Big traffic drop - experiment gone bad . Please help!

by AVP387

Posted: 11 years ago 19 replies

Hello Warriors,

I messed up big time. I do not know what happened but I took at ~70% traffic hit on site. I maintain a technology blog that was growing steadily. I reached about 40000 visitors a month in 4 months. All original SEOed content in the form of articles and HOW-TOs. Below are the details of my traffic change:

Date - Pageviews

Oct 14 - 1579 (typical higher traffic during Weekends)

Oct 15 - 1342 (normal)

Oct 16 - 1418 (normal)

Oct 17 - 1319 (normal)

Oct 18 - 1288 (normal)

Oct 19 - 1146 (slight drop)

Oct 20 - 288 (big drop)

Oct 21 - 317

Oct 22 - 370

Oct 23 - 305

I still have not recovered from it and my earnings which were growing about 20% a month dropped significantly as well. My mistake, I did too many changes at the same time to pin point what caused this. I would greatly appreciate your input on how I can recover from this. Below are the changes I made around that time.

October 9: Self hosted (my blog is self-hosted). No major changes.
October 10: New post
October 16: First mistake. My self-hosted server was going to be offline for a few days. So I opened up a shared hosting account with GoDaddy and moved site to it temporarily (for about 1 week). I did not want to lose traffic due to the outage. I later read that if the quality of other sites on shared server are bad that could affect your site.
October 17: Second major mistake. I bought 600 facebook likes from Fiverr. This gig came with 2 free gigs, for which I chose, 7000 Backlink Pyramid and 25 PR5 penguin safe backlinks. I did some research and came to the conclusion that if buying backlinks was bad then it is easy to affect the SERPs then it is easy to kill the competitors. Boy was I wrong!
October 18: Traffic within normal variation range.
October 19: Published a new post. However, this post contained over 90% of duplicate content from another post within my blog. I never duplicate content. In this case I could not avoid it as it would affect the quality of the post.
October 20: Big drop in traffic. Lost rankings for several of my posts.
October 21: Received a "Big Traffic Change" warning on my Google Webmasters Dashboard.
October 22: Submitted a "Request for Reconsideration" with Google.
October 23: Google came back and said that no SPAMs were identified and there were no manual actions from them. They did however say that their algorithms may have detected something.
October 24: Moved my site back to my self-hosted server.

Previously, most of my posts were within the first page of results. Now many don't even rank. Some went from SERP rank 3 to 250. Also, my new posts used to show up within hours. Now they do not show up. Since then none of my new posts are ranked good. I do have several of my older posts still showing up within the first page, which is still resulting in some traffic to the blog.

During this time my Alexa rank and links also dropped significantly. Rank is still dropping. Alexa links dropped from 178 to 32.

My blog grew rapidly due to hard work. Then I tried to take shortcuts and I learned a hard lesson.

Positive changes within the last one month:

Alexa links increased from 32 to to 41.
Traffic stayed the same (no more drops).
Facebook likes and reach have started increasing gradually.

I would greatly appreciate any constructive feedback on what I could do to improve my traffic.

Thanks for your time.

#bad #big #drop #experiment #traffic

Anton543 11 years ago

"October 17: Second major mistake. I bought 600 facebook likes from Fiverr. This gig came with 2 free gigs, for which I chose, 7000 Backlink Pyramid and 25 PR5 penguin safe backlinks. I did some research and came to the conclusion that if buying backlinks was bad then it is easy to affect the SERPs then it is easy to kill the competitors. Boy was I wrong!"

I may be misunderstanding this, but are you saying you bought bad links and pointed them to a competitor?

My guess is that sometimes shuffles in the SERPS happen which can see your rankings plummet for a few weeks only to come back stronger than before, that is if you haven't done anything unscrupulous.
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- 2 replies
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- AVP387 11 years ago
  
  No No. I bought links for myself, pointing to some of my posts.
  
  Thanks
  
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- AVP387 11 years ago
  
  Thanks everyone. I have been continuing to post quality content. I have to work on building genuine backlinks. I will check the disavow tool as well.
  
  I like what I write about. So I am committed to continuing to write whether I get traffic or not.
  
