Traffic drop

Hi all,

I run a website wich had around 13000 visits per day in the last month, In november the visits went down to 9000 visits.

86% of the traffic comes from Google.

There are a few major keywords that were in the first page of Google and now they disappeared

I've didn't any changes for months, no upgrades no configuration settings changes, no down time, nothing!

My long tail :
First week of Octobre : Search sent 78,028 total visits via 39,431 keywords.

First week of November : Search sent 67,610 total visits via 38,540 keywords.


By the way shouldn't my site have more than 8000 visitors per day from Google with these stats : Threads: 81,000, Posts: 1,000,300, Members: 50,350 ?

Quantity of posts doesn't directly influence traffic. While you do have substaintal membership, if no one is searching for Acme Widgets that your site is about, there's no search traffic to speak of.

Have you run your keywords against google trends?
Google Trends

Perhaps you're in the 'off season' for your niche. I know i personally experience a "sin curve" of traffic throughout the year based on seasons.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Quantity of posts doesn't directly influence traffic. While you do have substaintal membership, if no one is searching for Acme Widgets that your site is about, there's no search traffic to speak of.

What is Acme Widgets?

Guests can browse and view 90% of my forums

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Perhaps you're in the 'off season' for your niche. I know i personally experience a "sin curve" of traffic throughout the year based on seasons.

The off season of my niche is summer, the traffic increases from September to the end of the year.

Acme Widgets was just a generic niche used as an example (since i don't know the topic of your fourm). If no one happens to be searching for that, there will be little search traffic.

Do some research on the keywords you lost ranking for.
Who is outranking you now?
why?
what can you do/add to your site to bring those keywords back up top.

My website is no longer in the first pages of google for certain keywords,

I made some changes, added the H1 and H2 tags, exclude Member Profile and tags from sitemap, add more stopwords (in french).

Right now I'm planning to do this:

- Change thread URL format from [forum_title]/[thread_id]-[thread_title].html to [thread_id]-[thread_title]/

- Change the limit URL Length from 0 but I'm afraid of this

it is STRONGLY recommended NOT changing these settings again. Doing so will directly impact URL integrity, losing valuable incoming links and search engine positioning.

If I change these 2 settings will my website loose incoming links and search engine positioning?

Hello ,

Did you applied any other changes other than H1 tag implementations ?
I strongly advise not to play with your url rewrite settings.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

Did you applied any other changes other than H1 tag implementations ?

Yes I've removed forum title from thread + albums + members profile pages

Originally Posted by djilou

- Change thread URL format from [forum_title]/[thread_id]-[thread_title].html to [thread_id]-[thread_title]/

I would highly advise against this. Changing your url structure is not something that helps. All of your threads will undergo re-indexing.

- Change the limit URL Length from 0 but I'm afraid of this

0 is my recommended setting. If you do add this, keep in mind this is a WORD break, not a character break. 0, or ~5 are our recommended settings (4-7 on average, but it does not take a range). High values here cause load issues, so keep that in mind.

Did you had any downtime recently ?

I just checked your site and i highly recommend you to remove the links within your footer. Google penalizes links that are not related to your site. The drop you faced is highly related with that footer links.

I missed those... yup, agree with mert. Selling links like that has always resulted in ranking penalties, and nearly all the time once removed, the rankings come back.

Just out of curiosity, does Google penalize for the branding links related to different modules/products. expl: SEO by vBSEO, product X link X, etc..

Not that I have seen. Google is pretty smart, and it knows a paid link vs a copyright link for common software.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

Did you had any downtime recently ?

I just checked your site and i highly recommend you to remove the links within your footer. Google penalizes links that are not related to your site. The drop you faced is highly related with that footer links.

No the last downtime was in april 2008!

All links removed from the footer, I noticed also a Page Rank changes with the traffic drop from 4 to 0, now it come back to 3

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

0 is my recommended setting. If you do add this, keep in mind this is a WORD break, not a character break. 0, or ~5 are our recommended settings (4-7 on average, but it does not take a range). High values here cause load issues, so keep that in mind.

Okay, the problem is I have some urls (arabics) with a big length, like this one :
91109-o-o-o-uso-u-o-usu-o-o-o-o-u-o-o-uso-u-o-o-u-u-o-o-u-u-u-o-u-o-o-o-uso.html

Setting Replace Non-English Characters in URLS is set to Replace Non-English Characters in URLS, but if I choose Remove Non-English Characters in URLS specials characters (french) are removed from urls: Characters whit accent : é è à

Any way to keep those characters in urls with Remove Non-English Characters in URLS setting?