My website traffic dropped by 95%

[MrBrightside]

Hi,

My blog traffic dropped by 95% with no changes made, all keywords ranking for my site has been dropped, it been 3 days till now, i checked WebmasterTools and there is no errors. is there any recent algorithm changes? if not can anyone help me?

THANK YOU

[Planet13]

How are you checking for the traffic drop?

Are you checking JUST google analytics?

Are you also using a third-party checker, such as statcounter?

Have you checked your server logs as well to confirm the traffic drop?

[MrBrightside]

I'm checking both of analyctics and statcounter

[Planet13]

Hmm...

have you checked your logs to see if there are 404 errors? I think it takes google a few days to show nor found errors in the Webmastertools

That's all I can think of right now. Hopefully others will chime in.

[MrBrightside]

There is no errors in my Webmastertools, maybe i should wait a couple of days and check again like you said, and thanks for your help

[MrBrightside]

Another thing i'm doing Social Bookmark for SEO, and one of the socials bookmarks that i use is down could be that a reason ?

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, MrBrightside!

one of the socials bookmarks that i use is down could be that a reason ?

does this affect page load speed?
if so visitors could be bouncing from your site before GA has seen the visit.
your server access logs should tell you how many requests are being made regardless of time spent on pages.

[MrBrightside]

No there is nothing wrong on my page load speed, the problem is that all of my keywords, i mean the most of them have been disappeared from Google they were on the first page now they are gone.

[phranque]

if you're loading a widget for social bookmarking and it's "down" - that could affect page load speed.
page load speed is used as a ranking factor.

in addition to what i described above which could affect your analytics...


and both respondents in this thread suggested you look at your server access log files for additional clues...


what does WMT tell you about Top Queries and Top Pages and changes over time?
have you tried segmenting your traffic in GA to see if that reveals anything?
have you tried various searches using the site: operator to see if anything looks weird? (too many/few pages indexed vs what you expected? any filtered content? non-canonical urls indexed?)
how old is your blog?
have you analyzed your inbound link profile?

[MrBrightside]

No it's not the widget just the social bookmark website that i post my links on it, is not available.

I tried GA but nothing helpful just my traffic is dropped

And yes i tried many searches and the most of my keywords have been disappeared from entire Google, the most of my top pages are not indexed anymore, but there is one page who still indexed it was on the first page now it's on the second page, and i noticed something weird about this page, one of my Google Adsense ad block doesn't appear on that page but it appears on other pages...

My blog have 6 month

i've checked my backlinks and everything is ok they still raising

[edited by: mademetop at 7:53 am (utc) on Jul 24, 2013]
[edit reason] No external links, please [/edit]

[Planet13]

I am not sure I understand what your social bookmark website is:

Is it an EXTERNAL site that you use to link TO your site (something like pintrest or something like that)?

Looking at your google impressions and clicks, it looks like you were hit with some kind of penalty.

You said:

...the problem is that all of my keywords, i mean the most of them have been disappeared from Google they were on the first page now they are gone.

That, too, is a sign of a penalty.

My blog have 6 month. i've checked my backlinks and everything is ok they still raising

I have to ask. How did you get your backlinks?

Did you buy any backlinks?

Have you used any website directories? Or article directories?

Have you been posting lots of comments in blogs and forums?

[phranque]

I tried GA but nothing helpful just my traffic is dropped

equally for all keywords and all landing pages and all demographics, etc?

[MrBrightside]

I'm doing social bookmarking, like posting my links on digg, Stumble upon, delicious...
i didn't buy any backlinks.
i have never used any website directories or article directories.
i have never posted on forums or blogs.
i'm just doing social bookmarking nothing else.


And can you explain that penalty please and how to recover? thx

[MrBrightside]

@phranque yes

[fathom]

Can you describe your content creation strategy and how such content is organized in your domain?

