My site lost 5/6 of its traffic in October

[sudipdasin]

After the October google algo change, my site indexed pages dropped from 60,000+ to 10,000. Previously I was receiving about few thousands of visitors daily from google organic search alone. Now I hardly receive a few hundreds daily. My current google index is about 2800. I don't know what happened, but my site is practically ruined as it is a social networking site and a entertainment portal. Can you guys please help me out here, I am about to go broke. Thanks a ton in advance

Recent Changes done : setting crawl rate to maxmimum in GWT, Geolocation turned off, submitted new gzipped sitemap with an index

[tedster]

Have you done anything that you know Google says is against their guidelines - especially in the area of link building?

[epmaniac]

i had also submitted sitemap (with links from main index only) few days back and my main indexed dropped

could it be because of sitemaps?

[tedster]

I doubt that your sitemap caused a problem unless it was very buggy. I think Google is having troubles right now [webmasterworld.com]

[goodroi]

just in case here are some things you might want to do in case you haven't done so already:

check to see if your website has been hacked (hackers can add malware and dangerous spam links to your pages)?

check your backlink profile for any changes (loss of good links, links from spammy sites sites, etc)?

re-verify the sites you are linking out to are still quality (maybe some sites expired and relaunched as spam or malware sites)?

logged into google webmaster central to see if there are any messages?

talked with all members of your team to make sure no one did anything (upload bad robots.txt file, launched a duplicate version of the site)?

good luck

[sudipdasin]

There was something else - since the problem happened I tried to distribute my feeds to my wordpress and blogger blog, in the hope that those sites will get indexed and inturn will send me back my traffic

[scottsonline]

The sitemap issue started as a symptom. This problem acted like a network issue to start, google would claim they couldn't get to sitemaps. Relevant or not who knows

[Robert Charlton]

There was something else - since the problem happened I tried to distribute my feeds to my wordpress and blogger blog, in the hope that those sites will get indexed and inturn will send me back my traffic

Possibly bad timing on the (additional?) feeds to blogs, as Google has been a problem on indexing those. See...

Wonder why your blog posts are not indexing these two days?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4220566.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Reports are that Google has fixed the blog indexing problem, though I haven't checked that, and blog posts the have been delayed will begin to reappear.

Conceivably, if I understand what you've done, you may start seeing your articles getting indexed in multiple places on your multiple sites. If that happens, you'll have to choose where you actually want them, as you don't want the same content all over the place. What Google does with dupe content is not to "penalize", but to filter out all but one version... and that may not be on the url you'd prefer.

PS: This is probably a good time to sit tight and let Google sort out its own problems. That said, you may want to remove the duplicate versions you've posted.

[sudipdasin]

Hi Robert, great info there. But I just like to know that distributing only the title of my posts with a link to my original post will count as duplicate ? I use ping.fm and dlvr.it to distribute my posts to other social networks but as mentioned earlier only the title and with a link but no body or description.

[tedster]

No that's not duplicate content. Duplicate content means really duplicated - way up there, approaching 100% the same. That's the situation where all but one of the URLs involved gets filtered out of a search result.

[sudipdasin]

Thanks for clearing that out for me Ted. Great help really appreciate it

[Robert Charlton]

Your first mention of your feeds did sound as if you were distributing your entire articles to get them published on your other blogs, since your main site wasn't getting indexed....

...since the problem happened I tried to distribute my feeds to my wordpress and blogger blog, in the hope that those sites will get indexed and inturn will send me back my traffic

As tedster suggests, you should not be concerned about just publishing the title and a link back. This is not duplicate content.

You might even include a snippet... perhaps generate a snippet that's a very short summary of an article rather than an excerpt of the opening. I would never distribute the whole article, though. That could present a potential duplication problem.

And since the feed went to your own blogs, I assume you would abide by your own terms and conditions and not republish the whole article, so you should have no concerns about these feeds at all.

setting crawl rate to maxmimum in GWT

You should check your server logs to see whether changing this setting has helped or not. Google generally recommends leaving crawl rate at the default and letting them figure out the most efficient speed. If you maintain your own server, you may have a good handle on your server load and capabilities, but it doesn't sound like you do.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:27 am (utc) on Oct 24, 2010]

[johnlim9988]

sudipdasin, have you found the real reason?

[epmaniac]

if title of your RSS FEED is same as your homepage, would it be harmful?

[sudipdasin]

Nope! still trying frantically to find out what hit me so bad. May be a combination of factors, yet to solve it out.

[tedster]

Do you have a WebmasterTools account - and if so, are there any clues in there?

[indyank]

Geolocation turned off

Why did you do that? If you had targeted a particular region, why didn't you continue with it?

social networking site and a entertainment portal

Are you sure that there isn't any copyrighted stuff on your portal like images, videos, textual content etc? Look into GWT for more info.See whether there are any messages or removed content.

Also check basic things like how your robots meta tag look like, if you use it.Double check that you have not accidentally added noindex meta tag to the head section of pages on your site.

[sudipdasin]

Yup there are some duplicate content (copied from external sites by our members)which I am taking care of at the moment. And no I don't have any noindex tag in the head section. About the Geolocation bit I did it b'cause I thought it would solve my problem

[sudipdasin]

Ted I was attacked by a random bunch of spammer mainly from China, and those posts were mainly spam or duplicate content. I did delete some of them and that caused lots of crawl errors on my GWT control panel

[sudipdasin]

Can any of you guys tell me how to find out which pages have been flagged by google for duplication issues. Another bad thing happened, not sure it pertains to this forum but here it goes, my bing indexes is fluctuating more than stock prices. Yesterday I saw an index of 123+ then today at 35. Whereas my wordpress blog got 3700+ indexed pages in a week. This is freaking me out