Huge Drop in Traffic - Need Adult SEO Advice
 

I saw a thread a bit back with someone requesting SEO help.

I hate to do this but I need professional advice from people that know what they are talking about.

Look at this graph from Google WT and tell me what you think it means..

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6805/hd7o.png

Some things to note.

1. The site was created in Feb 2013
2. It's an adult site
3. It spent 3 months in the sandbox before getting the traffic spike
4. All content is high quality and unique
5. Dodgy link exchanges nor buying links has ever been done
6. The site isn't a victim of negative SEO
7. New content is added a few times a week
8. There was 5 days of downtime due to a server issue from the 31May - 5 June

I would love to hear from anyone that thinks they may be able to help.

Any changes with link campaigns or site structure in the time between the spike and the culling?

It's such a small window and since the site is new might it be possible that Google put you in for a couple keywords and then cut you based on your Time On Site and bounce rate values for the given terms? Is the site a site which retains surfers and satisfies them or is it like a skim and popup hell? For the terms you were getting the traffic surge on were they relevant and the best terms for the site or was it some freak things and not a very good fit anyway with a very general term?

Hard to say without seeing the linkprofile,get some high pr blog comment links,they got 2 sites back on track for me

also,you have just shared your gf/wife photo with us

I have bought a couple of expiring domains that were pointed to the domain but no changes to the site structure. I have not done a lik campaign, traffic is natural.

The traffic is high quality and retains visitors. I don't even use popups and there is just 1 advert on the whole site (a banner ad).

The traffic I was receiving was relevant for the site and I believe it would be what a surfer would want to see based on the keywords.
Checking similar terms now my site is no-where to be seen. Proberbly Penguin.

?? What do you mean?

there was photo of a blonde girl on the imageshack link

Probably is penguin 2.0 related. But that's also when you first had the spike too. Right after the launch. You may have benefited from the initial shakeup and then when they did a slight revision you got screwed. As I remember P2.0 started off weak and then was made stronger. You may have got caught in that.

Try to identify the exact keywords you were getting the traffic spike on. As I understand it Penguin punishes more for individual keywords and not the entire site or all terms. If you identify a screwy link profile for those terms you might be able to fix it and get it back. Hint: Google will get suspicious if a certain percentage of links aren't with regular url labels like http://domain.com/mydirectory/content.php versus Free Porn. If it's all the later then that's suspicious becuase most regular users just paste links like http://domain.com/mydirectory/content.php

It may be worth playing around with those expired domains and pointing them away or changing the WHOIS. Google probably is watching that stuff and might react based on usual things.

Ok, thank god it wasn't my wife. It was the girl in this thread https://gfy.com/showthread.php?t=1113783

the domain is fucked.

buy a new domain and start over, it will be much easier to get serps

I build 1-2 new sites a week. Some get picked up by google and soar like eagles, some get huge initial traffic and then level off or drop to little or no traffic, on some google wont show me any love at all. I build all my sites using a similar formula, all are on the up and up, all use real content, never put more than 1 ad on a page, only a few outgoing trade links, I never do anything shady, I have never lost traffic to any of my 300+ sites after a penguin update.

My advice, move on and build another site, I have had a few come back from death, but not many. You'll go mad trying to figure out google

You have a penalty on the artificial anchors.

:1orglaugh no way playa

Absolutely the best advice here - in this thread but the above can apply to MANY issues in Adult. nice post. :)

Also check in WMT the number of backlinks Google says you have versus the number of domains you have linking in, what is that ratio ? You need to be careful redirecting other domains as that can really screw up that ratio.

I've been doing SEO for years. All the way back to AltaVista believe it or not. I'm surprised that nobody could look at that map and notice the obvious.

Your red clicks graph line has virtually no move in it. It's a straight line which means that you have a < below less # than CTR, which also means that pretty much your daily CTR through the SERPS doesn't change much.

The closer the two dots on the graph line are to each other for that day, RED/BlUE indicates a higher CTR percentage. If you were actually getting CTR on those new query spikes...you would have a spike in that red line that should somewhat mimick that blue line..to some degree...

Diagnosis: You probably just got indexed at a higher rate during the update which seems to be around the same time that I had a drop on one of my sites around 5-5-13. The index was shifting and you were up and down on the SERP pages and getting some high impressions (some front page, but many very low page...impressions mean pulling for any query..doesn't mean infront of the surfer), but for CTR not enough to really matter. I'd say that those were probably 2-4 word queries and depending on the niche even being in the front page at the bottom doesn't really matter if there are some serious players/domains at the top that are going to get almost 90% of that front page traffic.

What you really need is another stats package to cross reference that with and actually see if your Google traffic to your site actually went up or down.

I have the same luck. I have one site that I worked my ass off on. It has over 200 unique posts and good content yet it gets a trickle of traffic from Google. I have another site with about 25 posts and it gets 10 times as much traffic as the other.

I work on building my network of sites as a whole. That way if/when one of them gets kicked in the balls, the others are still there and it all evens out in the end.

Sometimes it seems the harder I work on a site the worse it does, I have some I put together in an hour or two that get tons of google traffic.

I installed piwik and track all my sites so I can track the entire network, some sites go down a little other sites go up a little but as long as the network number continues to grow, I'm happy

It might just have been the google dance and the lately chages and thevit setteled down, usually the spikes are like this.

8. There was 5 days of downtime due to a server issue from the 31May - 5 June

too much long

Looks like nobody read that far.

I had the exact same drop on 5th of june.
A few weeks prior to the 5th of june i had the highest se traffic ever but 5 june all got killed to almost nothing.

