Sudden large drop in traffic

  • Hi,

    First of all, I will admit that SEO is something I know very little about. I do have Yeost installed, but it is pretty much set to defaults, and so far, it has been working fine so am uncertain if this has anything to do with my issue.

    I am trying to figure out why my site has seen a rather large and worrying drop in traffic since December 5th 2015. I haven’t made any changes to the site, and the last article I had posted was on December 3rd 2015. I have averaged around 3.5-4K hits a day on average for a long time, but this is pretty strange. Screenshot

    I have looked at Google Webmaster Tools (not that I fully understand everything in there) to look for clues, and under Site Appearance>Structured Data I can see that of the 1,043 items(articles that Google has indexed) 1,030 now have an error? Screenshot

    When I select one of the links that have an error to see what it may be it just states ‘Missing: Updated’. If I click on one of the links that has an error indicated, then a small window pops up that shows, ‘hatcom (markup: microformats.org)>Page Details’. Screenshot

    If I then click ‘Test Live Data’, it opens the following window, that means very little to me. It does however have a green tick ‘All Good’, next to hatom (1). Screenshot

    Does anyone have any ideas as to what Google seems to have issues with, and why this has suddenly started to occur?

    My site is techfleece.com for those who wish to help.

    Regards,

    Richard

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Hi,

    What you mentioned it’s not an issue as you use meta for “modified” in all articles.
    The issue why your site dropped is, that you use canonical URLs for your post with bit.ly URL.
    So google stopped to give a rank to your URLs and give them to bit.ly. This setting just tells google, that content on example.com/your-post belongs to URL bit.ly/something so Google now give rank and search to these bit.ly URLs.
    You should correct that. I don’t know how that come, maybe from sharing, advert or some analytics plugin.
    Check it and remove these bit.ly canonical URLs.

    Thread Starter TheGift73

    (@thegift73)

    Hi Peter,

    Many thanks for getting back to me. Yes, I did have the Bit.ly plugin installed for my site, and have been using it for quite a few years now. I didn’t realise that this may well be the cause of my traffic drop, but I can see that that would make sense. That would also be the reason as to why when I google for a topic that I know I used to score very high in (page 1 in place 1-4) that the URL was a shortened one, or, and this shouldn’t have an effect I believe, a link to my Google+ page with a link to the article.

    I take it that I should really just take some time and go through all of my articles and manually remove the bit.ly canonical URL’s where I spot them?

    I have now uninstalled the plugin and cleared the cache. I have also written to support to see if whether there is a way to undo any of the changes that the plugin has made to my URL’s.

    Regards,

    Richard

    It looks ok now, I checked some posts and all of them use canonical real URL belongs to your site.

    Thread Starter TheGift73

    (@thegift73)

    Thank you Peter. I also watched this short video after your first reply to gain more knowledge on canonical URLs and how they work.

    I also use the Yeost SEO plugin (have done since 2011) and in the canonical URL section, (advanced section) there is nothing there normally. On the image example, I added that manually. Should I add the URL of the article in that box for each and every article that I have written? If so is there a faster way to do it, or should I do it manually for each one in turn. I ask this as all my articles have Tags and are sorted into Categories as well. Example of my latest article (AirVPN review one)

    I have my Permalinks section in WP (Settings>Permalinks) set as Day & Name. It has always been set this way.

    Mainly asking as I have never used the Canonical section of Yeost before, mainly as I didn’t know what it did and thought it best to leave it alone. I know that I have removed the bit.ly plugin and you have said that you now see it has been removed; so should I now also resubmit my sitemap to Google/other engines, or manually do the Canonical URL inputs first before doing that?

    Sorry for the wall of questions, but I do feel that the light suddenly switched on when I started looking up Canonical URL’s after you mentioned them.

    You can do nothing wrong if you resubmit your sitemap, it can just help if its actual, so do it.
    Canonical tag – URLs are helpful if your content is reachable with two or more URLs.
    If your post stays as a post on your site, there is not necessary to use the canonical tag.

    It is for the purpose, for example if you copy the post and post it on another page, site with different URL, so you will set up canonical to your original post, that google knows all rank belongs there.

    So if you just post in blog normally there are no needs to use canonical.

    Thread Starter TheGift73

    (@thegift73)

    Ah, OK that now makes sense.

    Again, thank you for all your help and advice.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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