Recover Your blog's Lost Traffic Due to Recent Google Outage

recover lost trafficThe reason why we delayed this post was that we were actually experimenting on what actually caused a Global drop in traffic and why isn't Google responding on this biggest traffic Tsunami ever. I remember that from July 17th to August 17th MattCutts was on a 30 days self-Challenge of not reading news or using social media. I guess that challenge has already ended but is MattCutts even aware of the recent Google Outage that took place on August 16th, when he was on this "No Social Media, No News" challenge? :> We were not able to find a single piece of information on what exactly happened on August 16th and therefore were forced to do our own experimentation which at least improved our traffic by 10% and we are further waiting for more productive results. The tips below are optimization techniques for both Blogger and Wordpress Platforms. Applying them is indeed the easiest and quickest job.

UPDATE#1: Google just announced the reasons what made a search traffic drop:

If you have not read our Case Study on Google Outage then please first read that:

What Might Have affected your Site Traffic this time?

All services by Google went down for 5 minutes on August 16th, which effected a global loss in traffic worldwide up to 50%-90%. We wrote a comprehensive Case Study to prove that Google actually went into trouble on two specific days and the company has not yet commented on this technical blackout.

A similar failure happened even on April 17th, 2013 when Google Apps, especially Gmail went down for over 30 Minutes and people could not log into this largest cloud based Emailing system. Google quickly commented on this failure by informing Mashable:

We are currently investigating issues with Gmail, Drive and Docs as well as the Google Apps Control Panel. We are providing more information and frequent updates through our Google Apps Status Dashboard, which you can find here.

But the problem this time is different. The outage this time effected Google's organic search traffic. Well optimized sites saw a massive drop of over 50-90% drop. The forums are crowded with anger and waiting for a positive reply but looks like this time we need to help the sinking ship ourselves.

Here are some of the problems and their solutions that might have resulted out of this latest Google outage story or new Google Penalty story:

Problem#1 : Precious loss of Indexed entries on Google servers

Google's databases that stores indexed data might have been badly effected which caused lost of several entries. Google bots gather newly updated content using sitemaps which are XML documents. Whenever you update your blog, your sitemap gets updated with a new tag entry, this entry pings Google through your webmasters account and that's how a Search robot gets informed when to pay visit to crawl and index the newly published content.

Solution#1:

If this assumption is the least right then a possible precaution would be to refresh the sitemaps you have submitted to Google. Follow these steps:

  1. Log into your webmasters account
  2. Go to Sitemaps
  3. Check all boxes and hit the Resubmit button. Give Google at least 24 hours to refresh the new entries.

resubmit sitemaps

 

Tip For Blogger: Submit sitemaps containing at least 500 URLS. You can use our Multiple sitemap Submission tool to create total number of sitemaps for your Blogger blog.

Tip for Wordpress: In your XML sitemap plugin limit the number of posts to at most 500 or 1000. Add both these sitemaps in your webmasters account.

Problem#2 : Poor Quality Content  [True Definition]

A striking question that we often hear is Poor quality content and how to identify that you have written something that is poor in quality? The answer is simple, any post or page on your site that is of no value to Google users. Now what exactly could this content be. Following are some topics that come under this category:

  1. Tags
  2. Labels, Categories
  3. Archives
  4. Author Pages
  5. Paginated Pages
  6. Duplicate Content
  7. Content with only links
  8. Content with Less word count (less than 300)
  9. Broken Links
  10. Affiliate Links & Affiliate Posts!

 

I have taken care of almost all these types of SEO mistakes but the last one is something that I doubt this time and that is repeated posting on Affiliate products. We often post on Discount coupons with repeated use of keywords and product details. This pays no value to Google users but our Readers. After having brainstormed ourselves thoroughly We have come to a decision that such posting deserves to be tagged as noindex and noarchive. Google rarely sends traffic to Pages which shares affiliate products so it would be wise to take a safe side and noindex all such posts that offers no value in long term to our organic search and are meant to serve blog readers alone.

Solution#2:

We have written several tutorials on how to solve issue of the first 9 Poor quality content issues and today we will share an extremely easy and rarely applied method to make best use of your Affiliate posts and yet stay on the safer side. We will talk about Poor content issue#10 i.e. Affiliate Links & Affiliate Posts!

Its pretty obvious that you must always add a nofollow attribute to all your affiliate links but what about the post itself?

Noindex Affiliate Posts, Archives and Search Pages:

For Blogger:

Follow these steps for BlogSpot blogs:

  1. Go to Blogger > Settings > Search Preferences
  2. Enable Custom Robots header tags and set these settings:

custom robots header tags in blogger

 

Note: You can now easily noindex archives and Search pages (labels, search results) by choosing the noindex and noarchive options as shown in the image above.

