#1 in Bing, DDG and others, #999 in Google

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I took a look at a 9-year-old site this morning. 440 pages, I would rate the site good to great on the content side. Certainly a lot of effort was put into the site by someone very knowledgeable about the subject, it's about what they do for a living in the entertainment field.

Pages once held solid rankings in all search engines, but this year it got comical.

- May, 50% traffic loss from Google
- Sept. 50% traffic loss from Google
- Early Nov. 50% traffic loss from Google
- 3 days ago, Another 50% traffic loss from Google(might be thanksgiving related in the US but it didn't happen in previous years).

It's a common CMS and theme. No glaring SEO issues, and none reported in search console. Page speed is good, only minimal things could be tweaked, but nothing that would move the needle. Backlink profile is decent, a bit on the low side but all natural. Error logs look good. Bot activity is the norm you'd find on any site... there is literally no glaring issue with the site.

Spelling and grammar are fine, content is very useful. No UGC. Social profiles aren't overly active, they exist and have a good number of real followers...

If you look at Google's recommendations this site does not break any "rules", and it has no manual penalties reported, but Google crashed and burned it anyway it seems.

The other engines ALL remained steady, they have been for YEARS. The owner isn't going to change a thing, there's nothing to fix, and they weren't creating for Google.

It's also not a case of being replaced by videos or outranked by other content, the pages rank for 5% of the keywords they once did and now get about 100 people per day from Google to a few pages only. The content type is informational evergreen, no affiliate program or display ads, it earns from a mailing list built over 9 years.

Whatever is causing the Google only ranking issues really doesn't seem to have anything to do with the site. It must, but it gets flying colors on every level, including from other engines.

It's almost enough to take it personally. G, Almost.

I understand that people losing traffic and not understanding why is a common thing, but I've re-read the guidelines many times over many years and know what I'm looking for. Obviously I'm missing whatever the cause is, but It gave me an idea. Perhaps this is long overdue.

Should Google have to inform a site owner through search console about the SPECIFIC cause of traffic loss if the amount of traffic lost exceeds 50% (or whatever) over a short period of time?

Clearly they can spare the resources, they already send "congrats, you reached 1000 clicks in 30 days" type messages all the time. LOSING traffic seems much more important to report about, G. Even a VAGUE hint would help like "loss is related to backlink data" or "loss is related to content quality" or even" loss is related to hosting issues"....

if you cut 50%+ traffic in one update, drop an actual hint G? I don't even want to think about the number of times such a loss has caused the owner to tear apart a perfectly good site....

[beaverman]

Completely agree. Actual spammers know perfectly well why they got hit. On the other hand, legit webmasters who have done nothing wrong (at least on purpose) might use a hint as to why they were severely hit after honestly putting years into their websites.

[edited by: beaverman at 7:21 pm (utc) on Nov 25, 2022]

[haramamba]

Should Google have to inform a site owner through search console about the SPECIFIC cause of traffic loss

Instead, they put a new stupid HTTPS tab into GSC today with the "Good job, you are serving 100% of pages through HTTPS" message.
I want some real website diagnostics instead of this $^&*&# to understand why I'm losing 90% of traffic.

[RedBar]

3 days ago, Another 50% traffic loss

So it's actually at 6.25% of May? It's lost 93.75% of its traffic?

I had an experience like that a few years ago with G. A site that had ranked #1 for several years, and rightly so since it was not only a good site it was the only global source for the original widget that I first took to my market in the early 80s! In a peeriod of a few months G demoted it to oblivion and featured a US company site that had only one page with a few images, mine was a dedicated 40 page site for the widget with some 150 unique images and unique text.

I never, ever found out why that after several years of ranking #1 G saw fit to basically remove it and, like the site you mention, it remained #1 in all other search engines.

I wish I could help or suggest but obviously cannot!

[Tomwlsh]

I agree google should provide more feedback, but I doubt they are going to unless the EU forces them to be more transparent, or they lose a court case for defamation.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I doubt it too but when it's an overnight 50%+ traffic loss a general hint in the right direction would be nice. Yes, the site is down in traffic by over 95% YTD.

I spent several more hours on the site after my post and I'd be a hypocrite If I didn't update this....

I'm not 100% sure this was the cause, I've never seen things unfold this way before if it was, and in fairness to Google the recent Search Console changes would have caught this. What set up the site for a downward trajectory is likely related to a change the owner made long ago without realising.

In April of 2022 the owner updated the category descriptions and made (very) minor changes to the link text of the category pages. What they didn't realise was that the content management system also slightly changed the category URLs.

It didn't break any internal links, they all immediately updated, and didn't throw any 404 errors in SC or server logs, the redirects didn't allow those to happen. What was lost was likely related to the previous 8 years of data and rank from the old category URLs simply vanishing. New URLs have no history.

It's all I've come up with that might have caused the site to be hit in successive updates over many months. A 301 redirect should have caused Google to transfer the value of the urls, they were applied properly by the CMS, but it didn't happen. Maybe the new singular category keywords played a role too, they were previously plural with an s at the end. Only Google knows.

Tiny oopsie, massive change. The posts would still be trusted but the overall site probably not as much. Down it went but only after major updates. The crawling rate dropped as well with each update so it likely took months for the change to iterate across the site.

The new Search Console would report the 301s as errors, the old one didn't, and hasn't yet, which is odd because mine occasionally tells me about 15 year old changes. Anyway, I found the change by going back far enough but the owner would have appreciated a hint back when it happened. This is my only theory thus far, there's really nothing more to investigate and no changes needed, but how it happened doesn't feel entirely right and I'm looking right at it.

Google HAS made their Search Console more robust, it would now catch this after their recent changes. Still, a "sitewide content change detected" would have been a nice hint to go along with the overnight massive traffic loss.

Please consider giving at least a very general hint when you take out the big traffic smasher, G?

Also, Wordpress, a "You are about to change the URL structure, are you sure?" warning in the categories section would have helped avoid this, too. The change wasn't made in the permalinks section.

On the SEO front, I feel this site needs some internal link attention. There are a lot of pages that would make great internal links and internal links tend to help posts become more important and categories a little less so. Perhaps the traffic loss wouldn't have been as severe with more internal links.

I hope this helps someone some day.

[Robert Charlton]

Sgt_Kickaxe, if I'm understanding you correctly... wouldn't some of the category pages whose urls got changed have had external backlinks to them, independent of internal site navigation, which should have eventually triggered some 404s?

Additionally... if your observation of changed urls is correct, and I assume it is, is there an archived backup of the site somewhere, with the old urls? If so, you might try generating requests that Google would see for the category urls, and then see if your logs report 404s, and if Google reports the errors.

Please consider giving at least a very general hint when you take out the big traffic smasher, G?

That's what the Google 404 error reports are for. It is possible, I suppose, that category pages haven't gotten many requests in seven or so months, though this is complete conjecture, but the Google 404 errors are in fact the big hint you're wanting to be sent. Without spidering the site, Google would have no knowledge of changes that were made.

In any event, f the above that I'm suggesting produces 404s (and this is off the top of my head0, perhaps you could try a mass redirection from those old urls to the changed urls. Worth a shot if you can find the data. Have you looked at the WayBack machine for historical data?

[Robert Charlton]

PS: Do you literally mean #999 in Google, because, if you do, there have been some historical uses for that position which suggest some attempts at manipulating results. Not worth going into unless it really is an "end of the results" type ranking.