Lost 75% of my traffic on Oct 25, help appreciated
-
So I've been running coolquotescollection.com since 1997 (!) as a hobby project. I lost about 75% of my organic search traffic on the 25th of October, literally overnight. I've been doing a lot of research but I still don't know why I was penalized. Image attached.
I naturally thought this was because of Penguin (Oct 17, my drop was Oct 25). However, after checking backlinks I only discovered 11 domains with about 100-400 links each, the major ones were forum signatures and blog sidebars, 6 domains were spam sites / directories. They almost exclusively used the same anchor text (domain name or similar), so this doesn't seem like a black hat attack. Some of the directories used keywords in their urls however (like "funny quotes").
1. Is this really enough for such a heavy penalty?
I added these domains to be disavowed today, I'm aware this might take weeks or months to change.I've automated so that pictures gets uploaded to my Facebook page with a link to my page. This started in early 2014.
2. Can Facebook links be considered link spam?
They don't even show up in webmaster tools.
Example: https://www.facebook.com/CoolQuotesCollection/photos/a.510328825689624.1073741825.326096120779563/615403025182203/?type=1&theaterI analyzed keywords and the major ones dropped between 2 and 6 positions. Notable exception: I seem to still rank nr 1 for "cool movie quotes" even though page is not optimized for that keyword.
Moz warned about over 5000 pages with duplicate content. It was a single page that used a querystring url parameter I have excluded in webmaster tools. I have now entered a canonical link on these pages. Example:
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-url-example...
http://coolquotescollection.com/Home/TShirts?url=http-another-url.......
3. Could the Google algo penalize this even though I have excluded the "url" parameter?I have a lot of internal links in the page navigation. Can this cause problems? See the absolute bottom of this page where I have 94 links for example: http://coolquotescollection.com/laughs
4. Could a lot of internal links (navigation to page numbers) be the problem?Some more facts:
- Site is http://coolquotescollection.com/
- Domain is 14 years old.
- The web site launched in Sep 1997, a year before Google! (Not relevant but you might understand why this is important to me).
- I haven't done any SEO work for at least 12 months, probably closer to two years.
- The only SEO work I've done is to optimize the pages, no link building at all, no black hat stuff.
- I'm automatically building a sitemap that contains all pages, see here: http://coolquotescollection.com/robots.txt
- I've used webmaster tools for years, haven't gotten any warnings. I checked backlinks there, also here from moz and ahrefs.
I'm annoyed that a quality content site can be penalized so hard (75% drop) when there are no, or just smaller issues. I'm just lucky this is not my business site, if so I would have gone out of business.
Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated!
-
Traffic decreased about the same on all pages. I was however surprised that the thin pages was 40% of all landing pages. This might actually be one explanation. It still doesn't explain the extremely sudden drop however, since I've read content-related algo hits are usually more gradual (over one or several weeks). I might be wrong however.
Stats:
75% decrease in traffic on thin quote pages (40% of all landing pages)
80% decrease in traffic on all other content rich pages (60% of all landing pages)My plan now is to hide (NOINDEX) the thin pages.(http://moz.com/community/q/noindexing-thin-content-pages-good-or-bad)
-
That's right. You might want to check your analytics. See if your traffic on those thin pages dropped. You might also want to check your indexed pages on webmaster tools to see if it dropped.
If you see signs in any of those, then you found your main problem.
That's the only thing I would work on right now actually. Edit them or redirect to meatier, relevant pages.
One thing I'm sure of is that this isn't Penguin as you never really did create any links to it
-
Yeah I've heard this as well. Some still seem to think Penguin only happened on the 17th of Oct, but I find that hard to believe.
I manually looked into all domains with more than 20 links to my site and disavowed all spam and low quality sites. Did you mean something else?
-
I assume you mean the detail pages with just a single quote on? Like http://coolquotescollection.com/1/
Do you think I would see improvements if I removed these pages completely? Or is there another solution I can try? -
I'd still look at the link profile as well. Penguin 3.0 is still rolling out http://searchengineland.com/google-penguin-3-0-rollout-still-ongoing-209886. Look into the profiles/content of the linking domains to rule you out being collateral damage as well.
