Increasing content, adding rich snippets... and losing tremendous amounts of organic traffic. Help!

[Novos_Jay]

I know dramatic losses in organic traffic is a common occurrence, but having looked through the archives I'm not sure that there's a recent case that replicates my situation. I've been working to increase the content on my company's website and to advise it on online marketing practices. To that end, in the past four months, I've created about 20% more pages — most of which are very high quality blog posts; adopted some rich snippets (though not all that I would like to see at this point); improved and increased internal links within the site; removed some "suspicious" pages as id'd by Moz that had a lot of links on it (although the content was actually genuine navigation); and I've also begun to guest blog. All of the blog content I've written has been connected to my G+ account, including most of the guest blogging.

And... our organic traffic is preciptiously declining. Across the board. I'm befuddled. I can see no warnings (redirects &c) that would explain this. We haven't changed the site structure much — I think the most invasive thing we did was optimize our title tags! So no URL changes, nothing.

Obviously, we're all questioning all the work I've done. It just seems like we've sunk SO much energy into "doing the right thing" to no effect (this site was slammed before for its shady backlink buying — though not from any direct penalty, just as a result of the Penguin update).

We noticed traffic taking a particular plunge at the beginning of June.

Can anyone offer insights? Very much appreciated.

[GregFindley.co.uk]

Hi Novos Jay,

Do the shady backlinks you mentioned still exist and point to the site?
Have you used the disavow tool at all?

The reason I ask is that it might just simply be down to the fact that the links that were holding the rankings and traffic up previously, are now gradually being devalued through various algorithm updates, so in spite of your recent work to do the right thing, there's still going to be an overall negative effect.

Perhaps with a little more information about the types of links (the shady ones) and quantity/% of the total backlinks, I/others might be able to give you some more specific ideas on what's happened?

Thanks,
Greg

[Novos_Jay]

I've got very little information about these backlinks since they precede my time, but I know that there was never any Google warnings about it. I think you're probably right, though — that the effect from the lousy backlinks is ongoing.

I graphed the decline in GA & found that the decline in traffic is exactly mirrored by the fortunes of this one ridiculously popular blog post. So while I continue to root around for confirmation for this, I'm guessing that this particular post has had found some new competition on the SERP. Yeesh.

[GregFindley.co.uk]

Ahh I see, I think if I was in that position I would try and have the dodgy links removed where possible, if you think they might be doing more harm to the site. Remember just because you've not received a warning notice in Webmaster tools, it doesn't mean that these links aren't negatively affecting your sites rankings, it may just be that there's not enough to have triggered a warning message, or as mentioned before they've simply been devalued.

What was it that caused the popularity around this particular blog post?
Do you mean that the decline in overall site traffic is down to a decline in traffic to this specific post? Or that it just correlates with the decline?

[Novos_Jay]

I'm trying to determine right now whether it's been an issue of this particular post being the symptom of a broader discrimination against our site or whether there has been competition introduced for this page. All the peaks and valleys of the site's organic traffic are exactly the peaks and valleys of popularity for this post. Graphing other major (organic) landing pages for our site (the top three of which have much less traffic than this one stupid page) does not indicate that the other pages have been similarly affected — their popularity is far more undulating, and subject to far fewer crazy movements. So I'm pretty sure at this point that it's the one page.

And, yes, this particular blog post accounts for about 1/2 of our site's organic traffic. We've reduced the bounce rate on this blog post down to the low 80's, percentage wise, which I think is respectable for what the blog post is & it's relationship to the site and the site's purpose as a whole, which is commercial and not immensely related to the post's content.

I suppose that's a new question, isn't it? How much should we care about the fortunes of one page that has a high bounce rate? Obviously, we should reduce the bounce rate (and there are some things we haven't done yet to do that) but the nature of this particular post is just not a super strong match for the content and direction of our site. The bounce rate will always been fairly high, it's just the way it will always be. Yet it has so. much. traffic. Another site I work on has a similar page, similarly somewhat-tangential to the site's content: the "when to use spray foam insulation" page. Thus I always want to call these the "spray foam insulation pages."