Sudden Drop in Organic Traffic on 28 June 2014 and still continuing

[lolamjambuna]

Hello everyone :)

I am a WordPress Blogger and I post articles on Computers and Technology.

On 28th of June 2014, I lost 80% of my blog's traffic. I have read in many forums/websites that many webmasters suddenly lost their rankings in Google Search Results on 28th of June 2014.

Before this sudden traffic drop, I only placed one slot of AdSense ad which went above the fold. After traffic drop, I immediately removed the slot and also made adjustments to my blog's layout, so that good amount of content remains above the fold even after placing the same ad slot in future.

I was convinced that my blog suffered Page Layout Algorithm Penalty, but now after reading the experience of other webmasters I don't know what's happening?

Can anyone please help?

Thanks a lot :)

[aristotle]

lolamjambuna
This is what I currently use. It blocks fake referrals from 9 different country domains. But as I said before, it isn't practical to try to block all bad bots.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} \.(ru

[webcentric]

The Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification board covers bot warfare in great detail...

[webmasterworld.com ]

Given my experiences with bot and country blocking and the fact that I watch this kind of activity, I seriously doubt it's the cause of the symptom mentioned in the original post which is date specific.

[lolamjambuna]

@aristotle Thanks :)

@webcentric Ruling out and fixing all possible causes. Google becomes butt hurt any time.

It also don't notify anything in Google Webmaster Tools. We have to figure everything out ourselves. FML

[Mentat]

As you can see i the image, one of my abandoned sites was affected by Panda each week, with a blow on 28 of June...

[i.imgur.com...]

[lolamjambuna]

same here :

[i.imgur.com...]

[aakk9999]

@Mentat, what is the niche of your abandoned site? Is it in the similar area as lolamjambuna (computers and technology)?

[webcentric]

@Mentat, what is the subject matter of your abandoned site? Is it in the simmilar area as lolamjambuna (computers and technology)?

I could post a similar set of stats and tell you that the impacted site is a completely different type of site. This is wider than a specific niche I think. I'm seeing crazy SERPS on any number of subjects.

[drkblog]

(Thank god!) Hello guys!

I've been wondering for a few days now what wass going on with my domain. Until I found this post by looking for the key date June 28. As some of you I have seen a sudden drop in traffic since that day. My wordpress blog (hosted in my own server) went from 130 to 10 visits per day. This is a personal blog with 99% original content over several subjects in Spanish (arduino/software devel/politics/society). But the Google traffic drop affected the top level domain home page also. This one is a English content site where I publish open source software of my own. Here webmaster tools state that impressions went from 1500 to 100 per day, since June 28.

I've been reading a lot about possible causes and checking my backlinks. I found out that my domain.com was replicating www.domain.com and added 301 redirect in the .htaccess file as Google recommends. But it has been like this since September 1998. That's why I don't think this is the reason.

I'm the webmaster for a couple of Wordpress sites (different domains than mine) where I use the same plugin configuration and I don't see traffic drop there. These sites are hosted in the same provider as my own site.

As you can see I'm a bit lost here. I have to check my top-domain web site (where I publish the open source) because while it's 99% original content, there is a lot of sites out there which replicate my software description. Some of these site are reported by webmaster tools to link 8,000 times to one or two pages in my domain. But again this doesn't seem to be something new. And checking this is getting really ugly, because there are hundreds of sites linking.

Hope sharing my experience would help here.

[fsmobilez]

i have faced almost same issue, my 8 years domain effected on same date , keeping a close eye on this thread if someone found the solution please dont forget to share it with other

[Mentat]

IT, mobiles, software is a very crowded niche now.
Every little indian seems to have an Android blog and all the software sites are using the same descriptions + a lot of adsense fake download button ads.

The duplicate content is at a huge level, word for words or subject wise.
Scrap bots are working non-stop in order to create new sites automatically.

Thin content (less than 200-300 words) + old content seems to be a BIG problem since Panda 4.0

The main problem is still the fact that authority sites are doing a lot of spam without getting punished.

[webcentric]

Thin content...

I'm seeing pages with less than 10 words of actual content ranking better than pages with a half a dozen original images, 6 to 8 paragraphs of original text and a couple of links to authoritative sites to boot. We're talking about pages that were #1 a few weeks ago that suddenly got pushed down almost 100 places by pure junk.

Conclusion: this has nothing to do with quality IMHO. Maybe there's a newness factor involved. And my main site doesn't have a back-link problem. I've never played that game and I've checked the link profile pretty thoroughly and recently. This looks to me like an algo off its meds, frankly.

[aristotle]

webcentric --
You're wasting your time trying to make sense of Google's search results. It's a system where one accidental violation of one unknown rule can outweigh a hundred positive factors.

[drkblog]

I don't think discussing whether Google results are worthy or not is useful in this thread. I guess most of us have an opinion about that. The point is some of us reached this thread because our sites showed a significant drop in traffic the same day. We connected this event with Google index in some way. Which in turn implies that part of our traffic comes from Google search engine. Then, discovering what is going on could lead us to solve it and recover part of this visits.

