Webmaster Warnings?

[somes]

It's under settings in the left navigation menu. It's pretty easy to set-up.

You're welcome!

[TP_Marketing]

Is it normal for traffic to fluctuate like this? Is it possible I was hit with a penalty? Or is this normal for a newer website? 1.5yrs old?

[somes]

It depends on the size of the fluctuation and what your site is about.

[TP_Marketing]

Seems to be down around 30% today , It is an E-Commerce, large site.  If there was a problem with Dup content would they notify me also?

Thanks so MUCH!

[somes]

30% is quite a big drop, but e-commerce sites are more vulnerable to such fluctuations. Obviously, if it stays this way, then it wasn't a fluctuation. Also, yes, they do inform you of issues with duplicate content.

Here's a post on link penalties...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

[MarieHaynes]

There are a number of warnings you can get in WMT.  Sometimes they will warn you that your wordpress is out of date.  I've also seen warnings that tell you you had a possible site outage.  (I got that one when my hosting company was down for a morning.)

The scary unnatural links warnings come with a yellow caution sign next to them which tells you they are very important.

[TP_Marketing]

Hello!

I have no warnings at all from Google, traffic is down for some reason for me today, Ive never really ranked great for exact keywords Im targeting, but broad long tail was great! Its seems to all really slowed down today? I keep Mozcast up all the time and it doesnt look like there were major changes today from google. What could explain the traffic drop on my long tail broad?

Any help greatly appreciated!

Thank You

[MarieHaynes]

I wouldn't get too worried about a one day traffic drop...you could speculate all day long about what the issues could be.

A few possible reasons could include:

-a hosting outage

-problems with your analytics code

-accidental noindexing of page(s)

-malware - (check your site at www.sucuri.net).

-loss of a good link or two

-a competitor has surpassed you in the SERPS

In other words, we don't always have to jump to the conclusion that we've been affected by a penalty when there is a traffic drop.

[TP_Marketing]

I actually did notice a drop in links, I lost around 100 today, is it possible that was the issue? How would you analyze this to get back were you were? I am in a VERY competitive market, huge companies with huge budgets rank on page 1 for a high % of keywords. I was happy with my lower traffic keywords. Very concerning to lose traffic like this.

[MarieHaynes]

Interesting...how are you aware that you lost 100 links today?  What tool did you use?

In losing links, the number is not important...but the quality is.  If I lost 100 links because I deactivated a forum signature I wouldn't be too worried.  But, if I had a single link from CNN that got taken down that could be devastating.

[TP_Marketing]

that is directly from webmaster TOTAL links. When using OSE the total links are much lower.

[MarieHaynes]

I would think that those numbers could greatly vary.  Sometimes a pile of links in WMT can come from weird sources like askives.com.  If someone does a websearch on askives and your site is related to their search then all of a sudden there can be 100 new links that appear to your site and they can be gone with the next Google crawl.

You really can't analyze a traffic drop properly until you've got a good amount of data...like more than a day.