What is going on with my Organic Google Traffic? - seo

You can see my Google organic traffic graph attached, as you can see back in the time I have 10K searches and 1K Daily hit but nowadays (for about 2 months or so) I've got only 200-300 unique visitors from Google.
My site is totally unique and the content is not a copy-paste, it is fully written my me and I am updating it Daily.
So, do you have a guess about what's going on with my organic Google traffic? Any help?

Have you noticed a drop in organic positions for keywords you wish to appear high in Google for? Normally the reason for a drop in organic traffic is directly related to weaker organic rankings.
Have you recently changed anything on the domain? Http to https for example? Webmaster tools is a bit 'dum' and would need both versions submitted.
Ideally you should be tracking organic traffic through Google Analytics not webmaster tools.

You'll find the reason while performing these actions:
-Login to your Google Analytics account and check your top organic traffic pages (use in time compare feature to detect pages that caused the drop).
-Check on Google if your main traffic pages are indexed (by typing "site:www.yourwebsite.com" (without quotes) in the search box). Sometimes important pages get removed by admins without appropriate redirection.
-Log in to Google webmaster tools and check if there aren't any manual actions detected: Search Traffic/Manual Actions.
-Also in Google webmaster tools, take a look at Search Traffic/Links to your site. Are there weird websites on the top of the list having hundred or thousand of links pointing to your website? If yes, contact these website to unlink from you, and if you can not co-operate with them, submitt a disavow request to Google.
-Check the robots.txt file if there aren't some new rules added to restrict search engine bots' access to your pages.

Related

HOw long for seo changes to take effect?>

I have a site that I submitted to google, did some of the webmaster tools things for (sitemap, preferred domain etc) and set up analytics for about a week ago.
Yesterday i made a pile of changes to the body text, and to the meta and title tags text.
Should I re-submit the site to google, and how long will it take for me to see any results from my experiments!
Many thanks
Google may have not crawled your website yet. It may take 2 or 3 weeks.
From google support: Google's spiders regularly crawl the web to rebuild our index. Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites.
see also: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897?hl=en
You will know it did when you start seeing statistics in your webmaster tools. It's more of a trial and error here.

Automatic Google Indexing

Implemented Google site search in our company website. We need to automate the google indexing for our website.
Suppose like our customers are updated the forum. We need to show the up to updated forum information in our forum search ?
Is there any option in google API or any other API please help me ?
You can use an XML sitemap. This will tell the search engines where your content is so they can find it and crawl it. Keep in mind there is no way to make the search engines crawl your site when you want them to. They will crawl on a schedule they determine to be right for your site. (You can set a crawl rate in Google Webmaster Tools but that rate is relative to what crawl rate Google already has set for you. Setting it to fastest will not speed up heir crawl rate)).
Unfortunately, Google will only crawl your site when it feels like it. It is based on many variables to determine how often this occurs (i.e. site ranking, standards compliance, and so on). The sitemap XML is a helpful way to help Google determine what parts of your site to index, however if you don't have one Google will find it by crawling links on other parts of your page and updating its index if the page changes.
The more visitors you get and the more often your site's links appear on other sites will make Google index more frequently.
To start, I'd suggest http://validator.w3.org/ to validate your site and make sure you get it as close to possible to no errors. This makes it easier for Google to index your site because it can find the information it expects without having to crawl over invalid markup. Also, chances are, if a site validates with a very small amount of errors, it is more credible than one containing many errors. It tells the search engine that you update your site to ensure most all browsers can use it and that it is accessible.
Also validating your site gives you some bragging rights over those who don't meet W3 standards :)
Hope this helps!