Click Save and doing this will add a new option called "Custom Robots tags" in your blogger post editor. This option will enable you on how to treat a particular post. Whether you want it to be indexed or you don't want robots to crawl it. It has other options too for avoiding translating of post but we are concerned only with the tags noindex and noarchive here that will tell robots neither to crawl nor keep a cached copy of the page. 

Find all such posts where you have shared discount coupons or where you thing the post offers no quality and deserves to be tagged as noindex. Simply select the noindex and noarchive tags for that particular post and hit Update.

custom robots tags

Note: This method doesn't add a meta tag under the opening Head tag of that particular page but it will instead add X-Robots-Tag header tag in the HTTP response of that page.

Check the X-Robots-Tag for my homepage:

X-robots-Tag

For Further details please read:

For Wordpress:

Simply install Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin and visit your post editor. You will find the noindex option just under the Advanced tab, meta robots index

What then?

Once you have noindexed all poor quality pages and posts on your site, now it is time to refresh the sitemaps by resubmitting them to Google. This will force Google to recheck the URLS and automatically remove the noindexed posts from its entries. That simple!

Need Help?

Remember that the traffic loss this time could be due to any reason, we can only propose the best possible tips to ensure you get a step more closer when it comes to a well optimized site. The poor quality content on your site should be immediately removed by using the method described above. You do not need to deleted poor quality posts, just noindex them!

Let me know if you needed any help. Please do inform us back after a week or so, to let us know how this method brought a change to your overall site traffic. We will try our best to keep Blogger community updated with all latest SEO techniques that are applicable. Wish you a happy blogging experience and a happy Traffic recovery! Peace and blessings buddies. :»

If you don't want to get yourself into Serious Technical Trouble while editing your Blog Template then just sit back and relax and let us do the Job for you at a fairly reasonable cost. Submit your order details by Clicking Here »

67 comments

PLEASE NOTE:
We have Zero Tolerance to Spam. Chessy Comments and Comments with 'Links' will be deleted immediately upon our review.
  1. A.A
    Thanks for This great post.... Sir I Need Help.. my site infected with malware and antivirus blocked my site.... google did not snd me any email about this on webmaster tools..... how can i clean it..??? plz Sir share a post about this topic.... Thanks advance...
    www.Mudassarhussain.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are using Bidvertiser Ad Network and this network has some ads with malware. If you want to clean your site then do not use bidvertiser (or any other like) else you can continue it with malware.

      Delete
    2. W.salam Mudassar,

      You must check all third party plugins that you may be using which asks you to install javascript on your template. Install all such scripts which creates popups or annoying ads on your site.
      Faheem could be right, because Bidvertiser and similar sites are not trusted Ad networks

      Delete
    3. From last 1 month, I lost 50% of my traffic Due to this google update. Thanks for your useful post, I hope i will be able to recover my traffic once again. Please check my website too.
      Regards
      Prince Asfi - Learn Ethical Hacking

      Delete
  2. I have a such type of blog and I share giveaway , freebies , discount coupon code etc .
    Mustafa bhai ,,,, Can you give me some tips or advice about my blog ?

    My blog (wp)http://www.ihatecracks.com/

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hafeez Kindly avoid pasting urls to other sites. For such queries you are most welcome to ask me directly via the contact page. That comment system uses a third party Javascript code that was introduced back in 2011 by an Indonesian developer. You can find it in several templates available online. Sora templates being the popular one.

      Delete
  4. Google itself do something about this issue and atleast announce about this problem.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is really awesome post thank for sharing , i lost massive amount of traffic to my blog i am very much feedup and sometimes i feel to quite ,i will try out the steps as you stated above hope will work fine

    one more question , i webmaster tool under blocked url i have large number of url blocked by robot.txt how can i recover from can you please help me in regards please

    Regards
    Pavan

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you have sites which are blocked by robots.txt then make sure you have deactivated the robots.txt file by going to Settings > Search prefences.

      the default robots.txt file is bets so you must not create your custom files.

      Delete
    2. @admin
      i have dropped a mail to you please check , need your help man

      Delete
  6. Solution#2:

    dear Friends solution 2 is to easy Go to Blogger > Settings > Search Prefernces
    simple dissable Custom Robots header tags do not set any setting and click disable
    Now you done


    same process in Custom Robots tags and dissable now you done do not change any thing.

    dear friend please search your links of your blog one link can harm your whole site so please save your link and save your site

    i want to say i cover my blog traffic in 10 days and my traffic goiing batter to all of my friend blogssss and alexa rank is batter day by day.byee friends i will come back soon

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. you recover your blog traffic only by doing this?

      Delete
    2. You do not need to disable robots header tags. Just set the correct flag options as guided in the tutorial above. You must have set options that effected that blocked some urls in your robots.txt file.

