Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Articles on our site typically rank very well. We don't track keywords or actual SERP ranking positions because we think it would be a waste of time, if it was even possible. Rather, we track the number of visitors from different sources, in a rolling 24 hour, 7 day, or 30 day period.
For the past 6 weeks we have consistently had close to a 4.5% reduction in traffic from Google every week. Traffic is still good, but at this rate it won't be long before it really starts to hurt.
I'd like to know if anyone recognizes this pattern. I haven't heard of penalties being phased in gradually, but I'm not up on the latest.
Any insight?
I'd like to know if anyone recognizes this pattern. I haven't heard of penalties being phased in gradually, but I'm not up on the latest.
Many of the slow gradual declines I've seen have been due to the improvements in crawler technology. What used to be impervious to bots is now cakewalk for many. Is it possible that you've got some technical challenges that were not present before? With Google submitting forms now, you have to be very careful in what you allow them to index and noindex.
That would be one thing to look at. The other would be competitive sabotage but I won't go there just yet. Many stop reading when I mention that phrase as it could never happen to them. ;)
Okay, so what changes took place about 8-10 weeks ago that would have had an effect on your pages getting deindexed. Is that even the case? Usually a consistent loss of traffic means that you are most likely losing pages from the index. And, wasn't there a PR recalculation in the past 6-8 weeks? If there was, that might be another factor although they usually don't have this type of dramatic impact.
Slow gradual consistent loss of traffic?
I'd be more apt to believe there is a technical challenge at hand. Do you have a Google Webmaster Tools account? If so, I'd look there first for any signs of trouble. You'd be surprised at what Google will find for you in those reports. :)
For the past 6 weeks we have consistently had close to a 4.5% reduction in traffic from Google every week
I have good reason to suspect competitive sabatage, actually it would be sabatage from a company who wants to buy our web site. Since the purchase price is based on advertising revenue, a 25% decrease in traffic decreases the price by a number in the 6 figure range. I think this is motive enough.
So the question is, what do you do to check for hijacking? There are so many pages in this site, it would be difficult to find specific pages which are hijacked without knowing exactly what to look for. Seems like there is a thread around here about hijacking but I can't find it and I think hijacking has changed over the past year or so.
Anyone with any help would be greatly appreciated.
Is your site still growing and developing month by month?
Are there similar domain names that may have started to compete directly - has the company looking to buy set up an open rival to your site?
Is it a field where the competition is increasing around you?
Is your site still growing and developing month by month?
Are there similar domain names that may have started to compete directly - has the company looking to buy set up an open rival to your site?
Also, don't regard what BroadProspect said regarding scraped content. The less inbound links and authority you have, the more susceptible you may be to the issue.
There are many threads here in WebmasterWorld that talk about duplicate content - how to detect it, and what to try and do to battle against it and prevent it in the future.
1. Are rankings dropping for one keyword and then later on for another?
2. Are all rankings dropping, just a little bit more each day?
3. Are rankings maintaining from one country but not from another?
4. Are rankings apparently the same across the board, but traffic still is dropping more and more every day?
In other words - traffic alone is not a metric that exposes actionable information. To answer the question - which reports a very odd phenomenon, you've got to dig into it and refine the information.
It's even possible that this gradual, continual loss of traffic is the result of a DNS cache poisoning exploit against the sites involved, and not directly caused by Google rankings at all. That's a remote but real possibility, too, so checking your DNS settings for problems also makes sense.
Rankings and traffic are dropping on just this one website consistently week after week for about 6 weeks with the range of about 5% per week. yesterday was our lowest day in over 2.5 years and the trend continues... Soon I'll have nothing left.
That sucks! Maybe it is time to bring someone in to look at your site and see what "might" be affecting it. Those slow gradual decreases over time concern me. There are different things that can cause this and the list is numerous. No need for us to continue to list them as it would go on forever. You need to "find" the cause of the issue. If you are a small player in a big space and you encroached on someone else's "claimed territory", it is possible that you are the victim of what some call "Reverse SEO". It happens every single day!
I have other websites whose traffic has remained stable even increased.
That's a definitive indicator right there. What is different between the targeted markets of these sites? And now we have the "multiple sites" challenge in the equation. This stuff gets deep and if you don't know what to look for, you'll drown in it. :(
New member registrations have not slowed down, only Google traffic has slowed down.
That might support the "It's summer" hypothesis. People who are serious about writing are less likely to be distracted by the beach or barbecue grill than the casual "How do I write a bestselling novel so I can be rich and famous?" or "What's 'slam poetry'?" crowd.
For what it's worth, I managed a writers' forum on one of the major online services for half a dozen years, and traffic always slowed down during summer. The hardcore members remained active, but the casual drop-in crowd had other things to do.
First priority has to be checking every single outgoing link, and removing all that you cannot 100% recommend. Else use nofollow or noindex.
Then check them again and remove any others that are not 100% safe.
You are now beyond the stage of worrying about what's right and what's wrong; you need to accept that Google has a problem with your site, and what you think is no longer the focus; what Google thinks is the issue now.
I spent a day reading about and researching the different types of page hijackings and determined that my site was vlunerable to all 3 types. It took only a few hours to reasonably tighten things up.
3 days later the decline in traffic stopped and started to reverse.
I also set up some traps which notify me of proxy hijacking attempts. The first day there were over 100 attempts at proxy hijacking. Now, a few days later, the proxy hijacking attempts have almost completely stopped.
Traffic is slowly increasing but I believe the damage has been done and I'll probably never get traffic back to the pages the have been hijacked over the previous 6 weeks. Fortunately the site is still growing so in the long run the damage will be minimal.
The info in the other threads about page hijacking have been a great help. I strongly recommend every serious webmaster read them to get at least a basic understanding of the 3 known types of page hijacking.
If you have kids and work from home there are just too many distractions during the summer holidays to get any serious writing or networking done.
