Traffic Drop in 1 month!

[UrbanMark]

Hi guys,

ok, i'm at the end of my line with this one, my site www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk has taken a pounding since 4th April and i'm blowed if i can find a real reason for it.  Traffic has been increasing slowly in line with budget, sales were picking up, and coming into season should have been better - 24th & 25th robot had an access issue - host contacted and said there had been a site issue, but resolved and now all A OK.  Sales are terrible and traffic is grinding.

All comments greatly taken on board!

Thanks

Mark

[TomRayner]

Hey there Mark

The access issue may have effected the traffic and rankings, but that should have recovered by now if it was the sole issue.  Similarly, given the kind of shop you're running, you'd assume now would be the peak time for seasonality, so I think it's a fair assumption that something could be up with your site.

At first glance, it looks like Panda/duplicate content could be an issue with your site - as it is with many ecommerce stores.  Just to use these two examples: example 1, example 2, you can clearly see that these two pages have nearly identical content.  I think it's fairly safe to say that, in the Googlebot's eyes, these pages could be seen as duplicate content.

I haven't checked other examples, but given the nature of your business you may have a wide range of similar issues, potentially causing a big duplicate content issue that may have triggered the Panda algorithm.  In doing so, traffic would have fallen.

There could be a number of other reasons - is organic search historically the main driver of traffic to your site?  Has its dropped been the main driver for your site's drop overall?  Have you seen rankings for certain keywords drop as well - and have those drops been sharp?  If the answer is yes to all of those issues, to me it would look more and more like a Panda problem.

The remedy to this is to either deindex duplicate pages (not ideal obviously), make the content unique enough on each page or work out a solution that serves up the product once, but the one product page includes all colour variations - just as you have done with the sizes for those pages I linked to.

Of course, if you were relying on rankings and organic search traffic before and those rankings have now dropped, it could be an inbound link issue.  Check google webmasters for any messages about unnatural links, but if you can rule that out it may just be that the links pointing to your site are not passing on the strength they once were, or that competitors have entered the market with a stronger link profile.  Earning authoritative and valuable links could increase your rankings, should a penalty not be present on the site.

Hope this helps to at least diagnose the root of the problem and if you'd like to chat further about it, feel free to ask away here or PM me.  It can be terribly frustrating when this happens, but the problems are very much fixable so don't be too disheartened.

[UrbanMark]

Hey Tom,

Thanks again, hope you are enjoying some sun in the City today!

We have established that the attribute breadcrumbs are causing duplicate content issues, as when a category has 2 or more items it's rewriting them!  Taken this to the developers and the answer was "it's just how it works".  So we are disabling them for now, which is a bit crap but it really has to be done.

Examples of this

http://www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk/Category/Under-Armour-Sale-Items

http://www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk/index.php?app=ecom&ns=catshow&ref=Under-Armour-Sale-Items&prodsort=NAMEUP

The latter may be gone by the time you read this, but that's the issue there.  Also have had a nightmare with the /robot.text but it seems to be fine now.

Yeah it's a pure organic site, a little bit of FB and mailing to existing customers (funny as I was just reading your article on that earlier today).  Not seeing any link worries in GWMT, the site was upgraded from an old site in August last year where they did lose a lot, a hell of a lot of traffic.  they had some real bad links in there which we stripped out!

I'm kind of limited by budget on this one, but trying to make it as clean as possible and also getting some real good content written to give it a genuine boost.

Thanks again for the input, it's very much appreciated.

mark

[TomRayner]

Hi Mark

I'm surrounded by 8 monitor trading desk setups at the moment so the only light I'm getting is artificial!

In the second URL provided, I can see you added a canonical URL to that page - but the page is still being indexed by Google.  When did you implement the tag?

That would actually be a good way of making sure Google doesn't index the second URL and thus the duplicate content, but it may take a while for Google to recognise the tag.  I can see the first URL was last cached on April 18 and the second URL not cached at all - I'm wondering once it has been updated the URL might be deindexed and this aspect of duplicate content might be solved.

Regardless, it does sound like you're on the right track to solving those problems and disabling them altogether does sound like a good idea for now.  Hope it helps get the site back on its feet.

[EGOL]

What are your competitors doing?

Some of my competitors in seasonal SERPs buy links shortly before the season begins.  That pushes them up SERPs and lowers my rankings/traffic.  Then as the season matures they remove the links (to save money and reduce risk).

What can you do about it?   Make a stronger site so that you will be harder / more expensive to beat next year.