Visitor Traffic Decrease

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I’ve trying to figure out why my site’s traffic has dropped by more than 65% starting from last January of this year. I’ve worked with the major search engines on this, but my site is not in violation of any rules, and is, therefore, still being indexed.

It has come down to two plugins, one of which is BPS.

Is there any rule in the root .htaccess file that could be causing a major loss of traffic? I’ve looked at the default bad bot rules, but don’t see anything that raises a red flag. Is there any suggestion on what else to check in the htaccess rules that could be killing my site’s traffic?

I’m up to date, using version 49.1.

[AITpro Admin]

I guess it is possible, but not likely.  Our traffic stats look fine as you can see in the link below:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ait-pro.com#trafficstats

Typically things that have to do with visitor traffic are sitemaps, SEO plugins, robots.txt file, general SEO mistakes, penalized by a Search Engine for some reason (too many spammy links, too many ad links), etc.

Here is how you check your indexed website pages:

site:addYouSiteName.com

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account then use the fetch as Google tool.

Most likely this is going to be some kind of SEO mistake and not an issue with .htaccess files, BPS, etc.

 

[planner]

The funny par tis that Google actually sent me an email to alert me to the fact that my site is not doing as well as it used to, so I’m not under any Google penalty.

The site has been active since 2008, and the issue just stared at the tail end of January. I used an SEO plugin which I have uninstalled and I have made no other changes to the site before the problem started.

 

Btw, the site is linuxbsdos.com

[AITpro Admin]

Ok thanks for the link.  I will check out your site for SEO & other mistakes.  I’ve been doing SEO professionally for about a decade now so I should be able to spot any SEO mistakes fairly quickly.  Will let you know what I find.

[AITpro Admin]

Ok I see major problems with SEO right off the bat by only looking at your indexed pages.

You are using your site name in the Title and in a lot of URLs it is duplicated.

The only thing that should be in your Title – which is the MOST important SEO tag of them all is your actual target keyphrase.

do this google search:  site:linuxbsdos.com

You will see 4,200 indexed pages and you will see the problems right away.

I did the SEO work for this site in the link below and it brings in over a million in sales per year directly from my SEO work (quote requests that turn into sales, closers, etc).  You will see the difference right away when you compare your indexed URL’s to this site’s indexed URL’s.

[link removed]

So in summary, if you are seeing 4,200 indexed pages by Google then there is not a problem with Google finding and indexing your pages.  The problem is very obvious.  Get your site name out of the Title Tag.  The first 2 or 3 words in a Title tag are THE MOST IMPORTANT SEO factors of them all.  Next most important is the Description Tag.  Same rule applies.  The first 2 or 3 words in your Description Meta tag are the MOST important SEO factors of that tag.  Same thing applies to the content of the page.  The first 2 or 3 words in your content are the MOST important SEO factor.  To get the maximum SEO Boost – all 3 things will start out with the same 2-3 words.  😉

Oh and this is nice trick (in the sense that this saves you time and not trying to trick Google) that I learned.  Instead of actually filling in a Description (in an SEO Description text box for example) you can just start your content with the same 2-3 keywords and Google will automatically use the first sentence of your content for the Description.  Another really nice boost comes from doing this.  You bold your starting content target keywords and use a hypen.

Content Start

Search Target Words – blah blah blah

And your Title would have the same target keywords.  This is very important to note – Google’s algorithm is grammatically correct.  Hyphens, commas and other grammatical characters mean the exact same thing/have the same weight/have the same value as they do in writing and speaking English.  They are important and you should use them correctly as if you were writing/speaking grammatically correct English.  And yeah if you are doing SEO in another language then all the same things above apply.

[planner]

Yeah, I see the problem.  It’s the way the theme I’m using was coded.  I’ll  fix it right away and monitor traffic for a week and see what happens.

Thanks for the tips.

[planner]

One more thing:

I’ve installed the same SEO plugin you use on your blog,  leaving the rewrite title option enabled. However, site:linuxbsdos,com is still showing the blog title before the post titles. Is there something that has to be done after this to make search engines take note of the changes, other than waiting to them to  re-crawl the site?

[AITpro Admin]

Check the All in One SEO General Settings page for %blog_title% which will display the Title of your site in your Title.  It is ok to have your Site Title come last in your Title Meta tag since the first 2-3 words are the target keywords, but the way I look at it is since the Title Meta tag has a limited amount of characters/words that should be used then you should use only your target keywords in the Title.  For new Posts Google indexes them much quicker (1 – 7 days).  When you revise or change a Post/Page it takes longer for Google to re-index the page (5 – 14 days).

Page Title Format:
Post Title Format:
Category Title Format:
Date Archive Title Format:
Author Archive Title Format:
Tag Title Format:
Search Title Format:
Description Format
404 Title Format:
Paged Format:

[planner]

Is it even necessary to have the blog title in any Title Meta tag?

[AITpro Admin]

If the Title of your site helps your ranking because it contains keywords for your search target then you can use it, but personally I think it takes away from ranking position/results and you run the risk of Google seeing duplicate Title Tags.  If you do decide to use your site Title in the Title tag then you would want to put it last and it would be out of visible site anyway in the search results indexed URL.

You have a limited amount of characters to work with for your Title tag – too many characters and Google considers that “keyword stuffing” or “spammy”.  A lot of SEO experts will tell you that you should not use more than 70 characters in the Title Tag, but I have pushed the total number of characters all the way up to 100 characters and had good ranking results.

[AITpro Admin]

For this Forum we are intentionally using the Title of the Forum:  BulletProof Security Forum in the Title Tag for specific reasons.  I’ll use this particular indexed topic below as an example.

Topic: Feedburner 403 Error | BulletProof Security Forum

The primary reasons to use the Title of this Forum site in Title tags are:

Since all topics are related to the BulletProof Security plugin then when someone does a Google search they will most likely use a search term like this:   feedburner 403 error bulletproof for a feedburner 403 error occuring with the BPS plugin installed.

This also produces indexed Titles without us having to add “BulletProof” in every single Forum Topic Title.

The final reason and probably the most important reason is if we did not include the BulletProof Security Forum Title then these Forum Topics would be too general to Google and Google would probably devalue the Forum Topics since they did not have a good search target focus.

So this Forum is a good example of when to use a Site Title in the Title meta tag.

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