-
There was an update during that final week of October but it wasnt widely reported on. I think it's even bigger than the panda/penguin that came before it. I still dont have a conclusion on what it was but looking at your site, I would think it could be about the content. The indexed pages are really thin, hence possibly being the cause for the big drop.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Traffic inconsistency
Hello I verified my website on Google Search Console and submitted sitemap a long time ago. I have been getting data for impressions, but no clicks. However, Cpanel shows that people have been visiting my website, but Google Search Console does not. The data do not match up. Would you be able to explain why and what can I do about this? Also, Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest does not identify keywords on my website. Kind regards,
Algorithm Updates | | zi9gy
Igor kRdsaku MFFNnlZ1 -
Sudden Drop in Organic Traffic through Image Search
We've have been facing a strange issue with our Organic Image Search Traffic since July month, 10th July 2016 to be precise. There is a significant decline in our Organic Image Search Traffic that we can see in our Google Search Console Account, We have noticed a sudden drop (Almost 80%-90%) in our daily clicks through image search in Google Search Console, Does anyone here have any idea why this has happened suddenly though everything is same as it was before and we haven't done any changes in image names and images path. IWPbQ
Algorithm Updates | | tigersohelll0 -
Ecommerce SEO help
Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Drop in Organic Traffic for Homepage and Branded terms but Steady in Rankings and According to WMT.
I am stumped. I have been researching for over two days now. Our homepage organic traffic YoY is down approx. 25%. However, rank has not changed according to Conductor, Bing and Google WMT. Impressions have gone up according to both search engines and we rank now for more keywords in top 3 than we did last year. Both WMTs' present a pretty healthy picture. No insignificant indexing issues, Error URLs & blocked resources are down, daily page crawls are higher than ever, etc. I drilled into Google Analytics from a few different view points. The closest I got to an answer was I saw huge out-liars YoY in browsers and browser versions. We saw significant differences in organic traffic YoY from IE 11, 9 ,10, 8 and 7. Android Browser 31, 32 and Safari 6 and 7. I tested our homepage and search results in all of these, and found no issues. Yet, GA reports 50K+ differences YoY. My only thought is it is perhaps a GA attribution error? And/or browsers defaulting organic traffic to direct or other? Yet, our direct traffic is up but does not correlate with as much as we are down. Any tips on where to look next would be extremely helpful!
Algorithm Updates | | lunavista-comm0 -
Significant drop in traffic
Hi there, We run 3 websites in a similar niche (bins) but tend to have a different area of focus on each site, wheelie, recycling and general litter. They all have unique descriptions, images etc (as much as possible) One of our sites has been a long standing penalty sufferer and we still dont want to give up on it. They are all located on unique IP's but on the same server with the same owner in whois. My question is could our site that has struggled with a penalty in the past be effecting our other sites which havent had problems? I know google likes to see brands and we do regular content, social media etc on all the sites, The drop came today and appears across all our sites. The main site that had the penalty usually gets around 50 visits a day from search, so far today it has had 10 and that is most of the working day now gone. I hope someone can shed a little light on the issues we are facing Thank you Jon
Algorithm Updates | | imrubbish0 -
Help with local Seo?
Hi, I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally. I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country. For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states. Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others. They rank 3rd and im 8th. There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc. Still no joy. I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me. By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along. I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area. My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors! many many thanks for any responses John
Algorithm Updates | | totaldriveways0 -
Our Rankings are being very inconsistent! Some days we are on the front page, some days we are not in the top 50\. This happens on a weekly and sometimes daily basis... Any thoughts on why this is happening? This newbie appreciates any feedback.
We seem to be having major issues with our rankings. When I came into the company, the company was in the middle of cleaning up some of their past SEO efforts that had caused some issues with some of the latest Google updates. We were able to get the site back up to par, and some of our rankings were improved back to the first page, but then they disappeared. They will head back to the first page and then disappear again on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Does anyone have any idea on why it will be doing this so inconsistently and so often? This newbie appreciates any feedback!!!!!
Algorithm Updates | | PCMV0 -
What do i need to do to drive more traffic to my site
Hi i built a site around ten months ago but at the moment i am only receiving around 3 visitors a a day. it is a travel site that i write new content for but because i am still learning seo i am not sure what i have been doing wrong. I am not sure of the basics from getting people to the site or the correct way of generating free links or if i should be submitting my site to all these free site submitters which includes to lycos and other free services that you can find on google. If anyone can please explain what i am doing wrong and how to generate more traffic for free then that would be great. also can anyone recommend any free service that would help with increasing traffic and links
Algorithm Updates | | ClaireH-1848860