Google Organic Traffic Gone Thru Floor. Any Ideas?

[KirstyM]

Hello!

From about Thursday last week on the organic traffic on my lingerie site Lingerie Brands : UK Lingerie Brands : Designer Underwear totally fell through the floor. It happened gradually over a few days and now has virtually disappeared.

I'm a bit stumped as I don't think I've done anything wrong. All unique content, no nasty incoming links etc. I know this can happen to sites periodically as I believe Ray and Barry from on here have experienced in recent times!

My only concern is that the way the Wordpress setup works does create duplicate content because we've created a category for every brand. i.e.

This is the post for our Bjorn Borg undies: -

Bjorn Borg Mens Underwear UK : Bjorn Borg Boxers UK : Bjorn Borg Underwear : Lingerie Brands : UK Lingerie Brands : Designer Underwear

And this is the category page: -

Bjorn Borg Mens : Lingerie Brands : UK Lingerie Brands : Designer Underwear

I'm fairly sure its just a Google "funny" and that it will sort itself out, but hey.. in these situations its always good to throw your problem out there in case anyone does know something that might help sort it out!!

[Keith]

The traffic problem is possibly just one of Googles little quirks and hopefully it will return if you sit tight.

This little plugin may be the answer to your duplicate content issue Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin | SYP

[Grounded Vertigo]

I had the same happen to me a month or so back for my lingerie site too (though I'm sure it's not lingerie related!) and it came back again about a week later without me really doing anything.

My very technical advice would be to cross all your fingers and toes and hope Google does the same for you. Either that or try Keith's plugin...

[drivetowin]

Google is having a few wobbles at the moment - traffic for one of my main sites dropped by 25% for about the last ten days and then yesterday (and today by the looks of things so far) it's right back to normal (fingers, toes and everything else crossed!!)

[andysears]

I have the same problem, with my Salou site, Google trafffic just stopped last week, strange thing is for some reason where I never got any traffic from Yahoo, now I do.

It has also shown just how targeted the traffic from Google was, predominantly for one thing, where the Yahoo traffic is spread over the whole site.

Not sure if I have done some wrong or not, nothing really changed a great deal to make this happen.

[KieronD]

I just blogged about this, as the same thing happened to me. Google does this type of stuff now and again, best thing to do is not to panic and don't try to make sense of it either. Adopt a kind of zenlike approach and I'm sure it will come back

[befuddle]

My advice is this or what I feel works for me:

1. Remove all duplicate content
2. Publish even more fresh content each day that is available from your home page. Monitor when Google has indexed that content and when you start receiving traffic for it.
3. Work smarter. ie automate posts to go live on different days

Here are some recent dips of my traffic and the length of time it took to bounce back.

15th February. The site had been consistently good post-Christmas and then dipped to a low of 167 visitors. 20th February, all was fine again. 5 days.

5th March. This was the sharpest decline of all. Traffic had been increasing daily since the 20th February return, then overnight dropped to 222 visitors and hitting a low of 152 days later. 19th March the high traffic returned but only for 2 days. 2 weeks.

29th March. Traffic starts to climb. I've had dips since but they are only overnight. The lowest recorded day since is 433 visitors. 1 to 3 days.

[purple]

I have not really looked deep into this till I read this thread. My site in google news is no longer getting picked up, either in google news, google blog, and main listings. It was getting picked up within mins last week.
Another site used to get instant entry but now is not, although serps are still holding up.

Has anyone else seen pages not being listed instantly when before they were.

Overall it is the usual one site traffic up another down, so overall no big shakes.

[Elaine]

yep - the same self thing happened to me a while back - my home page dive bombed in Google - I simply waited a few weeks then checked again ...

and found I'd inadvertantly included NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW in my meta tags :blush

so 98% certain it probably is a Google wobble - but worthwhile checking you aint done something dumb

[renegade]

Being google slapped is part of affiliate life - we've got to have something to worry about to keep us on our toes haven't we?
I certainly suffered some major slaps over the years but I'm still here
To summarise the panel:
As Elaine said: Check you haven't done anything dumb
As Ray said: Publish new content daily and work smart
As Kieron said: Take a zen approach

My contribution would be to take the Zen approach with the affected site and work like crazy on another project to take your mind off the problem and avoid having all your eggs in one basket moving forwards.

I know Kirsty is well aware of all that advice but hopefully the thread will calm the nerves of any newbies suffering.

[Barry]

Yeah I have been bombed twice over the last 10 months but have bounced back, thank god.

One of those times was due to a hacker planting adware on my site that got it banned from google altogether and the other time was for no reason I could see.

Both times I just carried on as normal adding stuff slowly and rewriting the front page and things returned to normal after a month.

Good luck with it.

Ta

Barry

[Lingerieexpress]

Our traffic dropped over the weekend and we lost some of our first page postions which went to page 4 and back further for keywords which we are normally top of page 1 for.

This morning things seem to be back to normal - just hope it stays that way.
Maybe just some shuffle in the Google index

[Paul Wright]

Kirsty, to help solve dupe content on wordpress take a look at the following plugin.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin - Joost de Valk's SEO Blog

Will allow you to prevent indexing of archives, date based archives, category pages etc. You can switch them all on or off untill you have the desired setup.

Cheers
Paul

[KirstyM]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the info, particularly the plugins to stop the dupe content - very handy!

I had a bit more of a dig around and what seems to be happening is that Google is having real bother determining which pages are relevant to a particular search term. Effectively its decided the wrong pages are relevant and those aren't strong enough to rank.

Look at the way a site: search for one of the keywords I used to be in the top ten is structured: -

site:www.lingeriebrands.co.uk odille - Google Search

It thinks the most relevant page is my feed page!

Twice recently I've checked that term and found one of my old, abandoned affiliate feed sites with absolutely no content ranking 10th. I checked SEO roundtable and the problem with Google getting the page relevance wrong is something lots of webmasters are reporting.

So yeah, I'm just sitting tight and keeping on adding the content and will give the dupe content due dilligence. The PPC I send to the site means I'm not really feeling any financial pinch on this. It's just irritating when you don't know why your site's been affected!!

Onwards and upwards...:tup

[andysears]

Today around half my google traffic has returned, also seems MSN Search has decided to start sending traffic. The difference now my traffic is for a spread of terms where before it was about 90 for PortAventura tickets.