Increasing content, adding rich snippets... and losing tremendous amounts of organic traffic. Help!
-
I know dramatic losses in organic traffic is a common occurrence, but having looked through the archives I'm not sure that there's a recent case that replicates my situation. I've been working to increase the content on my company's website and to advise it on online marketing practices. To that end, in the past four months, I've created about 20% more pages — most of which are very high quality blog posts; adopted some rich snippets (though not all that I would like to see at this point); improved and increased internal links within the site; removed some "suspicious" pages as id'd by Moz that had a lot of links on it (although the content was actually genuine navigation); and I've also begun to guest blog. All of the blog content I've written has been connected to my G+ account, including most of the guest blogging.
And... our organic traffic is preciptiously declining. Across the board. I'm befuddled. I can see no warnings (redirects &c) that would explain this. We haven't changed the site structure much — I think the most invasive thing we did was optimize our title tags! So no URL changes, nothing.
Obviously, we're all questioning all the work I've done. It just seems like we've sunk SO much energy into "doing the right thing" to no effect (this site was slammed before for its shady backlink buying — though not from any direct penalty, just as a result of the Penguin update).
We noticed traffic taking a particular plunge at the beginning of June.
Can anyone offer insights? Very much appreciated.
-
I'm trying to determine right now whether it's been an issue of this particular post being the symptom of a broader discrimination against our site or whether there has been competition introduced for this page. All the peaks and valleys of the site's organic traffic are exactly the peaks and valleys of popularity for this post. Graphing other major (organic) landing pages for our site (the top three of which have much less traffic than this one stupid page) does not indicate that the other pages have been similarly affected — their popularity is far more undulating, and subject to far fewer crazy movements. So I'm pretty sure at this point that it's the one page.
And, yes, this particular blog post accounts for about 1/2 of our site's organic traffic. We've reduced the bounce rate on this blog post down to the low 80's, percentage wise, which I think is respectable for what the blog post is & it's relationship to the site and the site's purpose as a whole, which is commercial and not immensely related to the post's content.
I suppose that's a new question, isn't it? How much should we care about the fortunes of one page that has a high bounce rate? Obviously, we should reduce the bounce rate (and there are some things we haven't done yet to do that) but the nature of this particular post is just not a super strong match for the content and direction of our site. The bounce rate will always been fairly high, it's just the way it will always be. Yet it has so. much. traffic. Another site I work on has a similar page, similarly somewhat-tangential to the site's content: the "when to use spray foam insulation" page. Thus I always want to call these the "spray foam insulation pages."
-
Ahh I see, I think if I was in that position I would try and have the dodgy links removed where possible, if you think they might be doing more harm to the site. Remember just because you've not received a warning notice in Webmaster tools, it doesn't mean that these links aren't negatively affecting your sites rankings, it may just be that there's not enough to have triggered a warning message, or as mentioned before they've simply been devalued.
What was it that caused the popularity around this particular blog post?
Do you mean that the decline in overall site traffic is down to a decline in traffic to this specific post? Or that it just correlates with the decline? -
I've got very little information about these backlinks since they precede my time, but I know that there was never any Google warnings about it. I think you're probably right, though — that the effect from the lousy backlinks is ongoing.
I graphed the decline in GA & found that the decline in traffic is exactly mirrored by the fortunes of this one ridiculously popular blog post. So while I continue to root around for confirmation for this, I'm guessing that this particular post has had found some new competition on the SERP. Yeesh.
-
Hi Novos Jay,
Do the shady backlinks you mentioned still exist and point to the site?
Have you used the disavow tool at all?The reason I ask is that it might just simply be down to the fact that the links that were holding the rankings and traffic up previously, are now gradually being devalued through various algorithm updates, so in spite of your recent work to do the right thing, there's still going to be an overall negative effect.
Perhaps with a little more information about the types of links (the shady ones) and quantity/% of the total backlinks, I/others might be able to give you some more specific ideas on what's happened?
Thanks,
Greg
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
-
How to check if the website has duplicate content?
