What the F is going on?

Hey guys,

I been working for this online education company (70% of traffic on the site is SEO),

OLD domain, Really good regularly updated content (like the type of stuff written by professors),

I came in back in August 2019 and back then they were hit big after making a release that affected the structure of the website badly.

When I came in, I found an expired domain which was doing exactly what our company did and I did the 301 acquisition technique with it.

We also added some fixes for image ALT Tags, we added Stars, we moved all important pages one level higher in the website (Now they are level 3 which is good), and we added FAQ for some pages.

After doing the above, for the past 2 years the site has only been gaining more and more traffic and positioning, I'm talking we recovered the negative YOY traffic and started doing +30-40%, and suddenly with the second part of the July update a couple of weeks ago we get hit Badly and BIG.

I mean we're literally at -50% traffic YOY and the CEO is panicking and so am I..

Nothing was really done on the structure that can have such a bad affect..

The only things I can think of is:

1. Google is just moody and it didn't like this update (sometimes it just happens) but this drop isn't normal I mean -50% is messed up, and the craziest part is that it keeps dropping more and more day by day, and this should be corrected on its own with the next Google update.

2. Somehow Google doesn't like the way we added stars schema or FAQ schema?

3. Maybe it detected the 301 redirection as a bad thing finally? I'm talking I redirected the expired domain (which was REALLY doing the Same thing as us, like not a similar niche, it was doing the SAME THING) to a SUB PAGE, it wasn't directly to root, I did it that way to keep things safe, could this be the issue?

I would really appreciate your input here guys of what you think the issue can be, I don't want to make moves that would screw it up even more, and I really am just afraid that this can be just Google being Moody and just a patience game..

Let me know what you think?

Thanks!

Why in lounge ?

krishnaverma said:

Why in lounge ?

Click to expand...

where do you propose I post this? I'm looking for help here, not smartass answers like yours mate.

Backlinked said:

where do you propose I post this? I'm looking for help here, not smartass answers like yours mate.

Click to expand...

SEO section, report and ask a mod to move.

krishnaverma said:

SEO section, report and ask a mod to move.

Click to expand...

Okay, thanks for your input. Do you have something actually useful to say about my situation?

Of course, I do not know what your company is doing, but I saw such an effect in certain narrow-market companies, when a certain sales season passed and then people stopped looking for information on very specific keywords, and then new products and articles appeared on the market. This way articles that were popular in the past did not have any top rating in the current year.

In this case we're doing help for courses that are in the official country's curriculum, so in reality the content is ALWAYS up to date and relatable, and if something changes in the curriculum, we make the edits on the content ASAP. So this wouldn't be the case.

As far as I remember stars were not to be used for normal sites only receipe sites are allowed.

no one can actually know what triggered post the update

my advice prepare a low comp word, shoot some high class pbns or guest posts or niche edits see how well it performs if it performs well then continue this strategy slowly the site will recover

also a tip your attitude was bad when someone gives you any kind of advice regarding where to post you should accept it and posting in general Seo section would have been way better

Mr Positive said:

As far as I remember stars were not to be used for normal sites only receipe sites are allowed.

no one can actually know what triggered post the update

my advice prepare a low comp word, shoot some high class pbns or guest posts or niche edits see how well it performs if it performs well then continue this strategy slowly the site will recover

also a tip your attitude was bad when someone gives you any kind of advice regarding where to post you should accept it and posting in general Seo section would have been way better

Click to expand...

Thanks for your advice. but I'm not really looking to send PBNs to a website that gets around 1-3 million organic visitors a month.

Backlinked said:

Okay, thanks for your input. Do you have something actually useful to say about my situation?

Click to expand...

He doesn't. He is only here to fall for crypto scams.

Backlinked said:

Thanks for your advice. but I'm not really looking to send PBNs to a website that gets around 1-3 million organic visitors a month.

Click to expand...

Don't follow his advice either.

Just to be clear guys, this isn't a website for a client, this is a website that is for a company I work for full time that has around 25 employees and gets Millions of visitors a month Organically.

This kind of analysis is already difficult when you have all the data in-hand, so first thing to say is that it's unlikely that someone here comes up with a magic bullet with so few information.

That said, you could have more pointers by looking more precisely in the queries that dropped in impressions/ranking.
Did you lost a few big queries ? a lot of long tails ? An average loss on all queries ?
Which websites are now in the top instead of you ?

That kind of thing

Good luck

Sheepp said:

This kind of analysis is already difficult when you have all the data in-hand, so first thing to say is that it's unlikely that someone here comes up with a magic bullet with so few information.

