Blog dropping in traffic - let's see what can be the cause..

[CarlosTheGaucho]

Have a blog that took off in mid November, was getting a decent amount of SE traffic (model name and lots of miscelaneous searches related to post content) this lasted for about a month, dropped overnight in mid December to 5 - 20 uniques / day and didn't recover ever since.

here it is:

http://www.darinavanickova.com

The drop happened after the update on Dec 15th, which is currently the fifth update from the top ("Darina Vanickova Gets Ready for Tit Fucking")

Something that comes to my mind:

- some post titles are almost similar and only vary in one or two words - can this be taken as keyword spam / duplicated title?

there is also a line or two of duplicated text at the end of every post, yet this doesn't cause problems with other blogs so far.

Has this ever happened to you?

What can be the cause?

[blogstargirl]

site:DarinaVanickova.com <--- you can view some of the duplication on your indexed pages when you enter this in Google search

Your blog post titles, which are treated as individual pages by Google when you use WP, are repeating the site title, perhaps this could be one issue.

Are you using an SEO plug-in? I recommend Headspace2 or All in One SEO Pack. You can make individual titles for each blog post and write unique descriptions.

Have you checked to see if you're getting tons of spammy inlinks?

I'd write longer blog posts, most of your posts look to be under 100 words, I'd up it to at least 200. And I'd link her photos to the affiliate program.

When you use WP, the tags and category pages basically duplicate content.

I'm actually going to try a couple of different test methods on my WP blogs in the next few months to see what effects these methods have on SEO.

The first method I'm going to do on 1 blog is to strip all tags and categories and try a different architecture (don't want to bore everyone with the details).

The second method I'm going to test on another blog is:

Not index the duplicate pages, but "do follow" the links on those pages. On every /category/, /page/, /tag/, /20xx/ page, I'm going to add this meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

What this does it tell the bots to not index the page, but follow all the links on the page. By adding this meta tag to the pages in the above sections, all those duplicate pages will drop from the index, but blog posts will stay, and get credit for all the links aiming at them, including those from the duplicate pages.

This plug-in can handle adding meta tags: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Hope that your traffic picks up when you determine and fix what is impacting your site!

[CarlosTheGaucho]

Thanks a lot for the feedback,

I was so far using custom SEO options that are available with the theme, which enable me to put meta keywords, meta description and meta title for each post - that's also where the "post title | blog title" is set

- For the meta keywords I've basically filled in the post tags and the meta description is say two lines of text related to the post.

- wasn't filling a separate meta title for each of the posts and left it as a default - post title, which worked for some time.

- it's not the case of spammy inbound links with this blog, but I've noticed that with a few other blogs of mine (webmaster tools reporting say 1000 - 2000 + inbound links from a single url) - that probably helps to explain why those get very little SE traffic, is there a way how to deal with this?

- might try to no index the tag and categories, using the google xml sitemaps plugin that enables that (hope it's going to work), I see your point though

- longer posts, quite demanding with the amount of blogs (have about 60 now) but I sure can try that on a few blogs to see if there's an improvement

So I guess what I can try right away is a different SE plugin / settings and experiment a little bit with no indexing the tags and categories to avoid duplicate content

[blogstargirl]

Are you using the Meta SEO Pack that comes with the back end of some themes? Meta tags for blog posts and blog pages are getting less important to Google. There are exceptions obviously related to SE spiders re: index/follow etc. But I think the time you are spending on the meta tags and descriptions could be better spent using Headspace2 or All in One SEO Pack plug-ins (or both).

There is a past thread here about suggestions re: dealing with spammy backlinks. If you know the URL they're coming from, you can try to find out who hosts the site and report the site to the host for spam abuse. You can also check threads or post at Google Webmaster Central. Have you installed Akismet plug-in for spam blocking of comments (at the least you could block most of that type of spam).

Writing is a pain to keep up with when you have a volume of blogs, but Google likes blog posts of at least 200 words and you will probably need it for your keyword density not to appear spammy if you're coming in at less than 100 words.

Try it for a few blogs and see what happens! Hope it works out.

[CarlosTheGaucho]

That's correct, in this case, there's also the "noindex,follow" option for tag and category pages that I haven't used before, so I'm already testing it on a couple blogs.

Let me check the above mentioned plugins as well on a couple blogs.

Comments are disabled by default, so it's not exactly a comment spam.

As for the writing - I've started to create bogus stories on a couple blogs to make up more text, will see the effect

[redwhiteandblue]

What sort of link building have you been doing for this site?

[mikecam]

Hi! Just checked your backlinks - you only have links from 4 (!) different Class-C IPs, that is nearly nothing - you need more backlinks. Diversify your anchors, even link from images so the linkbuilding doesn´t look to forced. Also, your domain is quite new and there is a filter called "google newbie bonus" (google for it, you will see). Just keep on working, post min. 200 words every week, trade links with other sites and you will see, the blog will regain the rankings and get even better. Good luck!

[CarlosTheGaucho]

It's true that there hasn't been much link building done, basically mainly a backlink from a site that's very much on top in Google for the model name, a few trades plus a few links from inhouse blogs that probably don't have that much effect. Wasn't aware of the "newbie bonus".

Let me build more backlinks and try to update more text content too.

[CarlosTheGaucho]

I wonder if I can ask about two more things that came to my mind:

- when I checked some of the blogs that dropped in traffic I've found the keyword density for the model name is approaching 8.5 - 10 pct. which is teoretically too much, on the other hand this is the case also with blogs that so far perform well, could this cause a drop in ranks?

- also some of the blogs are interlinked and contain a portion of quite a similar text as their about / model bio page is only slightly reworded, could this also affect the SE rankings as the pages would be regarded as partially similar ?

[blogstargirl]

- when I checked some of the blogs that dropped in traffic I've found the keyword density for the model name is approaching 8.5 - 10 pct. which is teoretically too much, on the other hand this is the case also with blogs that so far perform well, could this cause a drop in ranks?

yes, if your density is too high, Google could be perceiving your site as spammy - lower your density or write more text


- also some of the blogs are interlinked and contain a portion of quite a similar text as their about / model bio page is only slightly reworded, could this also affect the SE rankings as the pages would be regarded as partially similar ?

yes, you could be getting penalized for duplicate content by Google, you may want to take time to rewrite the static info (about / model bio page) so that it is more unique

ITA w/any other suggestions above which haven't been implemented plus IMO you need more backlinks and deeplinks. every blog entry is considered a page by Google, so if these pages have no backlinks and the backlinks are coming in to the main page only then your blog needs to be fortified. have you tried using Twitter for backlinking? you could backlink to every blog post and to the site itself, this could potentially boost traffic. you could have one Twitter for Czech Superstars to distribute backlinks to more than one site and a specific Twitter for Darina's blog. and if you're just trying to push traffic, aside from organic methods, you could set up a blogspot blog for DarinaVanickova or Darina-Vanickova, and backlink to your site, Google owns blogger so blogspot gets "liked" very well and ranks

[CarlosTheGaucho]

Thanks!

I'm already lowering the density where excessive and rewriting what could be considered duplicate with further blog updates.

As for previous suggestions, I haven't been adding any SEO plugin to this blog specifically, since I found that the theme SEO options offer very much every option needed, the real question is whether this really works, so I'm comparing with a few other blogs to see the effect.

As for the backlinking suggestions, there's a twitter in place so that might be a good way to start.

Using a few selected linkdumps with a number of blogs, which brings some clicks but didn't particularly help with SE traffic so far.