Massive decreases in traffic

[monster99]

Hi i've been looking at the affects of googles algorithmic updates over the last couple years and the impact on sites/competitors i have been monitoring in the space.

Two sites which surprised me, in having a dramatic decline in search traffic were:

kriskris.com (over 200k visitors to around 10k)

only-cookware.com (from 40k visitors at its peak to only around 1000k)

(semrush traffic data attached)

Both sites have great quality content and social signals.

The only thing i can think of is a over-optimization of anchor text, and types of links.

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[Boodreaux]

Those are huge decreases....looks like Google is controlling cash flow into businesses.  I just fell from #2 to #5 for my main key term.  I will have to start using their PPC.

[William.Lau]

For those of us that have not received warnings on WMT, I'd suggest you wait about a week to see if your rankings recover.

There was some sort of small update or change in Google's algorithm and one of my sites dropped 30-40% and just recovered about 20% traffic.

Sometimes these fluctuations happen, don't panic just yet!

[askshopper]

I have seen a very similar issue also, however the last week traffic was beginning to start to climb again only for the new Google update which you can be 100% sure has not finished yet, I think you just have to weather the storm for a little while longer and wait to see where the dice will fall after the completion of the update.

[monster99]

If you actually look at the traffic graph from semrush the declines haven't been recent, they have both been in decline since the start of the year. What reasons besides the fact that their backlink profile may be over optimized with exact match anchors, is there for this decline?

The sites have great content, good social media signals (kriskris has over 16,000 followers!) I'm just surprised quality sites like these are getting absolutely slammed.

[askshopper]

Yes your quite right, I would look for other factors for this, have you been losing links, have you picked up any bad links, you could start here by checking : http://www.linkdetox.com/ .

[MarieHaynes]

Check out your Google Analytics data and just look at the organic search traffic.  Can you pinpoint any major drops?  Correlate those dates to known algorithm updates and that should give you a starting point.

If the drops correlate to Apr 24, May 25 or Oct 5 then you're likely dealing with Penguin and the backlinks are your problem.

If they correlate to Panda dates then start looking for duplicate and thin content issues which are the main component of Panda.

I'm guessing this is Panda though.  I looked at a couple of your articles on kriskris.com and there are multiple copies across the web.  Are these articles originally yours?  If not, then you won't be able to rank a site in the age of Panda with duplicated content.  If so, are you intentionally syndicating them?

[KeriMorgret]

Have you review your backlinks in Open Site Explorer? Some of them look a little fishy, especially the ones for kriskris with the anchor text "lose weight fast" from sights that are mainly in Chinese and also have links to viagra and other such sites (http://www.xshz.com.cn/shownews.asp?id=220 for example).