My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?

[tact]

Hi all,

We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower.

One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www).

Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August.

We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor:

• We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks.
• Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day.
• GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact.
• Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google?

This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl

Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.

Thanks!

[EGOL]

we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.

As soon as I see this my BS meter goes off.

Is all of this unique and substantive content?  If it is duplicate or thin then you could have a panda problem.

If I was you I would take read about Panda and take the quiz at MyTrafficDropped.com

That might help you understand what's happening.

[loopyal]

Consider uploading images that are correctly scaled. You have large images and then you scale them smaller, That means you are loading half a megabyte of images too much.

Also, apply lossless compression and make them smaller without losing any quality.

The subdomains would have hurt your rankings.

It could be another site linked to you with the subdomain and that started the problem, because you didn't already have it handled.

About 5 years ago,  a big site linked to us, but they screwed up all the story URLs and my system knew what they really wanted it, so it provided the content. Google trashed all of our listings. It took a month to work out what the problem was, and it took months to recover.

[DavidLenehan]

Hi

I have the same problem. We launched a new site in June and had started to see traffic increase 25% per week. Last week my traffic dropped by 50%.

I use PRweb and send regular press releases to industry magazines to build backlinks. I have also signed up with Applegate who list my stock on their website. I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. The links go back to the individual product pages. Do you think this could be hurting me?

Thanks

[EGOL]

I now have 100,000 backlinks from Applegate. [...] Do you think this could be hurting me?

Are these followed links?  If they are followed links, if they are not hurting you now they have a high chance of hurting you in the future.

[DavidLenehan]

They are follow links. How does this differ from shopping comparison sites?

[tact]

I did take the quiz and got a big fat "maybe."

Our strategy with this site was to nail long tail terms and it worked very well for a while. This is an ecommerce site so I don't think it is out of place to have a lot of item and listing pages. However we do generate several variations of each item page because our products have size, color and shape permutations, and unlike other sites in the same space, we have unique pages for all of those combinations. The pages are different, but perhaps not very significantly. We have had success with this strategy on another site which has not been penalized, though we stepped up the number of item listing pages substantially on this one.

Traffic seems like it may be recovering slowly but you might be right that we are being overly aggressive on the number of generated pages.

[tact]

It looks like we were hit by this algorithm update described by Matt Cutts:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-four-15705.html

He says it is designed to remove duplicate domains from search results, but we still show several times on the first page for some searches and have dropped completely off on many others.

I think this update must have included some Panda elements, or triggered a reevaluation that we fell into because our site is still being indexed.

[EGOL]

If you have one of the typical applegate programs they are duplicating your content,  competing with you in the SERPs and giving you a big load of worthless to dangerous links.

That's my opinion.

[tact]

Thanks for this. When you had the linking issue, did you traffic drop suddenly or was it gradual? Were only the mislinked pages deranked or were all pages on the domain deranked?