Another traffic drop thread

**paultp** · 20-07-11

A site which has been giving fairly reasonable traffic (150 - 200 vistors per day) and reasonable revenue for well over a year dropped to 10% of its previous traffic a couple of days ago.

I know these type of threads have been posted before but is there anyway of finding out why this has happened?

From the traffic stats it looks like the text near the aff links is now not being indexed. I say this because I was getting quite high g**gle rankings for specific product names etc as well as the specific term I was aiming at and I presume that's where my traffic came from.

I will admit to the site being a fairly thin site but it has been performing well for some time now.

I'm just a part timer and this is one of a number of areas that I earn money from to make up a reasonable pension so I'm not about to completely redevelop the site. I'd just like to be able to identify why the traffic has suddenly stopped (presumably by g**gle) and see if I can do anything about it.

Cheers for any help

**MattSweet** · 20-07-11

Post your URL and details on the Google forum - http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/Webmasters/ask - being as detailed as you can.

You'll then get an assortment of wiseguys telling you your site is a thin and crap affiliate site and to accept that. Ignore these and look out for the few people who provide useful suggestions. These usually range from noindexing pages and nofollowing links to more complex solutions.

Leave it for a few weeks to see if its a blip then start to try out the suggestions. It may be a few simple changes can sort this out.

**paultp** · 20-07-11

Thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

I'm a touch reluctant to post up my url on g's support forum, I had a look and a lot of the replies to people's posts are from people who seem to think the sun shines out of g's a*se. It looks a lot like the ebaypartner forum where similar people reside who have the same rosy view of ebay. Poor sods.

Trawling through my stats, I've found that vistors from google have searched for phrases where I ranked in the top 5. if I repeat the search now, in some cases my site doesn't even appear in the results. Looking at the google webmaster traffic stats, the site went from averaging 1500 impressions a day to 200 on Friday 16/07/11. Everything else plummets in a similar manner, including income.

I suppose I've had a slap, maybe I'll have a look at the site and shuffle it about as I haven't done much work on it for a while.

It did what it said on the tin though; people searching for a certain product find my site and find a range of that product. I wonder why this is unacceptable to G? Some people don't want to be entertained and amused by a web site they just want to buy stuff.

All this dreamy rubbish of providing "good content" is just a smokescreen for what they really want which can be summed up as "if you want to use G to make money then pay G" - i.e. they want affiliates to use adwords rather than organic traffic. I suppose I should bung them some money then maybe I'd get more traffic. I have a few simple sites like this one (some simpler!) and they seem to have survived to date.

Personally I hope they algorithm themselves stupid until they disappear up their own rectum. When somebody eventually comes along and pulls their rug out from under them like they did to a number of search engines I'll be extremely pleased as they'll know how I feel.

None of this helps though, I think I'll just pack it in as it isn't worth the hassle TBH. In the meantime I'll have a wait and see what happens.

**Larney** · 20-07-11

I know how you feel. I have had the same thing happen, although I wasn't getting the traffic numbers you were. However I was on page 1 for my keywords and now I have disappeared off the face of the earth and can't even find my site for the same search results! It also seems to have happened last Friday. Google need some serious competition from somewhere, where else would such a monopoly be allowed?

**paultp** · 20-07-11

Its all about g earning money and they don't do that through organic traffic to affiliate sites. All the guff about "user experience" is just an excuse to lower ranking on affiliate sites.

If someone searches for blue widgets and finds bluewidgets.co.uk then clicks through an aff link to buy the best and cheapest blue widget from Acme Widgets, then surely the user has had a good experience? So has the merchant site and so has an affiliate.

However, G has made no money from this series of events so that is why it changes the algorithm to try and keep aff sites that rely on organic traffic out of the rankings.

If the user searches for blue widgets and what come up is a series of sites which discuss in amazing detail the pros and cons of blue widgets, the user will eventually get p*ssed off and click through one of the ads (adsense or adwords). G makes some money so it loves sites which provide information (with adsense) but no aff links. It also loves sites which have a massive adword budget or pay for keywords. The fact that the user is p*ssed off and no merchant has made a sale doesn't really matter to G because their revenue comes from ads and keywords.

Its a tough life.

Maybe I should just target adsense? G might love me again :-)

**Stas_uk** · 21-07-11

There are a lot of pretty believable quotes from Google people that state that adwords and organic search teams dont work together, don't talk to each other and that main Google strategy is to keep users happy, produce good search results, so Google keeps and increase it's market share and that will keep their profits up long term. Search quality team's job is to work on improving quality and thats their tasks, not to worry about profits. Apparently many search quality employees been there for many many years and they wouldn't be there if they were told to think about profits and not what they passioned about.

I've also lost 90% of traffic with Panda update. I've read a lot. My current conclusion is that now, to succeed with a big affiliate site long term you have to create a brand, think of your website as a brand, change your marketing thinking completely from SEO to more of a brand developer (or at least figure out what signals makes google think your site is a brand) or work on small micro niche sites (exact match domains still work). How google sees links has changed, not sure too much on this but diverse, natural looking, backlinking profile with links to majority of site's pages with very varied, mixed anchor text from good sources should be good strategy. Got to start thinking of the user expirience too as it plays a role now and they are measuring user activity on the site, brand name searches, return visits etc. Professional design, simplicity, ssl certificates might all mean something now. Everything has to be balanced...if you have loads of backlinks but users dont engage at all google will probably understand that you trying to game their system with backlinks building rather than building website for the user. Loads of signals got to add up now for the site to be considered good. Too many aff links I think is a big nagative. But if google sees you as a brand you'll probably get away with aff links and little content...
Content... If you currently ranking with just affiliate feed created, duplicate pages I wouldn't rely on it, it will not last. Don't spend your earnings, re-invest it. Unique content is a minimum, good quality content is better, real useful, interesting content that people will share, link to is the key. (in aff world, maybe reviews, user generated content etc)

There are of course unfair losers, unfair winners... Google is pretty reckless with its changes, killing businesses. But thats the game, need to adapt, learn not to rely just on organic traffic

On a positive note think you can get rankings easier with brand new domain and not so many backlinks than before. You might now have more success with brand new regged brandable domain than aged keyword packed expensive one.

**paultp** · 21-07-11

Hi Stas, thanks for the reply. Google teams might not work together but they don't set strategy, Google is a business and so its aim is to make money. It makes its money from adverts.

After reading around, the key thing from google's point of view is that the site should be able to stand alone if the aff links weren't there, at the mo mine would have just a front page!

So I've decided what to do about this. I'm not going to create a brand as I have no products, what I'm going to do is rehash the site so the aff links aren't the main thing, the products are. So when users search for a product they find my product page and then get directed to the actual products page with aff links. That way the site will actually be about something rather than just trying to hijack a searcher and immediately push them on to a merchant.

Google will probably like it but whether the searchers will is another thing. I'll just have to suck it and see.

The weird thing is that another of my sites which is as thin as a thin affiliate site could be (3 pages of product links and hardly any text) has seen traffic increase. Maybe that slap is on its way :-)

**wilwak** · 21-07-11

Forgetting the affiliate angle for a mo I actually think Google results quality has fallen since Panda.

They used to deliver a nice mix of big corporate sites and smaller sites that some nice unique content - often personal experiences.

Many of my searches are travel related so personal content was really useful.

Now it's just big names dominating the results. Not what I want.

In fact I've been so frustrated lately I've started trying Bing and Yahoo for the first time ever!!

Is that what Google intended??