Hi there

I need help. My results in Google have all but vanished over the past few days and my hits have literally nose dived from 20k a month to a few thousand.

Can anyone see a problem with my site? I'm going through a SEO book - slowly - to try and really find out what the problems are, but if anyone can see something that's glaring, I'd really appreciate the help!

www.thegeekestlink.com/store (http://www.thegeekestlink.com/store)

In addition, my Robots.txt says:

Text of http://www.thegeekestlink.com/robots.txt (http://www.thegeekestlink.com/robots.txt)
User-agent: * Disallow: /

With the message: Googlebot is blocked from http://www.thegeekestlink.com/store/


Can anyone explain?

Are you trying to get in some sneaky advertising here. Your robots.txt is fine and doesnt contain the above and looks perfectly normal to me.

Of course if it did, your basically telling Google you don't want them visiting/indexing your site.

Why would I want any sneaky advertising? Just like yours, my link is sitting there on every post I make and we ALL know this is one of the least visited parts of the SF (but very very useful).

But I want to know why my links have all but vanished.

Is this one of Google's bizarre glitches? Am I in the Twilight Zone of gloom before bursting out - phoenix-like from the ashes of my former web isolation?

Well I must credit you on your SEO efforts, good use of long tail keywords on your product pages, nice optimized text, (your home page isn't optimized though??).

Where have you lost rankings?. What terms were you ranking for before?

Well, it's everything. My page rank dropped by 1, and pretty much direct web searches have vanished...

Even things that were at the top of page 1 seem to have vanished into the ether...

"Blood energy potion" was #2 and now has vanished altogether.
"skelanimals" is the same. That was riding high on the first page.

It's like that across the board. I wish I understood it, as my sales have equally plummeted!

Thanks for the advice and help :)

First thing to do is not to panic. When did this happen?. There is the great 'Google dance'. This has happened with lots of my clients sites and it can be scary. When you start optimizing and link building your site, for instance, the rankings will just disappear, and then after about a week to two weeks, the results will reappear, either in the same place or sometimes better.

Have made any big changes recently?, have you had a virus attack recently?, have you changed any pages?, these can cause Google to hold back your site sometimes for up to three to four months.

There literally have been no changes, only the new sub categories were added today, but that was barely a few hours ago...

You've put my mind at rest a bit. I was vaguely aware of the whole Google Indexing thing, but I feel better now hearing your words !

So thanks :)

Occassionaly I notice a dip in our ranking, personally I think it is an internal Google thing, might be adding new server capacity, changing of algorithms etc

Whilst you sort this out, have you given any thought to running google ads to get your keywords back on page 1 whilst you sort things out?

Conspiracy theory:hihi:

Your robots.txt is blocking google & other search engine spiders from your whole site. Change it, or remove it.

[Edited] It does seem to have changed, but now it looks invalid, just delete it, or write a proper robots.txt to block the search engine spiders from parts of the site they dont want to visit (login pages, search pages, etc).

SEO is an are form, and you have to take this into an account, a good analagy is its like baking a cake, you have to get it spot on or it will sink, i have been in the SEO business for 7 years and its amazing how quickly it can change!

Something changed with Google on May 1st or there abouts. Lots of people have had their traffic reduced for long tail terms. Not found an answer. I just have my fingers crossed for Google to fix whatever they broke.

The same with mine... I'm still trying to climb google but even searching for "Spy Gadgets Online" it doesn't appear anymore... I can only get my page up on google if I type in the domain in Google search :(

you have to keep in mind that google are constantly updating their algorithms and so your SEO work needs to be constant. It may not be something you have done but google may have changed something which means your site is no longer best optimised.

hope that helps, keep reading the book and i would suggest doing some online searches in to new updates by google. try and find out if anythings going on.

ccbben is spot on.

Using the site: protocol reveal your long tail results aren't being indexed.

You have about 60 pages indexed in google vs 600 pages indexed in yahoo.

Hi John

What does that mean (long tail results) and, more importantly, what does that mean for my website?

Thanks for taking the time to let me know :)

Something changed with Google on May 1st or there abouts. Lots of people have had their traffic reduced for long tail terms. Not found an answer. I just have my fingers crossed for Google to fix whatever they broke.

that is really reassuring as ive seen my traffic plummet over the last couple of weeks....but i dont know if my site has had this type of work done.

ive been a bit lacking in the promotion side of things so that combined with the silly hot weather when no one was on line made me think it was just that, but if its something else i will feel a lot better!


x

None of my sites or those of my clients have ever been affected by anything Google has done.

