How do i find out why i have lost traffic

3 years ago

Originally Posted by geoff tims

Anyway, after a few months of hiring them my traffic went right down. I fired them but found out they had put in a back door to my site which has now been removed.

Sorry to hear about your misfortune.

Do you know if those "gurus" tried to provide backlinks from .org, .edu sites and other black-hat SEO techniques?

If they did, then Penguin decreased your search engine rankings.

You can find out more about what black-hat SEO techniques can do to one's site here:

Google Penguin

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geoff tims 3 years ago

i had someone check to see if i have been penalized and they said no.
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Brian Cairns

3 years ago

A couple of places to check.

1. Your Domain Authority: if they put a backdoor on your site, your site may have lost some of its authority. Your authority for certain keywords prior to this sad incident was likely higher that it is now. This can happen without a penalty or banning. You can check your DA for free on MOZ

2. Technical SEO: Did they alter any of your tags? title, H1, H2? Have you checked your sitemaps.xml? Did they change it or delete it? Did they monkey with any schema data? This is typically in the header tag if there at all.

Happy to help you so more if you could let me know more details.

Thanks
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geoff tims 3 years ago

My domain authority was hit hard. I have been spending two years trying to sort this mess out. i have changed my site map now [ Link removed by moderator ]

I am not sure about the scheme data, as not sure what that is as i am still learning. this did mess around with h1, h2, etc. before they messed around with the site, i was in the top five for lifestyle magazine, and sometimes i was number one, and life and style magazine in the top five and holiday magazine in the top five. now, i am around 60. they caused a lot of damage and all i seem to be doing for the past two years is cleaning up the mess and trying to learn how to fix it and get my site back to what it was. but i am seriously struggling and i have considered many times of giving up
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- Brian Cairns 3 years ago
  
  Geoff, I'm so sorry this sounds awful. Definitely don't give up. If you were there once, you can get back. It will just take time and a some effort. I'm sorry to hear that you've been struggling for so long.
  
  Have you done a KW audit and page mapping? Your most competitive KWs are where you are likely to have taken the biggest hit due to the drop in DA.
  
  As a rule of thumb, sites with DA < 70 tend to struggle with raking well on KWs with monthly searches greater than 3,000. This is by NO means universal. It's just a simple gut check when it comes to deciding which KWs to do more research and to optimize.
  
  You or someone should help you clean up your tags based on your KW page mapping. That's a relatively straightforward task. Then pick the ones that are most important and achievable.
  
  Then, we need to get those lost links back. Do you know what you lost and from whom? It may worth reaching out again to rebuild them, especially for those pages where your target KWs are mapped.
  
  Finally, you can consider mark-up. There are differing opinions on whether mark-up (schema) is worthwhile. Personally, I think every little bit helps. I use it to provide extra information such as NAP (name, address, phone) and other add-ons for SERP (search engine results page) listings, star ratings, for example. I'd look in your header to see if there is anything like this there.
  
  Schema markup looks like this:
  
  <script type="application/ld+json">
  {
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ProfessionalService",
  "name": [company name]
  
  Does this help?
  
  Thanks
  
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Roberttjett

3 years ago

The most common cause of a sudden drop in website traffic is a recent search algorithm update. Penalties, redirects, incorrect robots.txt rules and ranking losses are all other legitimate reasons why you may see a drop in website traffic.

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King Manu

3 years ago

You might have a lot of low-quality backlinks that you need to disavow. Check your backlink profile and see what kinds of links that company has created.

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geoff tims 3 years ago

i had to get rid of around 2,000 bad links which was shocking, and they got rid of good quality links.
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parmarjeet

3 years ago

First, you need to do the research using any SEO tool like SEMrush or ubersuggest and check which keywords were ranking earlier and are down now. Also, check the backlinks which they have created. Go to Google search console and disavow all the backlinks. So Google will discontinue considering those backlinks. This should help but will take more than 1 or 2 months to reflect the changes by Google spider.

All the best

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cowolter

3 years ago

The same thing happens with my website "Traffic Loss" but not cause of redirection. It happens because by mistake my database of the website has been deleted and for backup, I contact my provider but they took around 1 week for proper response and recover onplanners but now my traffic goes low around 70-80% in loss. For this I have fixed all the crawl error occurred in search console and resubmit all the URL to google but till now google not giving the same ranking as previous

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Jamell

3 years ago

You definitely don't want unauthorized users having high level access to your website or computer so having the back site removed is a blessing .

You might want to run a site audit to figure out what needs to be upgraded etc .

Here is a list of things you can also do

1 update your content
2. Get rid of thin content
3 Repurpose
4 compress some images

Thanks
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geoff tims

3 years ago

i have done an audit with seranking and i have the images compressed. as well as adding new content and will be going over old content and update it. i am trying to understand how i managed to have articles on test sites that did well and not so much on my site.

