Sudden HUGEEEE traffic drop in organic traffic. How do I diagnose the cause?
Hey guys,
I am the founder of EDM Hunters (www.edmhunters.com). I did an interview with IH a year ago (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/edm-hunters).
I'm turning to you guys because I had a very major drop in organic traffic today and I cannot figure out why. Until last night, I had my daily traffic around 12-13k per day (80% of it being organic). Today, suddenly, it has dropped to 1k.
I see the pages still being indexed, so I'm assuming there is no Google penalty. For all my top search terms, for which I was usually in the top 3, my link for some of them now comes at pages around 4 or 5 and for some doesn't come up at all. For some of my 'not-so-popular' keywords, I see I still rank on number 1 in Google.
What could be the possible reason behind this sudden drop? One, obviously would be Google not thinking my pages being relevant enough, but would it be this sudden? I just assumed it would be gradual. I haven't really changed anything on the website anytime recently. Are there any tools that could help me debug this? Webmaster tools might come in handy, but that data would be updated in a day or 2. If anyone can help me figure out what could have gone wrong here, their help would be greatly appreciated.
Perhaps Google is responding to:
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/14806653
good one!
The DMCA takedowns happened a while back. I filed counter notice for all those pages and they are back up now.
Quick thought...have you had many DMCA requests? It's possible you've succumbed to Google's pirate update: https://searchengineland.com/dmca-requests-now-used-in-googles-ranking-algorithm-130118.
There have also been a number of significant changes to Google's core quality algorithms recently that are connected to Google's Quality Raters Guidelines (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf). Some things that could possibly affect your rankings negatively in connection with these guidelines include the following:
(Note, I'm not saying these are issues...as I haven't assessed the site, but they're all things to look into)
-Lack of Experience, Authority, Trust
-Poor site reputation
-Lack of main content on pages (I had a quick look and it seems like most pages on the site have very little unique and helpful content.)
-Not adding significant value as compared to similar sites in the industry.
-Too much content that is aggregated from other sources. For example, I took content from this page (https://www.edmhunters.com/labrinth/) and searched for it in quotes: https://www.google.com/search?q="Timothy+McKenzie+(born+4+January+1989)%2C+better+known+by+his+stage+name+Labrinth%2C+is+an+English+singer%2C+songwriter%2C"&oq="Timothy+McKenzie+(born+4+January+1989)%2C+better+known+by+his+stage+name+Labrinth%2C+is+an+English+singer%2C+songwriter%2C"&aqs=chrome..69i57l2j69i59l2.1399j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.
I found you at the end of page 3 so this content is not unique. If the majority of pages on your site consist primarily of copied content, then it's possible that one of the quality algorithms finally had enough of this.
Most of the above are pretty tough problems to fix though.
I had DMCA takedowns a while back, but I filed counter notices against them and the pages came back.
I do believe the lack of enough unique text content is the issue here.
Agreed. I'd spend time reading through the quality raters guidelines (linked to in my reply above) and look at the sections that talk about "main content".
Good luck!
Turns out it was the Google Pirate penalty. Going through all the DMCA complaints, I found out I had filed counter notices against only 500 out of the 3000 complaints. I filed counter notices against all the remaining ones, the pages came back up and the penalty is no more. The traffic just came back today!
Thanks a bunch for helping me figure this out. Drinks on me if I ever bump into you :D
For debugging you want to look at your Google Search Console for crawl/indexation issues. Also to see if there are any messages from Google there.
With something like ahrefs or majestic you want to see if there's been a bunch of spammy backlinks built (hard to do this retroactively) although I'd say negative SEO attack is unlikely. Best to have a backlink and keyword monitoring tool setup ahead of time to spot patterns and potential issues.
Check if there's been any large algorithm updates recently that might be relevant to your site. Otherwise, dig, dig, dig to find out what the factors are that hit you. It might be a yo-yo for a few days or it might be they recrawled and didn't think it was quality.
There aren't any crawling/indexing issues. No new messages from Google either. Looks like it might have been a quality issue.
Any news here? Now that you'd had a few more days of data.
Pretty much all of the search terms except the brand name "EDM Hunters" have almost vanished.
I saw a bunch of spammy domains like illegal download websites and some porn websites linking to my website. I disavowed those domains using the Google disavow tool. I worked on page speed and have noticed almost a 50% increase in page speed now. Let's see if these changes bring any difference in the days to come. For now the traffic is still the same, around 1k a day.
I had been working on a UI redesign for a while now. I am looking to launch it soon and then work on the content issue.
Hmmm, take a look at a bunch of those directly and in detail and see what's what. Could be a negative SEO attack. Are they comment links? Are there links to similar sites to yours on there (ie. is someone attacking all of their perceived competitors?)
