GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 33 - October 2015

FROM THE GPWA FORUMS R unning a website is not always smooth sailing. Sometimes, for reasons unknown to the webmaster, a major incident can occur that can derail a significant portion of a website’s traffic and, therefore, its income. Luckily, GPWA members can turn to the forums when problems like these arise, knowing the group can work together to troubleshoot and fix the issue. In this featured thread, GPWA member mla0712 can’t figure out why his sports betting site’s traffic has dipped. But thanks to an informative back-and-forth with a few of his fellow forum members, the problem was identified and a path to a solution was drawn. Read the full thread at: http://gpwa.org/377 We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic – what happened? #1 mla0712 Public Member Hi guys, I need some help/advice. I run a sports betting site, and around May 16-19 our organic traffic suddenly dropped by about 60-70%. We’ve been struggling to find the cause and have not been able to do anything about it. A few observations/thoughts: It seems we’ve suddenly had quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content or site to Russian users. We also don’t have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our links removed? We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy links in our forums and have just recently removed them (or at least we think we have), but could those bad links have been hurting us over time? I think Google ran an algorithm update in May regarding “quality signals,” but I can’t imagine it would have hit us that hard since (and I may be biased ) I would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now. Any feedback would be appreciated. “ Reply With Quote #2 Triple7 Public Member Which cave have you been under the past few months? Google did a big update and one of the main factors to its new algorithm is, “Is your website mobile friendly or not?” Your site is not mobile friendly, so I’m guessing that’s the reason and not the Russian backlinks that everyone has, or some forum posters who left their links. “ Reply With Quote #5 wonderpunter Private Member You have hundreds of pages of “picks” that have between 50 and 100 words... I’m going to put my money on that. “ Reply With Quote #3 sweetbet Private Member Originally Posted by mla0712 It seems we’ve suddenly had quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content or site to Russian users. We also don’t have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our links removed? I would disavow the links, and then contact the sites and ask them to remove the links. “ Reply With Quote From the GPWA Forums