Thanks
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DABK

3 years ago

Well, what's the difference between the test sites and the main site?

How did you set up the internal linking on the test sites? on the main site?

If you do the same thing on the main site that you did on the test sites, you get the same results.

So, look for the differences... From the theme you used, to the inner linking, to backlinks, to alt text, to everything, you know.

Were the test sites more narrowly focused? That you might not be able / want to duplicate on the main site.

Originally Posted by geoff tims

i have done an audit with seranking and i have the images compressed. as well as adding new content and will be going over old content and update it. i am trying to understand how i managed to have articles on test sites that did well and not so much on my site.

Thanks

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qwikaddotcom

3 years ago

Originally Posted by geoff tims

i am trying to understand how i managed to have articles on test sites that did well and not so much on my site.

What does this suppose to mean? Sounds like duplicate content. No?

Thanks
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geoff tims 3 years ago

i put the article on my site first and it was not ranking well or generating much traffic. i then put it on a test site two weeks later and it did very well in search engines and brought a lot of traffic
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kipl03

3 years ago

Hello, you need to use the Google Search Console to check the issues and you need to check backlinks also and use disavow tool to disown the toxic links.

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George Flm

3 years ago

So you paid for a backdoor to your site.
The nerve of some people.

On the flip side you live and learn.

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Jonathan S

3 years ago

Just Google it, there are lots of site offering FREE SEO analysis. There are many reasons why hugh traffic can be lost in an instant like when Google or other search engines changed their algorithms or even social media algorithms so it's best not to lost track on your SEO, get them updated.

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incomenow

3 years ago

Sorry about all you went through in the hands of the so-called SEO gurus! It's not always like that because there are a lot of SEO experts out there that know really what they are doing. Mearning, without hiring an SEO firm, you can get to work yourself, and optimize your site for search rankings. Content alone cannot fetch you the needed organic traffic. You need to promote your content and build links back to your site through guest blogging, email marketing, blog commenting, and lots more.

Originally Posted by geoff tims

Hi, i have just joined and hoping to learn a lot about SEO as i am new to this topic.

I hired a so called SEO expert around two and a half years ago. Before I hired them I was achieving around 10,000 visitors a day. They claimed to be experts and were based in the UK. There is a long story to it but i will keep it short. I hired them because they were trading under a big brand name, which turned out to be a franchise and the person in question had no experience and hired all the work out to India.

Anyway, after a few months of hiring them my traffic went right down. I fired them but found out they had put in a back door to my site which has now been removed.

I have been trying to learn SEO and been trying to find out how they have damaged my site. The site is not banned by Google so that is good, but the traffic has been hit heavy. I have lots of content on the site but the amount of content does not reflect on the traffic.

Is there a way to find out why i am having so many problems trying to fix my sites traffic. i seem to be spending more time trying to fix things that the content.

Thanks

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thedark

3 years ago

Few years ago I was invited to test a software that watched search traffic and tried to detect if you website was affected by different google algorithm updates. Now it is https://fruition.net/software/google-penalty-checker/ but I am not sure if it is available anymore.

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yourbestfriend

3 years ago

There was a major Google update the 4th December, not sure if that might have an impact

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Doodle Digital

3 years ago

Sorry for that.. Don't panic! Following some checklists may help you to identify the cause.

1. Recent changes to your design or website structure
2. Identify any tracking problem
3. A search behavior change?
4. Your website loading speed slow now than first?
5. Have any Content indexing issues?
6. Search console misconfiguration.
7. Google search algorithm update
8. Lost backlinks

If you have followed the checklist you should have been able to identify the cause of your site traffic drop. If, you have found any problem then solve it. I hope you recover it. Thanks!

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writeaway

3 years ago

A lot of the big SEO software tools available online have an SEO audit function

You might want to start there

When I did an audit for one of my sites, I was able to figure out both on-page and off-page factors that were affecting my site's SERP rankings

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drjagpal

3 years ago

Google Analytics or the tracking software of your choice. In Analytics you will go to Acquisition, All Traffic, Channels.
Select the week where the drop occurred.
Click "compare to" and select the week before the drop occurred.
Click Apply.

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centralcoastservice

3 years ago

The first thing you want to look into is your recent activity as it might be the reason for the traffic decrease. If you know that your site underwent some changes during the last couple of weeks, then they are probably the ones that caused the drop. This will save you plenty of time and help you understand what works for your site the best. Oftentimes the issue that lies on a surface is the main one, same as with electrical devices - the most obvious, yet not so much, thing to do is just to check if it's plugged in instead of running for a screwdriver and messing it up even more.

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Jacey Tome

3 years ago

Where troubles with your traffic can occur
Technical Issues
On-Page Optimization
Niche and Competitor Changes
Search Engine Algorithms Update
Useful Tools to Check Your Site

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