Thread: Serious Problems for SeriousCompacts.com

As many of you know, this site is ad supported, and most of the revenue comes from search traffic. Our Google search traffic, which represents about 99% of our total search traffic, took an abrupt nosedive on October 29, 2012:



All of a sudden, none of our content is ranking high in Google searches anymore. I have no idea why this happened. Don't even know where to begin.

Google Webmaster Tools hasn't directed any malware on the site. Some sites running this forum software (vBulletin) have been the victim of redirect exploits, which take people who click on Google search results for site content and redirect them to some other site. Google penalizes sites which redirect in this way, but no one has reported such activity to me. Has anyone here noticed anything unusual?

I have not noticed anything erratic with the site but I haven't been on much as of late. I do know that Google was doing some kind of optimization. Is your metadata still in tact Amin? If it is then that would lower your overall hits and thus the ad traffic. If your tagging is fine then you can relist with Google to see if that helps. Additionally I would list with Bing and Yahoo and any major search engine as you want the traffic from those places too. And that's my two cents that might only be worth two cents but it's been a few years since I ran any sites and had to do any of that.

Man, that looks like my last EKG. I wish I can help but I've seen nothing odd here.

G

oh WOW that chart is NUTS!!! theres GOTTA be something wonky!

i havent noticed anything weird
but ill start doing some google searches for m43 stuff thru the day and click the links for here n see what happens

Originally Posted by Isoterica

Is your metadata still in tact Amin? If it is then that would lower your overall hits and thus the ad traffic.

I don't know about metadata, but I will look into that. Thanks, Kristen.

Originally Posted by Amin Sabet

I don't know about metadata, but I will look into that. Thanks, Kristen.

Sent you pm's on some of that. :)

Some good basic advice on how Google works and how to avoid pitfalls.

How to Deal With Panda, Penguin and Other Google Algorithm Changes - PC Advisor

What other site data can you share, i.e., Pages Per Visit, Time on Site, % Mobile Users, etc... Did they see any changes at the same time?

If you have a lot of mobile traffic, for example, but are getting a lot of bounces (people not choosing to visit the site) when people get the invite for the App, that probably does not look good to Google.

The good news is that it's probably something that is fixable. The bad news is that it may take some time to start to climb back up the ranks again.

I can't find anything that has changed other than the drop in search traffic and lower ranking of our content in search results. Nothing changed in terms of pages per visit, time on site, % mobile users, etc, prior to Oct 29th. I'm guessing Google is penalizing the site for something. I just wish they would notify me as to what is going on. I've no problem waiting patiently for things to improve, but I can't fix what I don't know to be broken.

I don't know if you read this NYT article from about a week ago - it mentions a few ways Google has tried to make it easier for webmasters to learn more but overall it does seem very opaque. Good luck!

Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

I know absolutely nothing about google or managing a web site but I've found that the pages don't always load, they "stick" and if it does finally load then you can 't access any of the links to actually look at anything. This happens on my iMac and iPad.