Google Organic Traffic Gone Thru Floor. Any Ideas?

[Elaine]

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Allkids had quite a hike last week - but today back to normal - nice while it lasted though.

I've been battling with Google over strange results for a couple of years - trouble is you can spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why one particular page/term isn't producing the expected results, when your time would be better spent producing new content pages which have a better chance of ranking.

[channel5]

Kirsty,

One thing to consider is that you may have seen the end of the new site boost in Google, your domain registration was 6 months old at around the time that you reported the drop.. so assuming that your site is younger than six months then this would tie in.

You should check for broken links, found the following for example http://www.lingeriebrands.co.uk/shop/Bikinibysize.php

The other thing that checking your site out that I would be suspicious of is that you may have been flagged as a thin affiliate, have you read the Google Raters guideline document that surfaced a while ago:

Full Text of Google's General Guidelines for Remote Quality Raters from April 2007 : SEO Book.com

c5

[Alfie]

Hi Channel5, is there any more info on the relevancy of the age of the domain registration? We've had a very similar experience and our domain name is less than 6 months old!

Cheers,

Alf

[channel5]

The theory goes that to give new sites a chance to get noticed they receive a boost in the rankings for a short period of time (I have not seen anyone determine a set value).. What tends to happen is that you site starts to gain positioning quite rapidly and then at a certain point (in my experience around the 6 month point) Google traffic drops off like a stone.. Prior to this drop off your rankings rise as you build on the boost effect and then as the boost is withdrawn your rankings plummet as you start competing on equal terms.

In areas of very little SEO competition you generally don't notice the effect so much as you can pull the rankings easily without the boost. The more competitive the are the more the dropping of the boost affects you.

Here's some forum discussions on the new site boost theory:

New site boost effect and black SEO - SEO Chat
Rankings dissappearing from Google - Dev Shed
NamePros.Com - Google Loves ME!

[moredial]

When pages are new, they have a default PR. This is very useful as it gives you your on-page relevance value without the pollution of the incoming link factors.

This time around, Google is doing a deep crawl. During this crawl, the default PR is replaced with the PR of inbound links. As the crawl continues, sites move up and down the SERPs depending on which data centre you are querying and how up-to-date that centre is.

It takes over a month for the crawl updates to be completed and to have all the data centres carrying the same PR.

To keep visible, the easy way and the one that explains why sites that keep having new content do well, is to continue to add new content for your most profitable phrases. The other option is to have some highly relevant inbound links before the deep crawl starts so that your site remains with a PR of at least PR1.

Where a program like wordpress provides duplicate URLs, block those duplicates in the robots.txt file - just make sure that you don't block the URL which contains the PR.

[channel5]

When pages are new, they have a default PR. This is very useful as it gives you your on-page relevance value without the pollution of the incoming link factors.

This time around, Google is doing a deep crawl. During this crawl, the default PR is replaced with the PR of inbound links. As the crawl continues, sites move up and down the SERPs depending on which data centre you are querying and how up-to-date that centre is.

It takes over a month for the crawl updates to be completed and to have all the data centres carrying the same PR.

To keep visible, the easy way and the one that explains why sites that keep having new content do well, is to continue to add new content for your most profitable phrases. The other option is to have some highly relevant inbound links before the deep crawl starts so that your site remains with a PR of at least PR1.

Where a program like wordpress provides duplicate URLs, block those duplicates in the robots.txt file - just make sure that you don't block the URL which contains the PR.

This is not a theory that I subscribe to, do you have any references to testing that you have to back up this idea?

The best sites don't constantly have to reinvent the wheel adding new content.

[KirstyM]

Kirsty,

One thing to consider is that you may have seen the end of the new site boost in Google, your domain registration was 6 months old at around the time that you reported the drop.. so assuming that your site is younger than six months then this would tie in.

You should check for broken links, found the following for example http://www.lingeriebrands.co.uk/shop/Bikinibysize.php

The other thing that checking your site out that I would be suspicious of is that you may have been flagged as a thin affiliate

c5

C5, one thing I am not worried about is being flagged as a thin affiliate. All the content on that site has been written by me... 500 unique articles. I'm not entirely sure how much more I could do to add more content or value than I already am. I certainly have more content than most affiliate sites!

I also don't think the issue is as a result the end of my sites "boost" in the rankings. I know what you're talking about, but this doesn't have the feel of an end to those lovely initial enhanced ranking. Also broken links certainly don't lead to your site bombing (that broken link was added in the last 3 days or so - must nip off and shoot Duncan). Mind you, I've another site that is based around the same premise of unique content... so if it bombs at exactly the 6 month mark - I'll let you know you were right.

I do think there is a boost for new sites, but I do not believe that it lasts for 6 months. A few weeks at most in my experience before it fades away. I've seen this happen with sites I've developed and left, that have then bounced back at around the 6 to 9 month mark.

