When dealing with a decline in traffic it is important to determine the source of the problem. Is the change something indirect that you can’t control such as change in a search algorithm or a new competitor in the market, or is the change due to something more direct, like recent (well intentioned) changes to your site or a a server outage?
The clues are all in your Analytics data.
Is the loss from a single referer (Google, Yahoo, Bing)?
Is the traffic loss clustered around a specific keywords or phrases?
Has your website been off-line due to a server outage or update?
Is there a basic configuration issue, such as an incorrectly written “No Index” entry in the robots.txt file?
What changes, if any were made to the website preceding the loss?
Jill Whalen with High Rankings in Boston has a really great write-up on looking for the root of the problem here.
To summarize:
Determine what type of traffic loss you’re dealing with.
Look at the extent of the traffic loss.
Compare apples to apples.
Review and filter out “brand” traffic.
Analyze which keyword phrases have had a significant decrease in visitors.
Do a quick Google search for the phrases.
Review the landing page for the keyword phrase that lost traffic.
Review your long-tail traffic.
Decide if you’re dealing with a search engine penalty
I attended PubCon in Dallas last week. I have attended several Search Engine Strategies (SES) and Search Marketing Expos (SMX) over the years, but this was my first PubCon. PubCon is driven by the folks at WebmasterWorld, which is the leading source of what is happening in search and is a different crowd than either SES or SMX. I went to PubCon to get a fresh perspective on the SEO universe and I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed. I picked up especially good information on reputation management and Black-Hat SEO that I haven’t gotten anywhere else.
Black-Hat techniques are often used to inflate a websites ranking or destroy some one’s reputation. While I don’t advocate or use Black-Hat techniques (if caught you will be banned from search engines), it was good to learn some of the many nefarious techniques that are employed.
I was eager to connect with some of the people associated with WebmasterWorld. I was extremely pleased to meet Ted Ulle (Tedster), a prominent poster on WebmasterWorld. I attended Ted’s session on Information Architecture [take away: limit choices to seven or less]. I also attended sessions with Tim Ash and Bryan Massey on Landing Page Optimization [take away: test, test, test...] and the session on Local Search Marketing by Kate Morris was especially good and uncovered several recent additions to the AdWords interface.
It will take some time to digest all that I learned, but I will discuss key finds with my customers and begin to roll out key changes for their sites in coming weeks.
Google added a feature to Webmaster Tools yesterday that I hope will find its way in to Business Listings and other services. Now, if you are verified owner of a website, you can simply add additional users to the Webmaster Tools account (through the verify link). This means site owners can add individuals that do development, marketing or optimization, without having to upload additional files or edit pages. This greatly simplifies things, giving owners a simple way to remove this access.
I am attending the search optimization and marketing conference SMX West in Santa Clara next week. If you will be at the conference and would like to get together, drop me a note. For my customers, this is one of the larger industry events. While I follow in the neighborhood of 20 blogs on marketing and optimization all year, this show does a lot to pull all the information together. Confirming trends and many times is the launching point for new techniques and information.
I couldn’t resist posting this Dilbert cartoon strip from February 19. I am not sure if its the recognition that SEO has become mainstream enough to merit a Dilbert strip, or the fact that Scott Adams understands that sometimes sacrifices must be made to keep Google happy.
Duplicate Content has long been an issue with webmasters and is cause for concern because duplicating content dilutes your ranking in search results. Perhaps the most common cause of having duplicate content is in allowing both www. and non www versions of your site to exist. However, another place where I see duplicate content occur is when a customer has multiple domain names pointing to the same content. When you use multiple domain names, and there are good reasons to do this, you should pick a preferred URL and ensure that any secondary domains are 301 redirected to that URL.
In this video, Google’s Greg Grothaus does a great job explaining duplicate content problems and solutions ranging from 301 redirects to canonical tags.
I have previously blogged about how 301 redirects can prevent common problems from diluting the search engine ranking for your site. However, there are however a number of situations that create duplicate content concerns that are more difficult address. Webmasters now have additional tools to deal with duplicate content through Google’s Webmaster Tools panel. Through this addition to webmaster tools, Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore. This will a great help, especially for many large dynamic sites.
It is often hard to tell what is a real penalty as there can be may causes for your content to drop in the search engine result pages (SERPs). There are things that should be obvious, like changes in SERPs that co-inside with changes you made to the site. However, often results don’t directly co-inside with changes and therefore it can be difficult to track back.
It can be challenging to discover if:
You’ve got a true penalty
You’ve been outranked according to the current algorithm
It’s a Google bug (from algorithm tweaks)
Simple Checks Include:
Is your robots.text page restricting access?
Has an errant noindex or no-follow tag found its way to a section of your site?
Have you checked Google’s webmaster tools for error messages?
Have you checked WebmasterWorld to see if recent changes to the algorithm are effecting others?
Props to “tedster” on the webmaterworld thead, this list is an excerpt from an older posting of his:
Additional checks:
Do your pages show with a site:example.com search?
If they did once and they do not now, this is most likely a ban – the most extreme kind of penalty. It’s becoming quite rare to be completely banned rather than penalized – usually those who are banned know what they’ve been doing. Technical problems with your site, or some times Google may be at fault.
Does your site still rank #1 for a search on your domain name example.com?
If so, but your other important search rankings ALL slipped badly, this is often a sign of a penalty. Study up on the posts in our Hot Topics area for ideas.
Does a search for relatively unique phrases taken from your title tags return your URL relatively high?
If so, but your principle search rankings have dropped out the bottom, you may have lost the power of a good number of your backlinks. This is not necessarily a true penalty, but if you have been a part of some backlink scheme, even unwittingly, you may have been penalized for it.
Also, check any outbound links on your pages to be sure that the site they point to is still what you intended. Other domains can change ownership (or just change their conduct) and become part of a “bad neighborhood”. If others also have access to your site, be sure that no hidden content has been added without your knowledge, especially hidden links.
Carrie Hill just published a summary of directories that should be on every one’s link building list. These are credible sources that the search engines use to help determine the relevancy of your site for things like products, services, or locality.