  If anyone has more suggestions/advice, please share them with me. Thanks again for your time.
  
  Thanks
  
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Corey Geer 11 years ago

I saw the part about buying backlinks or SEO services from Fiverr.

No need to call in CSI for this one Chief, I think we found the problem.
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SuzanneH 11 years ago

Panda #22 - around November 21st...?

Google Algorithm Change History | SEOmoz

Suzanne
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Danny Cutts 11 years ago

And the google gives you a cold hard slap.....

Keep adding content and keep building links....

Danny
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PerformanceMan

11 years ago

Google giveth and they taketh away.

Your 'Honeymoon Period' ended after they tabulated the user metrics.

Thanks
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gearmonkey

11 years ago

Originally Posted by PerformanceMan

Google giveth and they taketh away.

Your 'Honeymoon Period' ended after they tabulated the user metrics.

This is what I suspect the issue is. People who say "never buy SEO services from Fiverr" are normally the ones selling something in their signature for 5x the price you can get the same (or better) service on Fiverr for. In fact, many folks on here outsource their work to fiverr sellers, then they come here and say how bad fiverr is so they can get try to get more sales. Dog-eat-dog world.

That said, don't point 7000 spam links to your money site. That may be part of the problem but atleast Google didn't give you the unnatural link building message.

Your site seems very new and if you had hosting issues that can be part of the problem. Another problem is you got hit by a recent algo change. I can't detect the culprit without seeing your webste.

Thanks
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AVP387

11 years ago

That may be part of the problem but atleast Google didn't give you the unnatural link building message.

Yes. I am glad that did not happen. And yes there could have been several reasons. But the data I have collected points to the 7000 link pyramid. As soon as I disavowed those links (1 week) my traffic recovered. So I am going to blame it on that.

Thanks
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gearmonkey

11 years ago

Originally Posted by AVP387

How old is your website?

Thanks
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AVP387 11 years ago

Originally started in 2010. 30 posts (non-SEOed).
Moved to a new domain in June 2012.
June 2012 - Present added 60 more good quality SEOed posts.

So at the new domain my website is about 7 months old.
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sbucciarel Banned 11 years ago

7000 Backlink Pyramid and 25 PR5 penguin safe backlinks.

By jove ... I think we've found the problem.
Never buy SEO services from Fiverr

Maybe Google's link disavow thingy can save you.
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cpwebsite 11 years ago

I think a change in the google ranking caused you to drop in your ranking because of the large amount of ranks you were building.
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AVP387

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Paul M

I can almost guarantee this is the reason for the big drop in your rankings across the board. Those kind of backlink packages are exactly what Google has been trying to clamp down on lately. No way are those 7000 backlinks of any worthwhile quality.

All the other stuff you listed is chicken feed by comparison. Not saying the other items didn't effect your site, but it would be unlikely for them to have such a dramatic effect.

As for improving your traffic - The best thing you could do right now is try and undo some of the damage from the backlink packages.

Here are some ideas:

You could give the new link disavow tool by Google a try if it's applicable to you. It should allow you to disavow bad quality links to your site from being taken into account. You can find out more about it here: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: A new tool to disavow links

You could start building more quality links to the pages targeted by the backlink packages to help improve your overall link profile.

You could also contact the link package providers (especially the 25 pr5 link provider) and get them to remove some of the links they pointed at your site.

-Paul

Paul, Thanks a million. I think that the disavow tool is working for me. As mentioned above I uploaded links to be disavowed. It took about a week for Google to reindex but two days back I saw a big increase in traffic. Last two days my traffic has been back up to 80% of where it was before the drop. Hopefully, it continues to increase.

Thanks
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Jason Perez O'Connor

11 years ago

Originally Posted by AVP387

So prior to this you were only writing content and nothing else? Just doing on-site SEO and getting near 40k visits a month? Surely that should be a good enough amount of visits to make a full time income (I don't know of what quality your traffic is), and if you like to write about it even better.

If you look around here people struggle to even get 50-100 visits per day. How long have you had the site? Is it full of lots of content?