Google Policy on interlinking my websites together

I was wondering what's Google's official policy on linking my own websites together, do they forbid it, allow it, allow it as long as it's no-follow, etc.
For clarification i will give both a white-hat and black-hat examples:
white-hat:
I'm a web designer who also has several affiliate websites. I designed those websites so i would like to give myself credit by linking from the affiliate website to my professional bio website where people can hire me as a designer.
black-hat:
I buy 100 different domains and link each one to the other 99 sharing all the link juice between them. The content of each website abide by Google's policy and isn't spammy , the only thing that's wrong is the fact that i got 99 links to each of them and i'm the only one doing the linking.
First solution - nofollow:
Well, if they are nofollow, I don't see why Google would care.
So, you'd probably be safe with that, if what you want to achieve is indeed giving yourself credit.
But, as for SEO optimization, as you already know, the sites wouldn't benefit much.
However with nofollow, even if you didn't increase pagerank, number of visits to each site should increase (the traffic from your other sites). This also could be beneficial.
Second solution - portfolio site:
There is one scenario which could suit your purpose:
Create your "portfolio". A site with links to all the sites you created, as an example of your skills and stuff..
Place a link on each of your sites to this portfolio.
Now, you have a page with 100 outbound links, each perfectly legitimate. And each of your sites contains just one outbound link connecting it to your other sites.
This should be fine both for your presentation and for SEO, and you avoided having a link farm.
EDIT: You can find actual info from Google here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Sitemap.xml - Google not indexing

I have created a sitemap for my site and it complies with the protocol set by http://www.sitemaps.org/
Google has been told about this sitemap via webmaster tools. It has tracked all the urls within the sitemap (500+ urls) but has only indexed 1 of them. The last time google downloaded the sitemap was on the 21st of Oct 2009.
When I do a google search for site:url it picks up 2500+ results.
Google says it can crawl the site.
Does anyone have any ideas as to why only 1 url is actually indexed?
Cheers,
James
First off, make sure Google hasn't been forbidden from those pages using robots.txt, etc. Also make sure those URLs are correct. :)
Second, Google doesn't just take your sitemap at face value. It uses other factors, such as inbound links, etc, to determine whether it wants to crawl all of the pages in your sitemap. The sitemap then serves mostly as a hint more than anything else (it helps Google know when pages are updated more quickly, for example). Get high-quality, relevant, useful links (inbound and outbound) and your site should start getting indexed.
Your two statements seem to contradict one another.
but has only indexed 1 of them.
and
When I do a google search for site:url it picks up 2500+ results
bdonlan is correct in their logic (robot.txt and Google's lack of trust for sitemaps) but I think the issue is what you "think" is true about your site.
That is, Google Webmaster Tools says you only have 1 page indexed but site:yoursite.com shows 2.5k.
Google Webmaster Tools aren't very accurate. They are nice but they are buggy and MIGHT help you learn about issues about your site. Trust the site: command. Your in Google's index if you search site:yoursite.com and you see more than 1 result.
I'd trust site:yoursite.com. You have 2.5k pages in Google, indexed and search-able.
So, now optimize those pages and see the traffic flow. :D
Sidenote: Google can crawl any site, flash, javascript, etc.

How do sites like Hubspot track inbound links?

Are all these types of sites just illegally scraping Google or another search engine?
As far as I can tell ther is no 'legal' way to get this data for a commercial site.. The Yahoo! api ( http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/inlinkData.html ) is only for noncommercial use, Yahoo! Boss does not allow automated queries etc.
Any ideas?
For example, if you wanted to find all the links to Google's homepage, search for
link:http://www.google.com
So if you want to find all the inbound links, you can simply traverse your website's tree, and for each item it finds, build a URL. Then query Google for:
link:URL
And you'll get a collection of all the links that Google has from other websites into your website.
As for the legality of such harvesting, I'm sure it's not-exactly-legal to make a profit from it, but that's never stopped anyone before, has it?
(So I wouldn't bother wondering whether they did it or not. Just assume they do.)
I don't know what hubspot do, but, if you wanted to find out what sites link to your site, and you don't have the hardware to crawl the web, one thing you can do is monitor the HTTP_REFERER of visitors to your site. This is, for example, how Google Analytics (as far as I know) can tell you where your visitors are arriving from. This is not 100% reliable as not all browsers set it, particularly in "Privacy Mode", but you only need one visitor per link to know that it exists!
This is ofter accomplished by embedding a script into each of your webpages (often in a common header or footer). For example, if you examine the source for the page you are currently reading you will find (right down at the bottom) a script that reports back to Google information about your visit.
Now this won't tell you if there are links out there that no one has ever used to get to your site, but let's face it, they are a lot less interesting than the ones people actually use.