Have you engaged someone to do link building recently? If so, then that could explain it. Other possibilities are if you're running ads on an ad network but, for some bizarre reason, they aren't being tagged as ads in the source code (no follow attribute for the link html).
They all sound unlikely but, then again, hard to imagine why those links would pop up if it's not one of the items above.
Disavow, sure, but also see how many there are, how many you can get removed and what the root cause is so you can handle it there. Would love to hear how this goes.
A colleague of mine asked me to look in to this. Because i like these type of cases. The first thing that i wonder is,
The organic traffic that dropped is that overall? Or on certain keywords? Maybe you already did this, but i would break down the organic traffic to see what actually happend. I Also believe you would have the search console data now. That should give you some insights now. Its stead of looking at your website, i looked at your competition and they got more content on their website and more like blog content.
Something else but i'm not sure I disable javascript and CSS to see what your website would look like and the balance between content and links are a bit off. All content is mostly links and barely have text.
Don't know if it helps, but keep us posted
The traffic drop is overall. It doesn't rank pretty much for all of the keywords. I do believe content is the issue here.
Based on Alexa, your site has been in a downhill for awhile. And that's pretty much like what happened to my site. The traffic started dropping subtlely for a while and then eventually dropped so much that I still haven't recovered. Sorry I couldn't chip in any useful info as things I have done haven't done anything good to my site. Really hope you can recover from it. It really sucks when it happens.
I may have found what could have caused the drop, I'm not too sure though. I just noticed that in the 'links to your site' section in webmaster tools, I have 32k backlinks from my CDN url.
I can see that https://edmhunters-563e.kxcdn.com/ is an exact duplicate of https://www.edmhunters.com/. I have canonical links in the CDN url pointing back to my original URL, but should a CDN url be able to replicate the entire website content like this? It could be because of some web server configuration I might have set up, I am just not that good at handling DevOps. Could the duplicate content across 2 domains be the issue here? I've just updated the robots.txt of the CDN domain to disallow all URLs. Let's see if that changes anything. But I'd love to hear your opinion on this, if you guys think this might be the issue here!
The CDN url (which is an exact duplicate of your site) is already indexed in Google's database, but I checked your canonical tag setup and it's fine. In theory, you should be okay. Out of curiosity, did you follow Max CDN's guide on setting up a crawler-friendly cdn?
Here's the link to the Max CDN guide:
https://www.maxcdn.com/blog/manage-seo-with-cdn/
Also, I looked into your backlink profile in ahrefs, and I didn't see any abnormal loss of backlinks, or increase of spammy backlinks over the past few weeks. The anchor text diversity is fine. I don't think it's a Negative SEO spam link attack.
If you haven't done a redesign of your website, then my best guess would be that the issue is either your CDN setup or web server configuration. Any crawl errors reported in search console?
It's hard to arrive at a conclusion without access to your setup. Look into the MaxCDN article I linked above to see if your CDN setup is the issue, I think it might be the culprit.
Check out if a google algorithm drop is the cause for the site traffic drop:
https://www.techwyse.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/find-out-if-a-google-algorithm-update-initiated-your-sites-drop-in-traffic/
Have you done a manual search of some of the key terms to see who is now ranking in these tops spots? Perhaps a big music site who didn't focus on EDM has now launched EDM content? (They could piggy bag their overall domain authority onto these new niches maybe?).
Yeah, I did. There doesn’t seem to be a new leader on the market. Just the ones that used to rank below me - billboard, genius etc. have started ranking higher.
Plus the shift from 1st rank to 4th or 5th page seems like there is something wrong with the website rather than their being a new leader.
Hmm, seems really strange. Sorry I couldn't help find a solution.
Could it be because of the change that Facebook make in organic trafic via the Explore Feed? https://medium.com/refresh-magazine/facebook-news-feed-change-is-death-to-small-businesses-c1c9a777efc2
I doubt that’s the case. Social traffic was never a big percentage of my traffic.
As it doesn't seem that you've figured it out, I'd love to know when you arrive at a solution!
Can that be SSL certificate expiration or related? I heard google take that stuff seriously.
The SSL certificate is up to date.
That's a pretty big drop with no changes made to the site. Off the top of my head:
Thanks for all your suggestions though. I truly appreciate it! I just hope I can figure out soon the exact reason for this drop. It's quite disheartening to see your project plummet like this and not know why.
What were the popular search terms that you're no longer ranking highly for?
These are just some of the top search terms. For all of these terms, my position in search results was somewhere in the top 3. I can find my page in some cases a couple of pages down, and for some can't seem to find it at all.