We are <widgets listing portal> with 300 indexed pages. Starting 17 Sep, we had a dramatic fall in traffic (50%) from google.
Any thoughts what could the possible reasons ? Thanks
[edited by: aakk9999 at 10:56 am (utc) on Sep 19, 2013] [edit reason] Exemplified niche [/edit]
aakk9999
11:01 am on Sep 19, 2013 (gmt 0)
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Eliko!
With regards to your traffic drop, have you done any analysis to see where the drop in traffic is coming from? Such as:
- analysing which landing page(s) stopped driving traffic - analysing which keywords stopped driving traffic - compared the number of keywords before and after the fall, to see if perhaps the long tail is affected
With regards to your widgets listing portal, what are the chances for these listing pages to be seen as "thin content"? I mean, do you just list these widgets and link out or do you write about these widgets providing more content on your site?
And lastly, have you done ANY changes to your site in weeks prior to 17th of September?
Eliko
11:43 am on Sep 19, 2013 (gmt 0)
The widgets includ a review and rating users, not "thin content" Without any changes in the site... One thing, on 28 Aug the description tags deleted (by mistake), Yesterday I returned them.
I did some analysis (landing pages & keywords) and it happens across the whole site. The traffic decrease after 2:00 am on 17 Sep
Traffic was effected on long tail, On google - Even if i search for the exact "page title" no results and If i search the URL then it displays.
Eliko, i saw that drop on 18/09 4pm! I just looked at WMT and was not looking bad that google shows me crawling errors for pages that have been delete a long time ago. Also they show me "linked through" from old pages that does not exists. I think they have a bad data push! They found nearly 2.000 crawling errors in 2 weeks. But the very best is, that the not found pages return a 410 "gone". But google insists they are crawling errors.
I think their algo is so fragil that if in china a bag of rice falls over the rankings are immediatly changed.
bumpski
1:51 pm on Sep 24, 2013 (gmt 0)
Google has been heavily indexing https pages. Many webhosts, by default, have enabled https/ssl access to websites. You can view a web site's pages with https, just as with http. Of course this leads to duplicate content problems that WMT does not seem to report. Just for one of my webhosts domain names I see virtually millions of sites indexed as https and http, and actually, plus the "secret domain" path the webhost provides initially to sites. (Acronym.Webshost.com) So it's obvious from this that millions of websites are oblivious to the concept of canonicalization and duplicate content issues. And I wondered if Google's new penchant for https could be related to the problems reported.
Regarding WMT and crawl errors: Sometimes WMT does not correctly show the link Google crawled. In the past you had to view source of the WMT page to see the actual link used. (Now the source is terribly convoluted!) For more info please see this link: Message msg:4293827 bumpski (Sorry can't make direct link to a post work) WMT Bad Links [webmasterworld.com]
