12% of googles results changed HUGE

One of my domains which has had its traffic drop by a 3rd.

11 year old site (actually been online for 11 years), wordpress blog.

All the links to it are natural, and gets new links to it every week by people liking the content and linking to it.

But one thing I have neglected in the last 6 months – is updating its content. Time to get it back on track.. when I saw the 1/3rd drop in traffic – i freaked.

One of my smaller sites, which was getting really good traffic for the keyword i wanted for the past 4 years, took a nose dive 3 days ago. Dropped 90% of its traffic, its still listed but no longer in first 2 positions, dropped a few hundred pages down. Hope its something i can figure out as i haven’t made any changes to the site, hope its not the new algo

@Rak 226658 wrote:

One of my domains which has had its traffic drop by a 3rd.

11 year old site (actually been online for 11 years), wordpress blog.

All the links to it are natural, and gets new links to it every week by people liking the content and linking to it.

But one thing I have neglected in the last 6 months – is updating its content. Time to get it back on track.. when I saw the 1/3rd drop in traffic – i freaked.

I consider myself well-versed in WP. We should chat about it ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

I think there are certainly ways to recover from these nose dives as long as your content isn’t autoblogged (ie. Horribad). A few weeks work to see restoration.

@the27offsuit 226664 wrote:

One of my smaller sites, which was getting really good traffic for the keyword i wanted for the past 4 years, took a nose dive 3 days ago. Dropped 90% of its traffic, its still listed but no longer in first 2 positions, dropped a few hundred pages down. Hope its something i can figure out as i haven’t made any changes to the site, hope its not the new algo

Tell me more about your site and structure. Maybe we or I can help.

Again, autoblogged content most likely won’t recover so valuable (“worthwhile”) content can fix nose-dives, particularly by augmenting the site and content with appropriate social media love.

@Rak 226658 wrote:

One of my domains which has had its traffic drop by a 3rd.

11 year old site (actually been online for 11 years), wordpress blog.

All the links to it are natural, and gets new links to it every week by people liking the content and linking to it.

But one thing I have neglected in the last 6 months – is updating its content. Time to get it back on track.. when I saw the 1/3rd drop in traffic – i freaked.

I wonder if domain name has been effected more? With older domain names holding less value.
If the content is unique without being a shot 200 word post then surly it would not have been effected? Does the blog have a lot of posts?

@bingodude 226767 wrote:

I wonder if domain name has been effected more? With older domain names holding less value.
If the content is unique without being a shot 200 word post then surly it would not have been effected? Does the blog have a lot of posts?

Keywords in domains are no longer a factor. That said, previous and historical rankings were considered.

Aged domains with garbage in the domain name are performing well. Old domains are EXTREMELY valuable now.

Came from the G horse’s mouth at SMX last week/week before.

@bingodude 226767 wrote:

I wonder if domain name has been effected more? With older domain names holding less value.
If the content is unique without being a shot 200 word post then surly it would not have been effected? Does the blog have a lot of posts?

Actually the posts are pretty good, the content is pretty good.

I believe it could be the underlying code for the theme which is negatively effecting our traffic.
Also we didn’t utilise the full potential of social networking and growing our base like that.

We did have a forum which had 5-6K users, but the amount of spam that was coming through was also -ve’ly effecting the site, we pulled that down over 12 months ago.

Also we used to go after terms quite regularly which were trending quite well, and would rank on the first page for them. Something we’re doing again.

So if the in thing at that point was “big dogs”.. and we put up a post about big dogs.. we would appear on the first page within a day.

Hey Carlo,

Where did you hear that keywords were no longer a factor. I had read some rumblings that they were being deemphasized, but not wholly taken out of the algorithm.

Jeff

@rialto.carlo 226778 wrote:

Keywords in domains are no longer a factor. That said, previous and historical rankings were considered.

Aged domains with garbage in the domain name are performing well. Old domains are EXTREMELY valuable now.

Came from the G horse’s mouth at SMX last week/week before.

@JeffG 226824 wrote:

Hey Carlo,

Where did you hear that keywords were no longer a factor. I had read some rumblings that they were being deemphasized, but not wholly taken out of the algorithm.

Jeff

From Google at SMX. They’re only relevance is historical, augmented with algorithmically backed-up importance from previous SERPS.

i.e. if your site was “important” and had the keyword for the terms, you’d continue to rank well.

else, you’re going to get booted out of listings for SERPS that you don’t produce useful content for (algorithmically determined).

Furthermore, expect to see domains-like-this.TLD disappear if they contain epicly **** (read “useless”) content.

PS. can’t believe the 4 letter word describing excrement beginning with S is censored. It’s a perfectly appropriate word.

also keywords in subdomains and hostname and what’s after the .TLD slash ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

so xhttp://blue-widgets.blue-widgets.com/blue-widgets/blue-widgets.html

^ not cool (never was)