There will be reasons why this has happened to you - Google doesn't just slap you down for nothing.

Yes Google does it's shuffle every so oftem, but for a good website doing what it should, to do well in the search engines will not be affected and if anthing, should just be improving month on month.

hmmm, this sucks as I thought I was really getting somewhere in Google!

Google hates me.

None of my sites or those of my clients have ever been affected by anything Google has done.

There will be reasons why this has happened to you - Google doesn't just slap you down for nothing.

Yes Google does it's shuffle every so oftem, but for a good website doing what it should, to do well in the search engines will not be affected and if anthing, should just be improving month on month.

hmmm, i think im going to have to get my seo man on the case then.

thanks :)

x

None of my sites or those of my clients have ever been affected by anything Google has done.

There will be reasons why this has happened to you - Google doesn't just slap you down for nothing.

Yes Google does it's shuffle every so oftem, but for a good website doing what it should, to do well in the search engines will not be affected and if anthing, should just be improving month on month.


http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-googles-may-day-update-what-it-means-for-you

Sure, Google makes minor algo tweaks like this all the time, but around April 28th-May 3rd a lot of sites (SEOmoz included) noticed a sudden loss of 5-15% of their normal long tail traffic.

I've read reports of 50% or more loss in traffic for some sites. Something big happened at Google around the 1st of May.

But in the grand scheme of 4 billion websites, I havent heard that many people complaining of anything. It could be these group of affected websites were all doing something which meant Google had to shove them down the list. Who knows? They will never tell you exactly what's happened or why. It's all a guessing game.

In any case, one thing I just realised is that you mention a loss of traffic, but not a mention of sales. Has your sales been affected? And if so, what is the conversion now?

By the way Rob, there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to get to Google page 1 for'spy watches' within a matter of weeks.

Ref the geekest link site, it's not optimised so where has this traffic been coming from? How many uniques visitors did you get in April?

Have you seen the thread on WMW? http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4125460.htm Its huge. Lots of people suffering. I seriously doubt its a penalty. More likely the Google SERPS layout, caffeine being rolled out across all data centres and a major algo tweak.

378 messages on 13 pages? That's not huge believe me, that's a typical forum chat about a gripe. You want to see some threads on ukbf if you think that is huge! I remember when my kitten went missing we reached about 10 pages!

I would say that your page code is bloated taking time to read. You have alot of universal links for internal pages and alot of comments with empty alt and div tags.

Try stripping out stop words like and, the, it, in from your meta descriptions whilst keeping it readable.

Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic

http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+searchengineland+%28Search+En gine+Land%29

Bad news. That traffic isn't coming back for those that were hit,

Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A, ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

I was only getting around 20 visits a day... Now it's probably around 5. Which I admit is pretty dreadful.... This number hasn't really rose over the past for months, it's just got worse... Sales used to be 1 every 3 days or so now it's zero.

It does get a bit annoying and it can sometimes be hard to be patient.

Indizine you mention there is no reason I can't get on page 1 for "Spy Watches" - What is this Witchcraft you speak of?!?!

Matt Cutts has posted a video about this. Its 100% an algorithm change straight from the horses mouth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM

At 1.50 he does say, "we don't expect this to be temporary" so maybe they will roll it back but I am proceeding with the expectation that it won't be.

oh well looks like those affected will need to re-think their seo strategy.

Changes like this happen quite often. SEO results are never guaranteed & it's a constant ongoing job.

You can't rely solely on seo as your only source of traffic. You need other ways to bring new people to your site & to keep them coming back.

Changes like this happen quite often.

Google make a change every day on average now. This one isn't a routine one though. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3801699.htm Look on there, big changes are given names. The last big one was April 2008. Vince in February 2009 affected brands but this was limited to a few phrases. This Mayday update is a big game changer.

You can't rely solely on seo as your only source of traffic. You need other ways to bring new people to your site & to keep them coming back.

Sounds good in theory but extremely difficult in practice. As everyone uses Google when looking for stuff, I doubt even the second best source of traffic would even come close in terms of volume and quality. People sometimes hype social media but the intent in the traffic isn't there so its never going to be as good as Google traffic. Bing and Yahoo have tiny market shares. I have come to the conclusion that Google is the only traffic source worth chasing.

As Google also own the adwords section of their site, does this mean they have a vested interest to change stuff to affect rankings to encourage us all to use adwords...not that I'm being cynical :)

To bring some closure to this topic, I thought I'd add that my links are back, and mostly better than ever.

I didn't really do anything, but forced Google to do a daily update, and now all my items are indexed and things are much stronger!

Absolutely bizarre, but I'm much happier