Is there any way we can share information about our affected sites here? Maybe this way we can find some common characteristic to review.

[npthanh1910]

I'm not very proficient in English to, skip if I misspelled said.
On June 28 last site I also reduced to 90% of traffic and the keywords I almost disappeared from the charts of google. This took place on the morning of 28 hourly Vietnam. Shortly after discovering the problem, I was immediately reviewing all and I found out that there are many domain link to my site has no longer active. The domain that has been flagged google, index = 0. Then I have to review the entire link to the website to find out and remove domain (disavow link).
And now, after more than 1 week since then, webmaster tool is not updating the domain some links to my site. I am in the waiting period.

[supercyberbob]

Gotta love the mystery prize G updates.

It's like playing Whac-A-Mole, and you're the mole. :(

[HarryBajwa]

Yes, organic traffic has been decreased of 20% on my website but yes still, i am getting more tarffic from social sites.

[lolamjambuna]

@Martin Ice Web & aristotle

I am unable to digest one thing and need your help.

If LOGS/ACCESS LOGS of a site are PRIVATE, how REFERRER SPAM is going to hurt our rankings in search engines? Even Google can't access our logs!

[aristotle]

If LOGS/ACCESS LOGS of a site are PRIVATE, how REFERRER SPAM is going to hurt our rankings in search engines? Even Google can't access our logs!

Yes you're correct. If your logs and stats are private, referral spam can't hurt your rankings. I tried to tell you this earlier:

Since they don't exist except as fake entries in your logs and stats, the search engines never see them except in rare cases where someone's logs are public. Therefore, they have no effect on your rankings in the vast majority of cases.

The reason some people try to block these bots is to save bandwidth. You can block a lot of them with simple methods in .htaccess, but it isn't practical to block all of them.

[lolamjambuna]

Ok Thanks :)

[netmeg]

Is there any way we can share information about our affected sites here?

Not specifically, no. Just in a very general sense.

[drkblog]

Some details that could be worth sharing:

+ My sites are non-commercial but I have a few ads from google there.
+ Traffic drop seems to be equaly distributed along my site pages.
+ My posts keep appearing within the first five results if I search for the title (or a very similar phrase). For phrases like "Arduino remote control" (not the real phrase) where there is a lot of content out there, from really popular sites. The same goes for my English website.

I would have expected my site disappear from Google results. But it hasn't and yet 80% traffic is gone. The more I find out about what's happening the less I understand why.

[Mentat]

see WMT.
The problem is in long tail... :(
I've lost 60% of my traffic in the last years, each week lower traffic..., but I cannot find a clear problem, is like a poison.
Each page is having very small decrease, but after one year...

[webcentric]

Recently - I've noticed G messing with my title tags. Apparently it's not a new phenomenon but it's new on my site. Changes in title and description text could be part of the problem if the pages are still showing up in decent locations in the index.

What's weird is that I'm still getting traffic for pages that have dropped 100 positions or more. This is probably all evidence that each search is handled in a more unique way than in the past. Results are being customized to the query so titles and descriptions and even position are fluctuating according to the query, user location, browsing history and who knows what else.

[RedBar]

Are all of you using WordPress?

[drkblog]

I have www.mydomain using propietary PHP (simple site) and blog.mydomain using Workdpress. Both sites show the same traffic drop. It looks like a domain-wide thing.

[lolamjambuna]

Saw a very SLIGHT improvement today: [i.imgur.com...]

Many articles which were disappeared from first 20 pages are very slowly appearing once again. Hope this continues :)

Google Y U DO DIS? We all cri everytiem :(

[webcentric]

Wordpress? No thanks. Built from scratch in .NET.

[fsmobilez]

my earnings in google dropped to 4$ per day and my server cost is about 113$

google what ever u did with 8 years old webmaster was not fair because many webmaster were solely dependant on website earnings and you have given really a tough time to every one whose survival was only from website earnings.

I hope some find find the solution to all this injustice and wried act done by google

[webcentric]

Fair?

"All is fair in love and war."

See, Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

and

Art of War, by Sun Tzu

There's a reason they assign these books to business majors in college. Not trying to be contradictory. Just laying out the battlefield as it were.

[Planet13]

I think it is good to remember that the only entities that google is at "war" with are the bings, amazons, facebooks, yahoos, and others of that ilk.

They are not - contrary to popular belief - at war with webmasters... espescially those running adsense to monetize thier sites.

Sure, they are at war with what they consider spam because it ruins the user experience when it ranks well. Matt Cutts has said that when he browses various black hat forums and sees once-proud spammers bitching and moaning about the latest updates, he knows they are on the right track.

Also, it might be good to keep in mind that some people who have legitimate sites are also GAINING traffic as well. This last Sunday one of my sites had the most daily traffic since April 28, 2013.