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 :)

[photojack]

No improvement so far :-(

[i.imgur.com...]

[Planet13]

My daily visits dropped from 2400 to 700... on 17th July it reached back to near 2200 again. I removed the backlinks.

I have the feeling that your traffic drop and rebound is unrelated to backlinks.

I don't think anyone has seen a rebound like that from simple backlink removal.

[samwest]

I just discovered something very disturbing that might account for our own miserable traffic performance.

Let's call the main site domain abcd.com - it runs wordpress in the root and uses wordfence for it's security. Every day the site is being bashed by robots trying to log in. I had wordfence set to report each occurrence and it happen almost every minute. In reviewing this mess, I found something very strange. A string of wordfence warning messages for ANOTHER domain (wxyz.com) that appears to be hosting an exact duplicate of our site!

If you search for wxyz.com (the rouge site) Google reports abcd.com as the first result. I'd think that is a major duplication problem!

I did a whois but the site is privately registered. Obviously someone is trying to derail this website using some nasty techniques and I'm sure G won't know the difference. Where do you go from here?

Opening new topic for this....

[Awarn]

Generally you will see a lot of Russian sites showing up in your error logs if you start blocking .ru, .su, .ua sites. I don't know what they do though. There definitely are links there.

A thing I find way more interesting is if you look at the wayback machine. I personally can't say I saw much change on the 28th but when I look at the wayback machine I see an increase again - which seems to coincide with events. I see this same activity around many Panda and Penguin events. It really makes me wonder how there can be such a correlation between events and the wayback machine. I am beginning to wonder if this in fact may NOT be Google.

[drkblog]

I found more information in the direction of the "improve search results" theory. I told you about this CTR improvement after June 28. Here is another interesting change:

One of my software tools is named "Daphne" which is a somewhat common name. Before June 28 for a range of 26 days I had 13,000+ impressions for daphne keyword (500 per day), with average position 9.9 and 0% CTR
This basically means that people looking for that keyword wasn't looking for my software, which is reasonable. Since June 28 to the date I see my webpage for this keyword has moved to average position 50 and has 20+ impressions in the last 30 days.

It's obvious G did something regarding my page and this keyword. To be honest I think they did well. Because someone entering that keyword only is not looking for my web page, as the 0% CTR shows.

[passiontabvideos]

I am also facing same problems..my friend
I am owner of video posting website. It is one of the leading in Singapore region. My website has appx. 2000 visits per day (more than 90% traffic is organic) but suddenly traffic dropped to 30-40 visits per day after 1st august. I have checked everything like filters, tracking code, no duplicate content, no penalty from Google, no negative marketing strategies, no paid marketing and many more aspects. I can’t find any ways to come out.

Looking reply from experts.

From:
Stean Tan

[Awarn]

I have the same issue and dropped 40% to 50% from the prior month. However there is more to this. In early June we discovered a dns issue that caused an issue with certain mobile (Verizon) being able to connect with the server. When that was fixed out traffic jumped about 40%. However I see a dip on this date but not huge. Right in that timeframe is a busy time for us so the data is skewed. But as that normal busy peak passes you see the drop appear by about 40%. It appears like we go right back to the amount of traffic that was is early June but the dns is correct so traffic should be higher. No change with the Russian stuff. Still there just ignore. Sure appears like throttling (I used to not buy that logic).

Another thing I find very interesting is that I have been dealing with this for 2 + years now. I have had several very qualified people look at and work on it. Page one basically doesn't change. Same players mainly. I have experimented with various techniques and different sites, different developers that use different methods. Seems very odd not one has been able to get to page one and stay there a week. It is not even a competitive term. Appears like they adjusted these buckets like potentially dropped the number of sites in each bucket. Same amount of slots just limit the players which causes greater domain crowding.

[samwest]

What I mean is that it offers some UNIQUE VALUE to visitors.

Otherwise, it could be that your honeymoon profile with google is over?

In my niche, it seems quality does not count, but when pinterest is blowing me away with thousands of keyword tagged photos, some that are not even remotely relevant, it's about QUANTITY. Quantity of dollars in the briefcase.

In my niche, I've seen very few cases of the best quality content being severed. The top listing s are now all ad network partners.

[lolamjambuna]

Hello Everyone

I started this thread and am back with an update :)

It seems like my site is recovering. Google has started sending me traffic once again: [i.imgur.com...]

My domain was registered on November 2013, so maybe my domain was in some sort of sandbox. I am not sure what happened exactly?

Anyway I made following changes to my site in the past 2 months and maybe one of them worked (may be these will help you too):

1. Pushed more content above the fold.
2. Removed Keyword Rich Anchor Text from all INTERNAL Links: [webmasterworld.com...] - Lots of TRUSTED sites are also suggesting this.
3. Removed 2 or 3 dofollow incoming links to articles which I dropped on a very popular forum. There was no intention of link building, the forum thread and my article were relevant. Still I removed the links considering them UNNATURAL.
4. NOINDEX but FOLLOW archives (categories etc.) in my WordPress blog.
5. Switched from Multi-page XML sitemap to single page XML sitemap.

If your site has also recovered, then do post what changes you made after 28 June 2014?

I hope this post helps someone :)

[rustybrick]

what date did you recover on? hard to make out from the graph.

[photojack]

I had also drastic drop in traffic on June 28th, then it recovered exactly one month later (July 28th).

It was fine for two weeks but then dropped again on August 14th.

[i.imgur.com...]

I’m not sure what’s going on as my traffic has never fluctuated like this before. Now again, there’s a whole bunch of low-quality, spammy sites ranking higher than me.

I haven’t done any changes to my site - except disavowing three suspicious looking links.

Thank you for sharing your tips, much appreciated!

[nettulf]

Me too, dropped on June 28.

Recovered August 7. A little bit lower than before just like the other two pictures above here, but still happy.

Dropped like a stone again August 26.

[lolamjambuna]

Traffic improvement date: 26 August 2014

I hope nothing bad happens now :(

[unikat]

My traffic also returned 50% on 26 August 2014. Please see my thread: [webmasterworld.com ]

[shredtone]

I'm in the same boat as the posters above. Huge traffic drop on June 28 and a partial recovery on August 26. Funny thing was that on August 25th I unblocked all my css and java in robots.txt and thought maybe thats why I was recovering. Seems Google is doing some more tweaking.