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    4. Website traffic dropped 50% after 14th November same day GWT reported a DNS error

    Website traffic dropped 50% after 14th November same day GWT reported a DNS error

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    • mutant2008
      mutant2008 last edited by

      HI there.

      On 14th November GWT reported a DNS error on my site I checked with my hosts but they said there was nothing wrong. I then went searching for answers and found it happened to lot of people on that specific day see http://moz.com/blog/was-there-a-november-14th-google-update. After that time my website traffic dropped by 50% over the period of a week and is still sitting on 50% of what it was. I then moved the site to VPS, had a few DNS errors  - that were the cause of my hosts  - so i moved back to shared hosting last weekend and now DNS issues are solved. However the original DNS issue is still unknown

      I dont know what went wrong and want to rectify issue. I dont sell ads and write original content 4 times a day. I have a miniscule bounce rate, my site speed is okay and i dont  stuff keywords in my content although i was careless with my <alt tags="">so they could be considered keyword stuffing (and i have up to 10 images on one post). But i have been removing all the keywords in my images theres over 3000 posts so its taking time).  My impressions have dropped from 10,000 a day to 2,500 and I have no idea why.</alt>

      My website has been building traffic consistently for the last 2 years. Only now has it crashed a bit. Have you any advice on what I can do to solve this problem or rather find the cause of the issue. Im not a pro seo person and do this blog in my free time so am not an expert on data analyzing etc....

      thanks alot

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Michael_Myles_Himself
        Michael_Myles_Himself last edited by

        The same thing happened to a couple of our domains as well. There was definitely an update on the 14th. Our plan is to continue to create great content and share it with our social networks.

        Just continue to provide value to your visitors and you'll be back where you were before the update soon. There's really no trick that's going to 'undo' the traffic changes from the update.

        mutant2008 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • mutant2008
          mutant2008 @Michael_Myles_Himself last edited by

          Alot of the online community weren't sure if it was an unpdate - it was a sneaky one if it was. Either way im continuing to provide good original content 4 times a day but am also undoing and cleaning alot of careless over optimization mistakes such as too many similar <alt tags="">mor no following of outbound links, deleting signatures inks in forums (even though theyre totally legitimate) an adding some speed. Having said all that im stumped as to why i got penalised. Im an arts site, I show paintings and photographs. There are no adverts. My bounce rate is negligible, I have a 3.5 pages/visitor page view, i dont have a backlink strategy, my content is orginal, etc, etc.....very frustrating... </alt>

          Worst thing about this is that I still dont know why it happened so I can't get to the root of the problem. I hope you're right and things get better. Is there any average length of time before things get back to normal if you've improved things? Any helpful, solid, uplifting advice is welcome

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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