage has an unusual amount of keywords in the title.

Example 1 - Hyperlink:

Example 2 - Navigation Bar:

No matter how you argue it, you're keyword stuffing.

Keyword Stuffing:

Source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66358

 

Yep, you have to face the fact that you're stuffed.

wiz

 

I may or may not agree with you. But this doesn't resolve my current issue. The number of keywords have been consistent for years. Additionally, Google Webmaster Tools hasn't recommended reducing these keywords under html recommendations. The decrease in impressions began this month. The only substantial changes to my site that occurred this month was that I scaled my images so that the pages open quicker and that I added a Google plus badge to my site. Could either of these changes cause a sudden decrease in impressions? Thanks.

 

I wouldn't have thought so. I don't see any reason why scaling your images which makes your site more user friendly would have a drastic effect, but then I'm not an expert. I did have a quick look at a few articles, and indeed a lot has been mentioned about the Google Panda update and keyword density, such as this article here: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/google-panda-update/

Of course, this becomes irrelevant if your traffic stats are the same, but you specifically mentioned impressions. Which is it? If your traffic is the same but your impressions has decreased, check your bounce rate, where are your users exiting? How long are they staying for? If they are staying for 0 seconds and leaving before the page loads then a lot of your impressions are probably from bots, but I don't know the ins and outs of your users activity.

It probably would be more worth your while to post your question in the SEO forum, more people would reply who have a better understanding of the subject are likely to reply.

 

It appears that traffic decreased along with the impressions.

 

Have your search engine positions changed?

 

Not that I can tell. My site pagerank is still 3.

 

Your pagerank is unlikely to change overnight unless there is a pagerank update. Are you still ranking for your main keywords?

Does this sound normal:

(About 20,400 results for "strongfamilies.us" on Google) https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclie...af5587e1dbb182&bpcl=36601534&biw=1366&bih=667

(About 576 results for site:strongfamilies.us on Google) https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclie...af5587e1dbb182&bpcl=36601534&biw=1366&bih=667

(About 1933 backlinks) http://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks/subdomains/www.strongfamilies.us (although this website reports 11,000+: http://smallseotools.com/backlink-checker/)

 

To be honest, I really haven't been monitoring this. I agree that I should be. So to answer your question, I don't know. What I have been doing and I know that this isn't the best monitor, is to enter specific search words in Google to find out where my site is listed. For instance, if you search for 'bullying conference', you will find that there is only one site ahead of mine. That makes me believe that there hasn't been any negative changes yet.

However, when I usually begin each day, I notice that there has been several visits to my site. Now there are only a couple with 100% bounce. This isn't normal for my site.

 

I don't actually see you even in the top 10 for "bullying conference" I see in ranked order:

#1: www.stopbullyingworld.org/
#2: www.stopgirlbullying.com/
#3: www.schoolsafety911.org/event05.html
#4: bullying2012.com/
#5: National Conference on Bullying - SAVE
#6: www.nationalsave.org/main/nationalbullyingconference.php

And so on.

I checked with this website: http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html and this says you are ranked #18 so I clicked on to page 2 and I see you ranked #11.

This is indicating that as the data centers are updating, you're rank is dropping. I have to reiterate that I'm not an expert so don't take my word as gospel but this would be because of your SEO.

 

I guess that I am getting confused. I just did a Google search using 'Bullying Conference' and my site is on the first page right under www.stopbullyingworld.org, exactly where it appeared when I last checked today.

 

Just another train wreck laundry list of "how not to build a website" that was sure to get slapped down by the search engines sooner than later -- you may have gotten 'lucky' and not gotten slapped down right away, when a content change threw up a flag for review and on review, you were marked as scam/trash/SEO abuse.

on top of the RIDICULOUSLY overstuffed and pointless phrases in a keyWORDS meta, the entire document is a malformed non-semantic inaccessible wreck. The massive idiotic use of TITLE attributes was guaranteed that sooner or later the entire site would end up blacklisted for abuse! Combine in nothing remotely resembling a heading tag, layout built from absolute positioning and inlined style -- and not only is it a SEO disaster that seems intentionally built to get blackballed, it shows that whoever built it has no business building websites in the first place... as evidenced by the 20k of markup to deliver 2.1k of plaintext and maybe five actual content images; easily three or four times as much code as should have been used.

ALL of those TITLE attributes need to go... it's called keyWORDS... not keyphrases, not keysentences, keyWORDS -- 7 to 9 WORDS that are present as actual TEXT (title's don't count for this) inside BODY that does not exceed 128 characters total.

Hell, even the TITLE tag is overstuffed rubbish likely to have gotten the site slapped down sooner or later!

My advice is throw it all away and start over with semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, and modern coding techniques instead of the sleazed together any old way disaster you have now. Can tell it's poorly written outdated rubbish from the first line of code -- tranny... which means it's in transition from 1997 to 1998 coding practices.

Oh, and don't trust 'magic combination' searches of that perfect magical phrase search -- just because you rank well for "Bullying conference" doesn't mean anyone is actually typing that in as a search into Google. "Bullying help", "bullying assistance", "stop bullying" -- you're nowhere to be found. Perfect match searches are a trap usually used by scam artists who want to sound like they know how to rank on google, when the reality is they don't know enough to even be opening their yap on the subject.