      Cure is better than killing :)

      Delete
  7. Thanks Mustafa For ALL The Solutions Hope This will optimize my blog traffic

    ReplyDelete
  8. Mr. Mohammad Mustafa Ahmedzai I want ask to you some think as you know in past blogger did not have Unique Description field in post creating form so my Question is this does we need edit our all post for adding unique Description.Because in New post we are adding unique description but what about old post?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Post Meta description can surely be added to old posts also. But if your posts are great in numbers then simply focus on your latest posts and make sure you add description to them.

      Google is efficient enough to create a description by default for your old posts based on the user query. So no worries for whats gone in past :)

      Delete
  9. Another awesome stuff mustafa bhai. I was really looking for this kind of article after facing a sudden downfall in my site's traffic. I have already implemented most of the above mentioned methods. However, i came to know about some new methods as well.

    You have always helped new bloggers and still doing well. Can you explain the real cause of certain downfall of traffic? was there any databse issue at google's end. Good luck

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ravi you are always welcome buddy.
      Unfortunately Google has not yet commented on it and neither was it some sort of Panda or Penguin penalty because Google often informs about it. So as far as I can thing I would second your thought on database issue :)

      Delete
  10. Thanks Mohammad Mustafa! i'm only looking for your content hare! kindly please make update about wordpress SEO! as well, or kindly please tell me! how to solve this problem in Wordpress! my almost all wordpress blog search ranking getting down! more then 50%.
    I am Using (All in One SEO plugin!) i can,t find any option 'Meta Robots Index option'!
    Can you please tell me how to solve this issue!

    Thank in Advance!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. For wordpress dear I recommend Yoast Plugin. Kindly install it asap and you will find almost all options discussed here. It is the best plugin when it comes to WP. :)

      I am here for any help you need.
      Don't worry your content is there so you will recover your traffic as soon as you make some good changes

      Delete
    2. Thanks for your quick reply! brother, i already installed (ALL in ONE SEO plugin) or all my content is connected with this plugin! so i don,t like to remove that old plugin, or install new one, cos its related to SEO! Kindly please gave advice about ALL in ONE SEO Plugin!

      Best Regard:
      Asif!

      Delete
  11. Thanks sir.My site www.vrtricks.com recently hit by about 90% traffic drop.Hope this article will help my cause.I will com back to this page later if i find proper solution.

    ReplyDelete
  12. ok! OK! now thats a serious matter to be concerned
    yes i respect the experts behind the article for a very technically solved puzzle yes my blog was also hit with same black cloud . when i read ur artilce i logged into my analytics account which showed a drop in traffic but for only those days as said Aug 16

    Later my traffic was reinstated though i dont have very brief idea of this i think my template was good stand with this
    and the way MBT doing is AWESOME!!! hats OFF u guys u make me inspire to stick to blogger i wish all the bloggers problem gets sorted out soon !!!

    http://www.castudyguide.com/

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hi,

    Last time in a different post; you had given different setting for Go to Blogger > Settings > Search Prefernces. Shall we ignore it and now use this present settings . PL clarify.

    Regards
    http://www.indian-share-tips.com/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes Analyst,

      I will update the old tutorials. You may follow this one.

      Delete
  14. Best Tips I was waiting for this post as you said in the last post . Thanks for sharing You always helped me :) Peace and stay blessed

    ReplyDelete
  15. Good Tips ,we are also trying this tips , you should run a survey on effectiveness of these solution after 10 days on your site .
    My traffic was affected from 17th april but how it is linked with Gmail ?

    Our blog has also affiliated links

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The reason why we mentioned gMail is to indicate that problems on Google side started from 17trh April onwards. And then came the Search tsunami on August 16th. Just joining the dots :)

      Since you share affiliate links, its time for you to take the benefit of above approach.

      Delete
  16. Really Thanks i hope it will help to recover my blog traffic.

    http://www.keyguru1.com/

    ReplyDelete
  17. Thanks Bro really useful article.Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  18. We're updating post daily, so can we resubmit sitemaps daily or every hour ?
    Thanks...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course not daily! Only when you make major changes to a huge number of URLS on your site. :)

      Delete
  19. hey dear admin. i generally post on gadget reviews and then place a affiliate link of that particular product of flipkart.com or amazon.com. is this a reason for my site traffic to be down by 90%. ?? also tell me how to recover
    plz review an example post of mine and plz reply fast
    HTC Butterfly S review and specs

    ReplyDelete
  20. where it is mentioned that less word count (less than 300) is considered as bad quality contents ?

