What skeleton do you have in your closet?

[tom_010101]

Hi i am Tom. Sorry my bad english, i am from Germany... :p

My Website went from about 30,000 daily visitors in August 2023 to currently about 7,000 visitors per day in April.

What critical things have you done? Everyone has something they might feel uneasy about. ;) For me, it's the following things:

- About 0.5% of all blog articles have an outgoing link to a non-topic-relevant page (Casino, Sports betting pages)
- I run ads with Ezoic
- I use Gtranslate (WordPress plugin)
- My Core Web Vitals are not perfect
- There are about 2% topics that don't 100% fit the content of my website

Are there overlaps with your website? Maybe we can analyze the problems this way. What you think?

Greetings Tom

[Beachboy]

My closet is jammed full of skeletons. I have a building contractor coming over next Tuesday to plan a closet enlargement.

[betty4920taylor]

Hallo Tom!

It’s great that you’re looking into the factors that might be affecting your website traffic. Having links to non-relevant pages like casinos or sports betting can potentially harm your website’s reputation with search engines. Search engines might view these links as a negative signal about the quality and relevance of your site, which could result in lower rankings
Running ads with Ezoic generally aims to improve traffic and ad earnings. However, it’s important to ensure that the ads do not negatively impact the user experience or website speed, as this could affect your site’s performance.
Using the Gtranslate WordPress plugin can help make your website accessible to a wider audience by translating content into multiple languages. This can be beneficial for SEO if the translations are accurate and the URL structure is SEO-friendly.
Core Web Vitals are important for ranking as they measure the user experience on your site. Improving these metrics can lead to better search engine rankings and a more positive user experience.
The relevance of your content to your website’s main theme is crucial. If there are topics that don’t fit well with the rest of your content, it could confuse your audience and search engines, leading to a potential drop in traffic.
It’s a good idea to address these areas to improve your website’s SEO and user experience. By making adjustments, you may see an improvement in your traffic over time.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld betty4920taylor

Having links to non-relevant pages like casinos or sports betting can potentially harm your website’s reputation with search engines. Search engines might view these links as a negative signal about the quality and relevance of your site

Why?

[tom_010101]

Sorry Betty, but your answer sounds like it was copied from Google guidelines :p

[Juniya]

Linking to gambling/casino websites while the website itself is a completely different niche is a red flag and has been for awhile. Out of everything you have listed, this one is the most critical, especially these days.

As for my own Skeletons, the most critical one I have: Quality over Quantity!

[RedBar]

Linking to gambling/casino websites while the website itself is a completely different niche is a red flag and has been for awhile.

Source ?

Different niche? Therefore how do major brand sites rank for so many different niches?

Just asking!

[tangor]

@RedBar ... I might be a source. :)

When I hit a site expecting one thing and find casino/betting stuff as well I just back out and go somewhere else. My experience has been most sites that combine the two are generally click bait/inferior.

As for major brands, there's a reason the word "major" is used. :)

[RedBar]

Is there a definitive "declaration" that dedicated gambling sites are "downgraded"?

I understand how that clickbait links could easily be seen as a dubious sign but who is providing that clickbait link to start off with, an independent, Google or some other "recognised" industry player?

Surely they can't have it both ways, take ones Dollars and then downgrade the advertisement and the site it's on? Oh, I forgot, this is G we're talking about :-(

I'm fairly sure that sometime in the distant past I seem to remember a "clarification" from G about this.

[tom_010101]

We should consider the way it is done. In my case, it involves about 200 out of approximately 32,000 blog articles in 14 years. An article relevant to my website's theme has been created. For example, on the topic of "great James Bond cars over recent years". The article includes a link to a casino site with an appropriate anchor text. For instance, when talking about the James Bond casino.

This is the kind of linking I am referring to. Such blog articles make up about 0.5% of all articles on my website. Could this actually be a problem for the entire site? That would be severe.

[RedBar]

Such blog articles make up about 0.5% of all articles on my website.

