Website traffic dropped 99% on all search engines

[sports2014]

I have a spots site which was doing well especially aroudn the world cup time, 2,000 visits per day then suddenly july 17th nearly all organic traffic was wiped out, The site is still indexed but rankings are on page 6-7 with complete thin spam sites ranking above, we have around 400 unique articles every page is 100% unique, I went through cleaned up affiliate links which i had and also removed adsene, although above the fold was still within content, using a smart responsive banner it would take up most of the screen for mobile users.. not sure if that was the reason of traffic drop? and really that much?

I have also noticed the speed rankings in google analytics had stopped registering at exactly the same date, I have checked robot text all is fine, but its making me think is there something else blobking googles ability to see the site? the page insights seems to work fine as does the fetch and render, I am really stumped on this one

[not2easy]

Hi sports2014, welcome to the Forums. There are a lot of others who noticed big changes about the same time - check out the discussion over here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Planet13]

1) How old is the site?

2) When you say that you have 400 unique articles, what do you mean? Are they on unique TOPICS? (Meaning that the TOPICS are not covered anywhere else?) Or are the topics covered on numerous other sites?

3) Are your articles "news" articles (meaning they cover contemporary events)? Or are they more "evergreen" articles (meaning they don't require frequent updates)?

[sports2014]

Thanks for the reception guys, Planet13 the site is 10 months old, and there is a mixture of content, but where we lost the traffic was from the fresh news type articles, but these would be for instance previews on games etc, usually 700 words and we would produce 10-20 per day for various games, but we also do have other topics and articles, player profiles, team profils etc.. but i wasnt expecting those to ran for awhile, its the fresh stuff which has been wiped out and every spam site and his brother outranks us with no content, and spammy links..

[netmeg]

There's a lot of people already producing tons of content in that niche - how are you setting yourself apart?

Have you looked at your user engagement metrics? Return visits? Time on site?

[sports2014]

return visits were around 30%, time on site 1-3 minutes depending the sport, yes I have seen much other content, but everything ranked above me is thin, like 100 words thin plus we have some quality naturaul high ranking backlinks, usually picked up from local towns/cities and niche sites... taking a 98% drop on all search engines itīs hard to think it was competition, I have always made the effort of producing engaging content and it was going well.. then boom all gone, and whats stranger is the analytics page speed also stopped working the same day.. Im wondering if maybe the page latency cannot be read? hence lower rankings "site loads in under 1 sec," js css inline, combined, cache headers set and a CDN and gzip, the only thing i can think of is maybe an above the fold penalty? as I had a smart adsense mobile block which used to show 728x90 on the header which was great on the desktop, but if you clicked through via mobile device the first thing you would get was a 300x250 banner before any content? would this cause the massive drop? and what is the time frame to reccuperate? I have taken the ads off since July 20th,

[EditorialGuy]

Just out of curiosity, is this thread's subject line accurate? I.e., did your traffic actually drop 99% on all search engines?

If so, is it possible that the problem is with your analytics? Are you seeing a corresponding drop in your AdSense impressions? And have you checked to confirm that your Google Analytics tracking code is in the source code of all your published pages?

[Sand]

If it dropped across ALL search engines at the same time (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), then to me, that screams of a technical problem on your site. Could be lots of things.

For instance, I once helped someone get their rankings back after a developer copied the htaccess from their dev site to their production site, forgetting there was a line in there that refused access to anyone outside of their corporate network. So everyone in the company thought the site was up, but nobody else in the world could see it. Ended up in 100% traffic loss for a period of time.

[sports2014]

I run various different trackers, and apart from the over exaggerated cloudflare logs, everything is down, however social, direct referrals etc are still the same, Sand.. thats what im thinking, perhaps the bots are having trouble reading and ranking me lower? I am using quick cache, as well as java css cleanup software, the site does get traffic from other sources... just search engine dropped, I have buitl a sub domain and its already out ranked the orignial in organic traffic ? itīs only 24 hours old

[sports2014]

Ok just wanted to update just incase anyone else has a similar problem ans has been scratching their head, I noticed by accident from a broken image on of my pages "we have hundreds and hundreds" that in the broken transparent box the alt tag had been switched to a h1 header, Now I am aware when writing sentences and using the cisual editor the lines above and below the h1 will also be included unless there is a large enough space, As I usually have images at the top of the page then h1 underneath, looks like every page has been duplicated with a h1 .. so double h1s for 100s of pages. I have now fixed this by going through every page one by one, will update in a few days to see if this was the problem

[Planet13]

I don't think your problems with the image alt tag / h1 have anything to do with your site's traffic.

You should be looking for noidnex tags that have been inadvertently inserted into your code, or something blocking bots in your robots.txt file, or something in your .htaccess file that is not allowing visitors from search engines to come to your site.

BTW: You said that AFTER July 17th, you were ranking on page 6 or 7. So where were you ranking BEFORE July 17th?

[sports2014]

For our fresh daily previews articles usually 1st or 2nd page, I have done a test and most of the long tail keywords are no longer ranked nor are the shorter ones, I tried mysite.com with exact match keyword and nothing, wouldn't duplicate h1, plus alt tags be classed as keyword stuffing right? robot txt is open, fresh articles index but do not rank,, the Google crawl I have checked and its fine no crawl errors still around 1-3000 pages crawled.. daily.. however impressions were 180,000 per day down to 2,000 on search query's, but as you have mentioned it I do get this error on webmaster page render.... wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wordfence_logHuman&hid=B5B450FA5419CC7A65745C121CE47186&r=0.003984802635386586

[sports2014]

Ok, after planet13 post it had me thinking.. sometimes the obvious is staring you in the face and you cannot see it so here is an update as search impressions are nearly non existent, done a test in both google and bing using complete title exact match, and interesting result... no descriptions any of the results, only shows the links to other posts and pages... the description has dissapeard from every search result nothing about the content of the particular post title anywhere.... This has to be the problem

[EditorialGuy]

This has to be the problem

Or, more likely, a symptom.

[sports2014]

Editorial Guy, Exactly right, and Planet 13 your answers got me thinking, and I dug deeper... I added a cache script about a day before the rankings dropped... So done a page source view. and tests.. looks like the page was being spidered.. but none of the tags, I had deleted part of the yoast plugin code, I have re run tests via bing webmaster and gmwt tools those errors have vanished.. fingers crossed will keep everyone updated

[Planet13]

"Ok, after planet13 post it had me thinking.. sometimes the obvious is staring you in the face and you cannot see it..."

Yes, well, that's because I'm a MASTER of the obvious ;)

[sports2014]

Ok, Update just Incase anyone else is facing a similar situation, looks like the spider was just reading title and header for every page.. "navigation links" I built a completely new "header.php" from an old template file, Today my rankings have appeared again, between page one and page 2 for fresh items, and some of my statics results 3 to 20... for those thinking of starting a new site.. try and resolve and dig deep into the website.. So many people will call panda or penguin update, but sometimes the problem is deeper but in the same aspects much easier to fix, Took me nealry a month to work it out.. But we are back in business