 

Let's say for instance that you are correct, why would I experience problems several years later? Since my site is registered with Google Webmaster Tools, wouldn't I get some clue that something was seriously wrong with my site especially with the use of meta tags or keywords? I have absolutely no indication that Google penalized my site. This site was built by two previous webmasters. As you can tell, I haven't had very much luck with folks who claimed they knew what they were doing or talking about. I appreciate your feedback but I would appreciate it even more if you would tone it down as I am looking for constructive/helpful feedback and not sarcasm!

 

I've read a few of deathshadow's posts before, don't take it offensive, appreciate the constructive criticism that he's provided. It was honest and straight to the point, that's all you can ask for.

In terms of the website, he's right you are stuck in the 90's it really does need revamping. Whether that's from yourself or you hire somebody to do it. Having a great design is only a half of the task, the other half is getting seen. SEO is ongoing maintenance and your website is using awful SEO.

The way you are thinking in the terms of "several years later" is wrong. Google indexes hundreds of millions of websites, it was just a matter of time and to be honest, I'm surprised you've lasted through all of the recent updates to Google's algorithm without dropping traffic.

My vote is with deathshadow, scrap it and start again using the best practices. That would probably be quicker, easier and more cost effective than doing it in phases.

 

Because engine rankings are a craps shoot in the best of times -- it's like when the 'big one' is going to make Nevada be ocean-front real-estate... It could be tomorrow, it could be next week, it could be twenty generations after after the youngest of us on these forums are dead and buried...

But unlike the dreaded end of the world scale earthquake, there are things that can be done to reduce the risk. Certain practices -- like the abuse of TITLE, keywords, misusing nofollow and broken invalid HTML make it not a question of "if", but "when"!

Not to blaspheme, but as a rule of thumb I've found google's webmaster tools to be increasingly pointless trash... bordering upon nube predation in terms of what it actually delivers. A LOT of automated tools for working on websites are for all intents and purposes stripping naked, painting yourself up in glow in the dark paint, and running into the jungles of vietnam in 1970 screaming "here I am, shoot me, shoot me!". From Dreamweaver to Google Webmaster Tools to jQuery -- the only thing about these that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting their use!

Now, this might be an odd question -- but if so how are you measuring traffic -- when you say 'impressions' do you just mean less people are signing up for the newsletter? Joining your linked-in? How about the socials, what are they doing. Are you seeing the same levels of traffic but getting less conversions, or has there been a corresponding traffic drop alongside the drop in 'impressions' / conversions?

Though since the newsletter form is broken/invalid, and doesn't work with javascript disabled... wonder if that's your real problem here. Again, disastrously bad markup and poor implementation is making that far, far, far less than useful... and most of it's being useless can be blamed on some developer somewhere along the way buying into the "pageloads are evil" lie.

That could be a 'ouch' in and of itself -- too many hands in the pot.

That happens -- there's a lot of ignorance out there and people who just don't understand the technologies they're working with -- the difference between professional grade work and work done professionally.

Sorry, New England Yankee in me -- we only have two modes of verbal communication; sardonic wit and the back-handed compliment... So sayeth Winston Wolfe:

"If I'm curt with you it's because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast and I need you guys to act fast if you wanna get out of this. So, pretty please... with sugar on top. Clean the ******* car."'

The bottom line is there is little worth salvaging from this site 'under the hood' or from a SEO perspective -- you have a decent copy (content text) and content -- the layout isn't bad it just needs the padding's evened out so it looks a bit less like it's slapped together any old way. As such a good first step would be to take a page -- like the landing page -- and rewrite it with semantic markup and separation of presentation from content... with little concern for the final layout and every concern for saying what things ARE, not what they look like. This would mean better indexing in search, and better accessibility, and likely an easier time of things when it comes time to think responsive layout.

I started digging deeper to give you a leg up by showing you how the HTML should have been written -- and there's even more major issues than my initial analysis revealed... like the second HTML tag and LINK tags in the BODY; again, invalid markup that in this case, could make some browsers not even render most of the body content and make search engines pretend half your document doesn't even EXIST... there are tags that have no business being used on any website written after 1998 like FONT... rel="nofollow" on anchors that there's zero legitimate reason to set to nofollow...

Cleaning out just the markup with an eye for SEO by way of semantic markup, there's little reason for that to be much more than:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html
	xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
	lang="en"
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><head>

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/>

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	name="description"
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/>

<meta
	name="keywords"
	content="bully, parent, child, education, school, community, coping, seminar"
/>

	
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	href="favicon.ico"
/>	
	
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Code (markup):

Which shows what I mean, given that this is 6.4k to the original's 20+. Two thirds reduction in code size, for a cleaner, easier to navigate and maintain codebase on which a proper layout could be built.

Though I would suggest ripping out the e-mail addresses and using a contact form instead to help pre-filter out the hordes of spam you may be dealing with -- that could also be something that changed which could effect your numbers. An update to the spam filter on your e-mail setup could be trashing a more mails... I had that on a site a few years ago where an update to spamassassin was killing off a lot of legitimate traffic. Going through it the copy could stand a bit of punching up too -- especially to remove the ridiculous number of redundancies. As a writer I know would tell you: "We know you're talking about bullying, you don't need to say it five times in one sentence!"

Some of it was just... wow. Even just silly things like "copyright (c)" or the <span class="label"> were laughable at best...

 

all is about Optimization, there is a lot of miss on your website source code...

 

Just to beat a dead horse, there are tons of well-written, non-spamming, white hat web sites that have been hammered over the last 18 months. This is google's attempt to clear out the poorly written, spamming, black hat web sites that had a lot of collateral damage.

So when everyone else is also wondering why they got smacked down, it is obvious why you did.

wiz