That seems very harsh if that is the reason however the algo would now appear to be so complex and probably so out of control I feel the butterfly affect is causing these "unintendedl" effects these days ... and then they get into chasing the dog's tail scenario.

[Juniya]

@RedBar & Tom

Unfortunately Google does NOT allow such things anymore more so if the content/links are not related to the website's niche, they actually consider this 'Link Spam'.

Source; [developers.google.com...]

You have to declare the link as a sponsored/no follow via the rel tag or it is, according to these vultures, spam.

[RedBar]

I knew I had seen it somewhere!

Site reputation abuse

Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site, and provide little to no value to users.

Illustrative examples of site reputation abuse include, but are not limited to:

An educational site hosting a page about reviews of payday loans written by a third-party that distributes the same page to other sites across the web, with the main purpose of manipulating search rankings

A medical site hosting a third-party page about "best casinos" that's designed primarily to manipulate search rankings, with little to no involvement from the medical site.

So ... those major / branded sites are allowed to do this since they do not seem to be penalised, absolutely no favouritism nor preferential treatment whatsoever is there?

[Juniya]

@RedBar - That is the issue, it seems some can get away with murder while other can't...politics.

But Google claims they have given all websites an early warning, they say all websites have until May 5th to remove all the "site reputation abuse" content.

Let's see what happens.

[buckworks]

My skeleton: sleazy links that used to be good links.

URLs that had quality, relevant content when I linked to them might have become very different at some point.

There are people out there who make a business of catching expired domains and re-using them for different content. It might be p*rn, pills or gambling content, or something I've been seeing lately, phony blogs full of keyword-stuffed junk, probably AI-generated.

Or, less evilly, the content might simply have changed to something that's too different for the link to make sense anymore.

That can mean that our sites end up linking to content that we decidedly did not intend to link to. It would be no surprise if that creates negative signals for our SEO.

Suggestion: Run a link-checker over your site from time to time to hunt for problematic links and clean them up.

[Juniya]

@Buckworks - Great suggestion, is there a link checker that YOU know or use that can identify 'bad links', perhaps not 404s but as in gambling, casino, illegal, spammy irrelevant links?

[buckworks]

The link checker I use most often is Integrity Plus from Peacock Media. It's Mac-friendly. I run it every few weeks to patrol a directory with 40K+ links.

It reports dead links and redirects, of course, but it also reports "Soft 404s" which can be customized to watch for specified keywords on the pages it checks.

I add words and phrases designed to keep an eye out for issues ranging from formerly-good links turning to sleaze to a business announcing their retirement.

[tom_010101]

Ok, I would like to tackle this. I currently have 32,000 (!) blog articles online. Is there a tool that can go through these blog articles one by one and list all the outgoing and broken links?

[not2easy]

Screaming Frog has been used to check links. It is a spider you set up to look through your site and find dead, broken or outdated links. They have a free version to try.

[buckworks]

>> 32,000

With that many articles it might be easier to work on the site one section at a time, rather than trying to check the whole shebang in one go.

Be aware that link-checking software visits a lot of pages in a hurry so be sure you're working on a connection with lots of bandwidth. DON'T try to run link-checking software on a connection where you have to pay extra if you use a lot of bandwidth. (Don't ask how I know that!)

[tom_010101]

I have a good server and unlimited bandwidth, no problem. But see through 32,000 by hand? Seriously? Unfortunately this is not possible.

[buckworks]

>> see through 32,000 by hand. Seriously?

The link checker would identify problems for you, then you'd have to fix them by hand, one by one. If you're lucky only a fraction of your pages would have things that needed fixing..

[ghostofseo]

I have started getting groceries weekly at the food bank in Jackson, WY thanks to the donations of the community. It's full circle for me...

When I first moved here I was dirt poor and hungry and would get free food from the food bank weekly. Then I started making money and would volunteer my time at the foodbank. Being hungry sucks. I wanted to give back. Fast forward ten years later and I become a pretty decent elk hunter filling tag (s) annually. So I started donating 1/2 my game meat to the food bank.

Last year my site grossed over $200k my best year on paper, this year be lucky to see $50k.

The highs and lows came quick.