Traffic Got A Hit Last Week; Down ~40% . Am I Doing Anything Wrong?

David_ said:
As long as you have a google webmasters account and no errors are showing up in there chances are good it's nothing you've done.
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Well, I do see 52k not found errors which is quite large. After reading a ton of pages on the Internet it seems that leaving them as it is and wait for Google to drop them is the right thing to do. I'm not taking risks with 404 pages; because I do have the basic 404 page in place.

An interesting observation I made: The traffic drop started on 5th of September and I got the 'large number of 404s' error message in GWT on 6th. I think that is the reason Google's putting us down in search results. The traffic should improve in the next few days, I hope.

Google on the other hand says that 404s won't hurt your site; but it looks like they've updated that policy.
 
Yep, just give it some time. Make sure your 404 page is returning the correct header code and wait it out.

Things will return to normal soon.
 
David_ said:
Yep, just give it some time. Make sure your 404 page is returning the correct header code and wait it out.
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Umm, I'd really appreciate some help on making sure that the headers are all right. Is there anything specific I need to check?
 
I use this script here: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers

To test it, enter the URL of your 404 page, (or even better to a old 404'd page like domain.com/tags/deleted-tag)

if its the site in your sig, then you're good to go with status codes.
Snap 2012-09-17 at 23.03.05.webp
 
Well, that's disappointing... So the suggestion is to wait? Geez.

I recently moved EverythingHalo to xenForo, then this comes up out of nowhere. :(:cry:
 
TheBigK said:
For some of the keywords, it's improved a lot while for others, it's gone down a bit. I can't arrive at any conclusion from them webmaster tools.
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Google's webmaster tools aren't really the best way to analyze what you're trying to analyze ("Where the hell did my traffic go?"). It's not in Google's interest to tell you why your traffic increases or declines. Think about it from their perspective.

It just so happens that last week I went through a three day training session with Bruce Clay, and his SEO Tool Set is pretty incredible. I'm not trying to shill for his services or tools (it doesn't benefit me), but they can certainly help give you the kind of insight you're looking for. It's not simple stuff, but if your site is your business, it's worth coming to grips with a more complex tool set that what you can find for free out there, or what Google is willing to give to you. If you really want to know what's happening and understand what you need to do to "fix" it, you have to use something that will take you much deeper into the available data.

I only mention this because you are talking a lot about keywords, and that's what tools like I mentioned above analyze. But I would recommend the tools to anyone who wants to gain a competitive advantage. You know, as long as you aren't competing with me. ;)

All Panda or any other Google algorithm update can do is change your ranking. If your ranking (for each keyword) hasn't changed, then search behavior has likely changed and you need to look at (and adjust to) that.
 
I'm convinced that it's the large "Page Not Found" errors that are causing the traffic dip. I'm going to wait for a while before taking next steps. Thanks to everyone for their support :)
 
Keywords are useless for forums, outside of static pages you've created, as content is user created. The issue is that you went and made changes to your site, by your own admission, that is when your traffic begun to decline. Undo everything you did, then see if it fixes your issue. Simple really.
 
Anthony Parsons said:
Keywords are useless for forums, outside of static pages you've created, as content is user created. The issue is that you went and made changes to your site, by your own admission, that is when your traffic begun to decline. Undo everything you did, then see if it fixes your issue. Simple really.
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Not possible for me at the moment. I checked with the backups and I only have last 10 days of backups. So the only option for me is to wait and see how Google treats my site. A BIG lesson has been learned.

I'm still investigating whether I something else needs to be fixed.
 
sudden changes always show that you either had a server issue that effected your server or you violated google's policy.

Make sure your server is stable and runs perfect constantly and in a speedy way.
Make sure you are not using different urls in your footer like partner sites etc..
Make sure not to constantly change url structure.

Removed tags will not effect anything. However redirecting not found urls to home page is a bad practise. You should always use a 404 page to display not found urls.
 
I guess I'm more or less finalised on 'Wait & Watch' strategy. Google says that 404s don't affect site rankings; but there are two changes that happened to the site within short span: Addition of sidebar on all the pages and sudden deletion of large number of tags. In fact, the analytics data shows that the traffic started sinking after GWT reported large number of 404 errors.

I'm not redirecting anything and continuing with generation of quality content for the users. I checked today morning (I'm in India) that the GWT reported 10k more 404s [now at 68k, total] but it only shows top 1000 pages only.

I've no other way of knowing what else to fix.
 
So your 404s are from removing Tags in Wordpress. And removing those worsened your forum stats ? And waiting will improve things ?

What caused the 404 errors ? Just tags ?
 
Digital Doctor said:
So your 404s are from removing Tags in Wordpress. And removing those worsened your forum stats ? And waiting will improve things ?

What caused the 404 errors ? Just tags ?
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I've every reason to believe so; because the traffic drop started on 5th Sept and I got Webmaster Notice on 6th. I also stated that I added sidebar on every page; but I"m not sure if everyone who's added widget framework add-on has experienced something similar.

The Google Webmaster Tools shows that there are about 68k page not found errors and only shows top 1000 - and almost all of them are domain/tag/<tag>. I'm not yet 100% sure if THAT's causing the traffic down. I'd appreciate any pointers in the right direction.
 
I think this proves something.
Google loves Wordpress Tags !

and that any CMS / Articles system should attempt to copy Wordpress in it's entirety.
 
Digital Doctor said:
I think this proves something.
Google loves Wordpress Tags !

and that any CMS / Articles system should attempt to copy Wordpress in it's entirety.
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Yes, they do. A lot of traffic comes directly from tags. I however took the SEO expert advice that we should remove the useless tags; that don't add any value. I found I had a large number of unimportant tags and decided to remove them. Was clearly a mistake. Just keep adding new content to the site and don't do anything for the SEO's sake. That's the message.
 
Probably the OLD Tags ... google has come to love .... and you should have left them.
or more likely .... given a bit more time ... things will return to business as usual.
 
TheBigK said:
I added sidebar on every page; but I"m not sure if everyone who's added widget framework add-on has experienced something similar.
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TheBigK said:
A lot of traffic comes directly from tags.
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Links within your site transfer page rank, so removing thousands of internal links (tags) could definitely have a negative effect on overall rank for those pages.

The sidebar links would do the opposite, they would strengthen page rank transfer within your site.

But if you did them both at the same time, the negative effect of removing thousands of tags (internal links) was much greater than the positive impact of adding the relatively small number of sidebar internal links.
 
mjp said:
Links within your site transfer page rank, so removing thousands of internal links (tags) could definitely have a negative effect on overall rank for those pages.
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Yep; but I removed tags from wordpress system that resides in the root; and the traffic drop is being experienced on the community (say, overall site). I checked our PR and it's the same; but SERPs have gone down significantly.
 
Just wanted to post an update.

After doing an intensive research, I've found out that it's the 404 errors caused by removal of lage number of tags from our wordpress blog causing the traffic to the site to go down. I need help in fixing those 404 errors by redirecting them to the homepage.

What I really need to do -

For every '404' page not found error on http://www.crazyengineers.com/tag/<keyword> (which results into 404), I want to setup a 301 redirect to homepage. But the regular 404 pages should just continue to work fine. Note that the /tag/<keyword> is important in setting up the rule.

I'm a complete noob when it comes to setting up redirects, and would appreciate your help.
 
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