    ReplyDelete
  21. Dear Admin
    In the month of August Google Webmaster tool send me email that your website is "Suspected hacking" when i saw that message i get shocked and then i start a deep search on my website for malware and after long time i found malware then i remove it but still my website have less traffic, before malware i have more then 2000 visitors on my website on daily basis and now my website have 200 to 300 visitors, please help me and tell me what i should do now because i remove malware a month ago and i dont see any results from Google.
    Before "Suspected Hacking" massage my website "Web Freer" Keyword come's on first position on First Google search page but now it come on last page with is probably 200th Google Page please help me thanks
    Waseem

    ReplyDelete
  22. Hi Mohammad Bro,
    What is the disadvantage of submitting blogger sitemap with less than 500 posts? I have only 857 posts now, so i'm submitting sitemaps in this format- "/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100" (Only 100 posts in a sitemap). Is there is any disadvantages?

    ReplyDelete
  23. Thank you, I've just done the noindex and noarchive on my blog settings, i hope i will get increased traffic on my Tech Blog though.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Yes It Is True!!
    Specially bloggers traffic are doping down day by day , i don't know why but i will do whatever it will take to re generate my old 2k+ traffic Thank For Nice Article Muhammad .

    www.H4ck3rCracks.com

    ReplyDelete
  25. hello
    i need help on this i use wordpress site please tell me any other way to noindex poor quality posts because i donot use yoast seo tool. i use all in one seo...

    ReplyDelete
  26. hello
    i need help on this i use wordpress site please tell me any other way to noindex poor quality posts because i donot use yoast seo tool. i use all in one seo... mustafa please reply soon

    ReplyDelete
  27. i have followed your method but there is not a big impact on blog there is not much increased of visitors

    ReplyDelete
  28. Thanks a lot Mohammed brother I have been regular reader of MBT. I found lot of useful learning from your blog. Millions of thanks

    ReplyDelete
  29. oh not a best solution in wordpress! do u think we need to edit every single post page! its almost impossible!

    ReplyDelete
  30. Hello Qasim,

    is it necessary to use the noarchive tag simultaneously with the noindex tag? What happens if I use only the noindex tag? I have a blog on Blogger and I only want to noindex Archives, Labels and Search Pages. The main reason I want to do this is not to gain more visitors but I want to solve the problem when somebody is searching for something concrete and Google takes her/him to the archive/labels site that is full of many different posts.

    Thank you for your reply,
    Sona

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sir Plz Reply there is not a big effect on blog what to do now

      Delete
  31. thanks for sharing a helpful resource with us as to recover from dreadful updates of panda and penguin a perfectly strategy is a must

    ReplyDelete
  32. Check this detailed web post. I have discussed all major and minor strategies which should be implemented if you are affected by algorithm changes:

    http://www.benignblog.com/2013/09/recovery-from-google-panda-penguin-penalties-algorithm-changes-effects.html

    ReplyDelete
  33. I am also one of the victim .my blog visitor per day was nearly 200 with 77 post but now it limits upto 90 per day..plz help me sir.

    www.techftmusic.org

    ReplyDelete
  34. Can You Refer My Blog..www.sciencefactsblog.blogspot.com And Say Why Google Disapprove my blog..
    can you suggest an ideal case to get approve quickley

    ReplyDelete
  35. Really Your information helps to get my website back. Hearty thanks to share..
    Website Design Company

    ReplyDelete
  36. Mohammad Sir!
    I own a blog (codenirvana.in), recently i purchased its domain and already done almost all the tips you shared in this valuable post!
    But sir still I am not getting traffic on by blog. Please visit my little blog and do advice me :)
    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  37. not working at all.. pls give us another solution..

    ReplyDelete
  38. Thank you for this! I also noticed a huge drop on my blogs visitors, the problem just is that it still is a bit lower than it used to be. But with a little seo with your tips it's fixed in no time!

    Taskuvarkaani

    ReplyDelete
  39. Today we lost 95% of traffic via Blogger Platform.
    Waiting for the replay...
    Please check inside our template too..
    www.softfully.com

    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  40. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  41. Hello Sir, I am facing big issues with my blog www.spiderorbit.com. The traffic was around 2500 visits per day and now it's remaining only 1100 only. Something happened on 25 April 2014. So please can you suggest me something good to bring back lost traffic?

    ReplyDelete
  42. This is very essential blog; it helped me a lot whatever you have provided.
    free rar extractor

    ReplyDelete
  43. i want to disable author being index my site is www.gsmhoster.com how can i do that
    when i type my site name with dot com it shows only authors.

    ReplyDelete
  44. It's been good to see your blog when I always look for such type of blogs. It’s great to discover the post here.
    Full Record

    ReplyDelete
  45. I have more than 200 posts in my blog but still I am not getting any organic visitors for my blog Studyinfozone. Any help is highly appreciated. Thanks in advanced.

    ReplyDelete