That said, you could have more pointers by looking more precisely in the queries that dropped in impressions/ranking.
Did you lost a few big queries ? a lot of long tails ? An average loss on all queries ?
Which websites are now in the top instead of you ?

That kind of thing

Good luck

Click to expand...

I'm fully aware of that, just looking for some ideas to get me thinking, I'm getting some pressure from the CEO :/

The queries which dropped were mostly of all types, but we rank for 100k+ long tail keywords, so much of the traffic is through longtails.

The websites that rank at the top are just our competitors, but they didn't see a boost in traffic like us in the latest updates, it was us who always gained traffic, but this time it seems like we're the only ones that really lost big and the others gained.

This is what makes me think, maybe its just a crappy update by Google and there's nothing to really "fix" here.. but yet again the drop is drastic at 50%!

Firstly don't point any PBN's at that site, you'll just be introducing more risk into the equation for what sounds like minimal returns on a site that big.

Have you run a malware scan? When you do site: or site: spammy words, does anything look suspicious?

Have you made any backend changes apart from the site structure that would have a global impact on load times etc? Have you checked for any internal 301 redirects etc in dev tools?

Have you created more internal duplicate content?

If you're worried about the 301 you could always just turn it into a one-page site with a backlink. I'd argue that's safer than a 301 if there's only one.

What is your backlink profile like do you have any sitewide links or anything like that? Any widgets etc? The sort of grey hat stuff.

This tends to happen from time to time, I have a large website that has been penalized around 3 years ago, I made some modifications to it to make it better, and around 6-9 months later the traffic was better than ever. The site was doing extremely well for 2 years, constant growing from one month to another, until another update slapped it around a year ago, and by slapped it I mean -90% traffic lost.
Since the past year the traffic is stagnating and the only thing I can do is to work on my other projects and hope that one of the updates fixes the problem.

Three years ago when the site was penalised for the first time I made a brand new site in the same nicche, 3 years alter this site is doing extremly well, and is constantly grwoing never had a problem with updates, so you might just be unlucky like my fist site.

jamie3000 said:

Firstly don't point any PBN's at that site, you'll just be introducing more risk into the equation for what sounds like minimal returns on a site that big.

Have you run a malware scan? When you do site: or site: spammy words, does anything look suspicious?

Have you made any backend changes apart from the site structure that would have a global impact on load times etc? Have you checked for any internal 301 redirects etc in dev tools?

Have you created more internal duplicate content?

If you're worried about the 301 you could always just turn it into a one-page site with a backlink. I'd argue that's safer than a 301 if there's only one.

What is your backlink profile like do you have any sitewide links or anything like that? Any widgets etc? The sort of grey hat stuff.

Click to expand...

There's no malaware on the site. Definitely no PBNs lol. no big changes on backend, internal 301 redirects are stable checked in screaming frog, no internal duplicate content (at least its a very low %)

Backlink profile is worldclass, and almost fully organic other than the 301.

We have like one or 2 sitewide links, but they are from very BIG sites, legitimate backlinks that don't have optimized anchors.

i'll keep the note about the 301 redirect though.

pepeneo said:

This tends to happen from time to time, I have a large website that has been penalized around 3 years ago, I made some modifications to it to make it better, and around 6-9 months later the traffic was better than ever. The site was doing extremely well for 2 years, constant growing from one month to another, until another update slapped it around a year ago, and by slapped it I mean -90% traffic lost.
Since the past year the traffic is stagnating and the only thing I can do is to work on my other projects and hope that one of the updates fixes the problem.

Three years ago when the site was penalised for the first time I made a brand new site in the same nicche, 3 years alter this site is doing extremly well, and is constantly grwoing never had a problem with updates, so you might just be unlucky like my fist site.

Click to expand...

Yeah mate, I really hope that this can does get reversed and fast, like I said, this isn't a site that has 1 or 2 people working on it, we have 25 employees including developers and a content writing and editing and proof reading team and professors writing the content and checking everything.

But meanwhile a 50% traffic drop is just not right, and I don't see any manual penalties, something must have triggered this with the update.

Do you know who gained those positions you lost? What were they doing different?

Has your site gone through any downtime recently? Has your hosting provider been through any technical issues?

Has the site slowed down considerably under load?

Read the raw logs, is googlebot crawling more or less of your site?

Has the number of indexed pages varied in the past few months?

Just to make sure, double check robots.txt is it blocking anything it shouldn't?

Just a few ideas

Backlinked said:

Thanks for your advice. but I'm not really looking to send PBNs to a website that gets around 1-3 million organic visitors a month.

Click to expand...

Do a paid audit that’s your best scenario not a $10 one but hire a expert and do a premium audit and fix it those asap. Go for those high authority links Forbes, and all that should help.