[MrBrightside]

i Receive my content from Unique article wizard, (not my content), and all what i'm doing is backlinking that's it nothing else

[Planet13]

i Receive my content from Unique article wizard, (not my content), and all what i'm doing is backlinking that's it nothing else

Ok, I think I understand:

You are getting THE SAME articles that hundreds of other websites are getting, right?

Go to one of the articles on your web site that you got from unique article wizard. Copy a complete sentence from the article.

Go to google and past that sentence into the search field.

How many other web sites have that same sentence on their site?

I apologize IF I am wrong, but I believe you need to study how gogole ranks duplicate content (the same content that other people have on their websites).

[MrBrightside]

let say about 5 - 10, well is that enough to affect my website

[aakk9999]

Just to exclude the obvious:

Have you checked your robots.txt? Just in case it is not disallowing the site?

It would also be good idea to try to do "Fetch as Googlebot" few of URLs that have lost the traffic to make sure Google can fetch them.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 7:40 pm (utc) on Jul 12, 2013]

[Planet13]

Yes, especially if those other web sites have higher trust / authority in google.

To be honest, I am surprised that you ranked SO WELL in google for 6 months, because you are using non-original content and your links are from social bookmarking sites, which I believe you created yourself.

Please understand that I am NOT trying to blame you or insult you.

But if I understand correctly, your site is NOT using unique content (even though the tool is called unique content wizard) and your back links are NOT from authority websites (like from major newspapers, or university web sites, or from experts).

Anyway, maybe I am wrong. I hope I have helped though.

[Planet13]

Also, do what aakk9999 recommended: fetch as googlebot and check your robots.txt

also check your source code JUST TO MAKE SURE that you didn't accidentally put a meta noindex tag on your pages. (I know I made that mistake once myself!)

[fathom]

Planet13 wrote:

Ok, I think I understand:

LOL... it's usually one or the other eh!

...and sometimes both ;)

[MrBrightside]

@aakk9999 i did what you said on one of my pages and i found 5 errors, 5 of the links from that page are blocked by robots.txt, so could be that a reason? if so how to resolve it.

@Planet13 No those other web sites are just some blogspot domains and some of those are some of facebook articles, they are not even active i think.

[Planet13]

"LOL... it's usually one or the other eh! "

with me, NOTHING is ever certain ;)

"i did what you said on one of my pages and i found 5 errors, 5 of the links from that page are blocked by robots.txt, so could be that a reason? if so how to resolve it."

Are you familiar with the proper way to format robots.txt file?

[MrBrightside]

Are you familiar with the proper way to format robots.txt file?

No, if there is a guide i can try

[MrBrightside]

Here is another thing that i would like to add

[edited by: mademetop at 7:51 am (utc) on Jul 24, 2013]
[edit reason] No external links, please [/edit]

[aakk9999]

@MrBrightside

i did what you said on one of my pages and i found 5 errors, 5 of the links from that page are blocked by robots.txt, so could be that a reason? if so how to resolve it.

I am confused by this sentence, how did you find 5 errors on one page if you were checking whether the page was blocked by robots?

Or better, can you describe what exactly did you do to check for pages blocked by robots?

Did you do "Fetch as Googlebot" ? If so, how many URLs did you check and what was the message for each?

Or did you do some different test? Can you describe?

Also, have you got robots.txt file? Check http://www.example.com/robots.txt (replace www.example.com with your domain name)

Does the page open? If so, do you see in there something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

We need to know exactly what you checked, how and what were the results in order to help.

[MrBrightside]

yes i did "Fetch as Googlebot" like you said i checked 2 pages and i found the same 5 errors on it and the errors are "blocked by robot.txt"

And i find this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

[Planet13]

Do your URLs normally have /search/ in the URL path?

If so, then google (and all other search engine bots, for bing, duckduckgo, etc.,) will be blocked from indexing those pages.

So if you have webpages where the URL is:

www.mydomain.com/searches/example.html

or

www.mydomain.com/category/searches/example.html

Or something like that, they will be blocked by your robots.txt file.

[MrBrightside]

No they don't