I've been working with the websites from couple of months and it was always in my mind if there could be a legit way to find if the website have a duplicate content. I've tried couple of websites through google but nothing worked for me. It would be much appreciated if anyone can help. Thanks
Web Design | | rajveer_singh0 -
Does loading content from an ajax url count as a bounce rate
Hi, Our current website http://www.luxresorts.com has sections that pull content through AJAX which is accessible through a URL. For example, on our homepage, we have a section called "LUX* Magazine THE TASTEMAKER", if you click on "Read More" it would open on the same page while pulling content from this URL: http://www.luxresorts.com/en/posts/lux-magazine. There are two concerns here: a. the above url does not contain any google analytics code, does pulling content from a url through ajax cause a bounce rate? b. since the url is indepenedent, the is no meta tags including title, description or even robot attributes. Should we treat this page as all other pages? Thank you for your help. Tej Luchmun
Web Design | | luxresorts0 -
In Wordpress getting marked as duplicate content for tags
Moz is marking 11 high priority items for duplicate content. Just switched to wordpress and publishing articles for the site but only have a few. The problem is on the tag pages. Since there aren't very many articles so when you go to the tag pages it lists one or two articles and hence there are pages with duplicate content. Most of the articles have the same tags / categories. Perhaps I'm using too many tags and categories? I'm using about 7 tags and around 2 categories for each post / event. I've read the solution is using canonical tags but a little confused on which page I should use for the tag and then I believe I need to point the duplicate pages to the correct page. For example, I have two events that are for dances and both have the same tags. So when you visit, site.com/tags/dance or site.com/events both pages have the same articles listed. Which page do I select as having the original content? Does it matter? Does that make sense? Someone was also saying I could use the Yoast plugin to fix, but not really seeing anything in the Yoast tools. I also see 301 redirects mentioned as a solution but the tag pages will be changing as we add new articles and they have a purpose so not really seeing that as a solution.
Web Design | | limited70 -
How to deal with 100s of Wordpress media link pages, containing images, but zero content
I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts. I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed. I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions. 1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google 2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from. What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc. All suggestions greatly received!
Web Design | | xpers0 -
Pleas Help! My microdata format disappeared?
Hi guys im new on this comunity, reacently i have an ishue taht i do not know how to solve. Google suggested that you can put microdata on my website and its look very cool on the organic search pages. So whtat happend. I have change my website to a new one with all rich snippets and microdata, submited a xml.sitiemap dinamic one that refresh every time when i putt something new on my website. do a redirection from my old site to a new one. All that google propose. I have check all the pages in webmaster tools and in a that tool google show everything, also microdata have shown on a google organic search aproximetly 7 days when he refresh my pages from old site. After that microdata and little stars just desapired from organic serch on google. I do not know why? I did not do anything. So can anyone help me how to return little stars on my links on google shown on organic serch. website: www.telekoplus.com hosted in Serbia Thank you in advance Beket Borocki P.S Sorry if i have mistakes in writing on English.
Web Design | | telekoplus0 -
Best Way to Re-Direct traffic from existing site to new site?
Good Morning, I have an existing site (http://goo.gl/QKkpi) running on a slow server. We decided to create a new site (http://goo.gl/XUH3f) with the intention of de-commissioning the first one. Both sites are on the same WMT account. What is the best way to permanently redirect any backlinks/traffic (all levels, from home page to product pages) from the old site to the new site (prior to shutting down the first one). Thanks a lot!
Web Design | | Prime850 -
SEOMoz crawl report shows a duplicate content and duplicate title for these two url's http://freightmonster.com/ and http://freightmonster.com/index.html. How do I fix this?
What page is attached to http://freightmonster.com/ if it is not the index.html ? Should I do a redirect from the index page to something more descriptive?
Web Design | | FreightBoy1 -
Getting tons of duplicate content and title errors on my asp.net shopping cart, is there way to resolve this?
The problem I am having is that the web crawlers are seeing all my category pages as the same page thus creating duplicate content and duplicate title errors. At this time I have 270 of these critical errors to deal with. Here is an example: http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=1 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=2 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=3 http://www.baysidejewelry.com/category/1-necklaces.aspx?pageindex=4 All of these pages are see as the same exact page by the crawlers. Because these pages are generated by a SQL database I don't have a way I know of to fix it.
Web Design | | bsj20020