Hmm, this might point to some of the problem. It seems one of the expiring domains I purchased had a load of backlinks from a couple or 'dodgy domains'. One of these domains look like they are a known malware distributor..

Total links to your site 905,000

I do have another stats package running, statcounter. I can easily see the drop in traffic from building upto 1,000 uniques at spike down to a current 300.

Would server downtime account for such a prolonged drop in traffic?

Thanks for the help so far all.

Ok, based on this thread I looked deeper into linking sites and I noticed a couple of disturbing things.
1. The number of links to my site = 905,103
These are primarily from 2 domains;

Domain.com #1 484,909 links to index.php
Domain.com #2 349,799 links to index.php

2. Domain #1 flags up a malware message, whilst from a different domain I guess the number of backlinks and malware risk are the reason I am getting fucked.
The second domain has no malware but they are both .com.ar so I guess the same owner.

So aside from the above, is there anything else that could have caused the drop?

Site? url?

what i mean is dont discuss it in a thread :helpme google will see it :1orglaugh

[QUOTE=nexcom28;19706499]Hmm, this might point to some of the problem. It seems one of the expiring domains I purchased had a load of backlinks from a couple or 'dodgy domains'. One of these domains look like they are a known malware distributor..

Total links to your site 905,000


If it's one of the domains you purchased and redirected that has all those links pointing to it then you'd be better off just not redirecting it to your main site, OR point that domain to a holding domain and just have a text link that will take surfers through to your main site from the holding domain.

What I mean is.............

redirect www.bad-domain.com to www.holding-domain.com and give a text link for surfers
to click through to www.main-domain.com that way you leave all the bad Google stuff at holding-domain

Thanks for the advice, this is exactly what I have done. I uploaded 2 domains using the disavow tool.
I then took off the redirect from the site that had the 900k backlinks and was pointing to my main URL.
I redirected that to a new 'throwaway' domain.
On this site I added a text link to my main site.

Actually I am surprised that this might be the problem. Yes it's a lot of backlinks but they are both huge sites and my link is in the footer of each page.
One of the domains had 494,000 pages when doing site:domain.com in Google, the other 630,000.

Does this mean we should not get backlinks from huge blogs that will add us to every page?

It's probably one of the problems and correct it's better to not have a backlink than have one from 1000's of pages on the same domain. Why would a website link to you 100,000 times ? it's not natural. The link to domain ratio is one of the less subjective things that you can actually control when it comes to Google. Some blogs change their templates so that your link only appears once on the front page and not in the individual posts, look for those.

No, it means you shouldn't add 600k links to your site in 5 minutes.

Link velocity is what you G is looking at.

http://www.imsoldiers.com/what-is-link-velocity

A few weeks have gone by since I made this post and things are still bad, if anything traffic is still going down.

GWT Still shows 899,000 backlinks and ahrefs shows 55,000 backlinks

I think I really need some pro SEO advice.

I will pay someone $100, $25 initially and $75 on when completed. PayPal only.

All I need you to do is look at the info I have, backlnks etc and tell me what I should do. Of course a lot of these domains bring in traffic so I don't just want to unlink.

You need to know what you are talking about though, I'm not an idiot with SEO. I want to talk on Skype rather than email as well.

Have you considered just 301 redirecting the site to a new domain name?

It is already, I redirected about 3 weeks ago

PM me!!

So how many backlinks show on new domain? I'm dense, can't follow every word in each post if this was posted already.
If none, or very few, there you go, wait it out and start getting indexed again.

if site as made in feb 2013 then this isnt that unusual. Traffic spikes as novelty value,almost like a news and then it gets properly rated ,evaluated and tanks..and slowly builds up...unless it was punished of course..

Ok,

At the moment is looks like this

Main domain has 899,000 backlinks GWT / 55,000 Ahrefs

A few weeks ago I redirected x2 domains that had a total of 800,000 backlinks to another domain. That domain had a text link to my main site.

Looking at this it looks like as far as ahrefs are concerned the links have gone and no doubt GWT will remove them soon.

So currently 55,000 backlinks which for a 6 month old site with 11 referring domains I think is still far too many??
How far do I strip it back and do I keep redirecting these sites to this other domain with another text link?

I would simply redirect 1 time to new domain and carry on with updates. Just me though. I've never had any main money makers get penalized/sandboxed. But your site was sandboxed first 3 months should tell you that you may not be playing on a level playing field.

edit: actually I did have 1 money maker get penalized and managed to get it off for awhile. The site is now, several years later, not ranking well in google. But it was code on the site I revised, nothing off server.

That's not fair man. If you saw my sites you would see..

Anyway, I think the reason the domain was sandboxed was due to "adult" being in the domain and then talking about sex?

My idiocy was buying domains and redirecting the sites to my main domains.

check your site trough http://www.linkresearchtools.com/, you have free trial at top, so you can check about your link structure. Also if you have linked only to the root of your domain you might caught some "spam penal" . BTW recovering from penguin update it may be very long and painful. (long in meaning 8-12 months) if you know what you do.

what is the link profile of the expired domains? are those expired domains expired because they are banned by google? The best first step is to remove all links pointing to the site.

Google is picky but Bing still likes bulk backlinks... so...

Use bulk backlinks to get Bing traffic while establishing your site's inlinks and domain authority.

Once established your site will be more attractive to other established websites in the same niche. Trade links with those sites and you will get Google traffic.


~Ray

Experienced the same thing nexcom28.

I've watched my Google traffic dwindle down to almost nothing on one of my newly launched adult domains that I've had parked since 2007. Google's Youtube rankings have taken over the serps.
This domain is now screwed ! - Wondering if adult is worth the time, money and effort any more. This shit takes the wind right out of your sails !

http://i.imgur.com/neiUaGr.jpg