As I said earlier in the thread, 30% of my traffic came back. Completely new traffic from pages that had never ranked before. Pages with a lot less unique content on than the others - Duh? Also, a few of my brand pages have started to rank again. Google now also seems to be able to better determine which pages are relevant for a particular term under a site: search... but its still not perfect. If it were an issue as C5 describes I'd still expect Google to be able to determine page relevance within the structure of the site.

Like I said my site has quality inbound links, unique content, and is updated daily. I'm 95% sure its not anything I've done wrong and I will just keep plodding along adding new stuff.

Looking at the SERPS, there are a lot of sites ranking for terms I used to with much less unique content (if any).

[channel5]

Hi Kirsty

Not trying to suggest your site is a thin affiliate in the same terms as the one page site just crammed full of links, the sort that Google boots very quickly nowadays if they even get a chance to rank. I can see that a lot of time and effort goes into your work on the site and that it's a quality product.

I've just seen other article based sites in a similar vein start to struggle with ranking due to the fact they don't physically sell anything and don't offer price comparison or value add tools, reading the Google Raters Guidelines then your site may be liable to being flagged under those rules by someone who read the rules to the letter.

If you could add some more direct price comparison tool to the site then this would alleviate this, again i'm refering directly to directions given in this doc.

Has your minimum bid level been raised in Adwords? I have a theory that the Quality Score in adwords and being flagged as a "less than thick" affiliate are linked.

On the boost factor, the length of a boost seems not to be fixed, and some sites hit it at different times (if at all in some cases), but I've seen many at the 6 month mark, and a total drop off followed by a slight recovery still sounds suspicous to me.

Anyways, keep us all updated to how your traffic flows as we only learn by looking at real live examples

cheers
c5

[fizzbird]

Hi Kirsty

Not trying to suggest your site is a thin affiliate in the same terms as the one page site just crammed full of links, the sort that Google boots very quickly nowadays if they even get a chance to rank.

Why are so many of these sites ranking so well at the moment then?

[channel5]

Why are so many of these sites ranking so well at the moment then?

Get into any area that is remotely competitive and they won't be ranked, the more lucrative and high traffic the topic area you target the much more likely your site will be subjected to manual review.

[KirstyM]

Hey C5,

My Adwords QS is excellent. Min bid 2p on most words. I don't think a thin content slap has come down on the site. There are too many other things that point to something being "wrong" (hell, maybe just "changed") with the way Google deals with page relevance at the moment. The fact that for ages it was seeing my feed pages as most relevant to brand terms as opposed to the many hundreds of pages of keyword rich unique content mentioning them, pointed to a bit of an issue! This is something hundreds of other webmasters are reporting.

I found a good example in the SERPS after my last post to show how Google is having issues with page relevance: -

odille swim - Google Search

-Odille swim is an Oasis Brand. Oasis site - nowhere to be seen!!

-The Figleaves page ranking here isn't their Odille swim page, its a page mentioning the brand name in passing.

- Knowmysize.co.uk - its some spammy page which mentions Odille once in amongst hundreds of other listed brands rather than the Odille brand page.

- Ooohlingerie.co.uk - its a Lepel page ranking instead of their Odille page (and this is I think the most common characteristic of the current SERPS issues)

- Becheeky.com - new arrivals page is ranking rather than their odille page.

The sites that are left ranking are absolutely and totally thin, with no added value. The bizrate site only has Figleaves products on from a feed. Dealclick - same, thin feed content. Shop.com is worse... there's only one or two Odille products on the page.

This is not a relevant set of search results, and I am seeing it everywhere in my commonly searched / monitored areas.

[stu-art]

Agreed - Seeing the same thing. It smells like an algo update gone wrong. Total rubbish in the serps across many areas. Also seeing lots of established merchants dropping a few pages. I also had a content rich site drop for numerous terms, and now starting to feature for others. Nice 1 Google.

[channel5]

The Example you give is interesting indeed Kirsty, (this thread is now the number 1 result by the way!).. Judging by anchor text of incoming links your site should be listed on that alone..

It's almost as if it's pushed the query through the QDF filter, which you wouldn't expect for a clothing brand search.

[KirstyM]

Hah! it is too!

Clearly something is awry at chez Google. I can only keep monitoring and see what transpires.

[pinman]

I'm glad I'm not alone in the Google 'organic hits plummet' saga

It's happened to me twice already this year. Firstly back in early March - just as I seemed to be getting up a head of steam - and then again on Tuesday and somewhat bizarrely once again after my site visits hit an all time hight

First time up I thought it was because I thought most of my links were affiliate ones (well the site is for discount codes after all) and this week I thought it was down to me re-submitting my site to Google.

However, after reading this thread I feel somewhat happier that it was neither of the above :tup

Must be someone 'tweaking' the algo somewhere :sneaky