I just don't see where the reason for changing what you were doing interms of SEO came from? greed? :O

Do manual backlinking, and not because your goal is to leave a link (that should be a benefit of doing offsite marketing), but because you are contributing to wherever you are leaving that link and think that people could grab more value from following your link and checking out your content.

No more shortcuts!!! focus on bringing people to your site in genuine ways and try not to make things look active and popular using fake methods like buying likes or links. That's polluting!

Thanks

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dvduval 11 years ago

It had to be the 7000 backlinks pyramid. It is not worth paying to have links pointing to your site like this. They are low quality and sure to cause harm.
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- AVP387 11 years ago
  
  Yes. It was the backlink pyramid. Thanks to google's disavow tool, now I am slowly getting back on track. Lessons learned:
  
  *no shortcuts - there is no substitute to hardwork (I deviated and took a hit for 2 months)
  *if something ain't broke don't fix it
  
  I will ofcourse publish my experience in a post to capture the whole situation.
  
  Originally started the blog in 2010 but published only 30 posts in 2 years. In April 2012, I published a post that came first in google SERP and started pulling in heavy traffic. And my revenue jumped about 200 times more. This inspired me and I started writing more seriously. Researched a ton and read about SEOs. Most of my posts show up within the first page of the results.
  
  All I do is On-page SEO. No manual backlinking. I do realize the importance of it. I tried guest posting a few times to improve backlinking and I am also on some forums but not active. From now on I will try to become active. I just dont have the time to do anything other writing and designing my blog. I am a scientist by profession. This blog is just my hobby although I have started taking it more seriously in the recent months due its earning potential.
  
  About 75% organic search engine traffic, 15% referral traffic from existing backlinks created by others, and 10% returning traffic. My main source of income Adsense and Affiliate Marketing. All implemented starting May 2012.
  
  Thanks
  
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Nelapsi

11 years ago

I think sometimes you guys live on a different planet.. You do not buy links on Monday and see a traffic loss on Wednesday because of that reason. Any of you who who pointed to this as the cause really need to get out of SEO and head back to something where you end the conversation with "Would you like fries with that?"

If this is something you did, you need to start looking at 2 to 4 weeks prior to this and see what you did as far as link building goes. You also need to look at your webmaster data and see what keywords and pages took the hit.

Just based on timing, this could be Panda related and that tends to be regarding content not backlinks. Your Alexa Ranking has 0 to do with anything and I already can see something odd going on because your very high Alexa Ranking does not equal the traffic you described.

Finally, you spent 5 dollars for fake facebook friends when there are at least 2 dozen sites that will do that for free?

Thanks
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AVP387

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Nelapsi

You may know a lot more than I do. But I am going to believe what my data shows. Apart from Analytics, I have several other statistics from several other tools recorded to a database on a daily basis. I analyzed them in several ways. I bought links and about a week later Alexa rank drops, Alexa links drop, and Traffic drops. I disavow the links I bought, 1 week later Alexa rank stops dropping and traffic improved.

Originally Posted by Nelapsi

If this is something you did, you need to start looking at 2 to 4 weeks prior to this and see what you did as far as link building goes. You also need to look at your webmaster data and see what keywords and pages took the hit.

Again, here too my data shows it does not take 2 to 4 weeks for Google indexes to be updated. Both before and after it was 1 week in my case. And of course I looked at my webmaster data and all pages took a hit but the pages and keywords for which I bought links dropped the most. Again, I am going to believe what my data says.

Originally Posted by Nelapsi

Just based on timing, this could be Panda related and that tends to be regarding content not backlinks. Your Alexa Ranking has 0 to do with anything and I already can see something odd going on because your very high Alexa Ranking does not equal the traffic you described.

You may be right about Panda. But I strongly believe my content is good as I do a lot of research before writing a post and diligently SEO my posts. My Alexa rank did drop after buying links. I graphed my rank over the last several months and the dates very closely coincide buying and disavowing links. If the trend continues, I expect my Alexa ranks to improve over the next few days.

Originally Posted by Nelapsi

Finally, you spent 5 dollars for fake facebook friends when there are at least 2 dozen sites that will do that for free?

I had no idea that there were free sites. But from now on thanks but no thanks to both free and $5 ones.

Thanks

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Big traffic drop - experiment gone bad . Please help!

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