Traffic has dropped from my site.

[jwdesign]

Hello,

I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this.

The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com

Does any one have any ideas that can help?

Thanks

[kdaly100]

Hi Jon

How old is the site and what keywords / niche (well it is clear betting) were you ranking for?  FRom a quikc OSE check your site is just developing.

Kieran

[jwdesign]

Hi Kieran,

Thanks for your reply.

The main keywords I am focusing on at the moment 'Rugby World Cup, Best Odds, Best Betting Odds, Compare Odds'

The page that were getting the most traffic from search engines were...

http://www.comparebestodds.com/rugby-union-betting/world-cup/rugby-world-cup-fixtures.php andhttp://www.comparebestodds.com/The site is 2 years old, but about 9months ago I did a complete rebuild and fresh content as I made lots of errors.

Last week I was getting 60 unique visits per day, and this week I am down to 5 unique visits.Appreciate your help.Jon.

[AdiRste]

If you do a cache check on your homepage then you'll see a logo come up that normally means a 404 error on Google so I think there was some problem with the latest cache, either on your side or Google's. I would recommend Social Bookmarking to get Google to visit your site and re-cache and I think then, everything should stabilise.

[kdaly100]

I'd tend to agree based on your response with irldonalb and your post is quite pertinent as there is an YouMoz Blog by chadburgess post that doesn't exactly point to this (it is realted to noindex but the tactics to get back on Google eyeline are still relevant)

To possibly (badly) summarize some of his tactics that relate to you

• Create some fresh content 1-X pages depends on your capacity and do some internal linking and Google will see this.
• Get some social juice going with your links and recruit some help of friends and associates to spread the word.
• Resubmit your sitemap to Google Webmasters

The full post is here and it is quite an interesting one - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/accidental-noindexation-recovery-strategy-amp-results

Good luck with it and report back with your success levels..

Kieran

[jwdesign]

Hi irldonalb,

Thanks for your comment, I am a little unsure what you mean? This is the cached page in Google

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rWcRgJb0JoQJ:www.comparebestodds.com/+www.comparebestodds.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a

it looks like it all loads fine, but there is a Google logo showing a 404 in the news section, would that effected the whole page indexing? the news is just pulled in through an xml reader, would it be worth removing the news from the page?

What Social Bookmarking would you recommend to get Google to re-cache my site?

Thanks for your help

Jon

[AdiRste]

I'm just glad I noticed it

I think this is your problem to be honest and the rest of the site is fine but as your site is currently as it is, I would expect fluctuation anyway.

I think you should see Kieran's comment below and follow the steps, there is no need for me to repeat everything when he has done such a good job below. I'll take credit for the spot but I think Kieran deserves credit for his willingness to expand in detail.

Thumbs up to Kieran from me.

Regards, Ryan.

[AdiRste]

In terms of Social Bookmarking, it MAY help but it's pretty positive. Try Digg.com

[ShaMenz]

Hi Jon,

While it is difficult to pinpoint exact reasons for traffic fluctuations without detailed information on the site, there are some things that come to mind.

First, since one of the pages you mentioned relates to the Rugby World Cup, I would check the originating country(ies) for the traffic. It is quite possible that the visitors were interested in betting on matches involving a team or teams who have been eliminated, or whose playing schedule has been less frequent in recent days.

Also, when I took a look at the Metrics for your site in Open Site Explorer, I noticed a few things that could certainly be negatively affecting your rankings.

1. The anchor text distribution for the small number of external inks that you have is quite narrow. This Whiteboard Friday Video gives a good explanation of using a diverse range of anchor text.

2.All of your links are followed. Cyrus gave a good explanation of the negative correlation for high percentage of followed links in this video.

3. When checking the load speed of your home page with the Mozbar, I see that it took 13.5 seconds to load the entire page. The impact of page load speed is also mentioned in the video on negative ranking factors above.

4. All of your external linking root domains are from dot com domains. This means that your link profile does not really have any diversity. Justin Briggs wrote a great blog post which explains the signals that search engines take into account when looking for low quality sites. In the explanation he talks about the importance of a diverse natural link profile.

My guess would be that a combination of all these factors is responsible for your drop in traffic. While the playing schedule is not something that you can control, all of the other things can be improved with a little work.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[AdiRste]

Sha,

I'm sorry but I don't think the link profile is big enough yet to be drilling down into these kind of areas, he said he is losing a small amount of traffic, not that he had tons and now he receives none.

1. True however the link profile is only small so it'd probably not of been focussed on that much so far.

2. True again but same as 1.

3. This is only a VERY small ranking factor and for you to even suggest this as a reason as to why his traffic has dropped by 90% is quite ludicrous.

4. You've mentioned this already, nice link though

I'm not attacking you or saying that you are wrong, actually, all your points are 100% correct however with such a new site and the amount of traffic being so small and with a such a small link profile, I think the suggestions above are too advanced at the moment and the problem lies elsewhere.

If you look at the crawl date, then the traffic decrease happening around now also makes perfect sense because Google has had time to drop you down the rankings for example.

[jwdesign]

Thanks for your help, I will give it a go and see what happens.

Quick side question, would this page (just created) have to many internal links, or isnt that ever a problem?

http://www.comparebestodds.com/news/2011/09/upcoming-rugby-world-cup-fixtures

[jwdesign]

Thanks Sha, appreciate you taking your time to give me feedback. Will look at implementing your points. Thanks.

[AdiRste]

Google recommends around 100 however they say they will crawl 10K + so I wouldn't worry at all.

[kdaly100]

Thanks for the nice words  Ryan and I am above now