continuous drop of organic traffic (since 2 years)

[ivan]

Hello to the whole community,
this is my first post and I wanted to share with you the difficult situation I am in.

Since 2013 I have been working on the growth of my website in the pet niche.

But for two years now I've been constantly losing organic traffic:

I don't understand what I'm doing wrong and what I need to do to improve the situation.
Any of your advice is welcome. The project is also a major source of income for my family.

thank you!
Ivan

 

[harrytwatter]

Welcome Ivan! Sharing a summary and timeline of what you've been doing to grow the site over the last two years might help the big brains in this forum better diagnose what woes you.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I removed the URL to your site. It's a really bad idea to share it publicly. It only takes one bad person to wreak havoc on your site, and they are out there.

It looks to me that you got hit in the December 2020 Core Update and the tweaks that rolled out to it in January 2021. With a core update it's likely a combination of a lot of things that are going on, and it doesn't appear that you're doing anything "wrong", minus one thing.

There's two things that jumped out at me regarding your site, without doing some giant audit.

The main thing would be Ezoic or whatever you're using for ads. They're doing things like pinning sticky ads at the top of the blog, which load later and push the entire page down. That adds a 100% cumulative layout shift to your page. The big leaderboard ads that appear above the content but below the menu give you like a 99% layout shift. I'd turn these two ad units off, globally. Google has been rolling out "Page Experience" updates or whatever they're calling them. You can learn more by searching "Core Web Vitals", which point out the main things they're looking at there.

Otherwise, it could simply be a matter of Google giving more weight to backlinks. You're at a DR32, which isn't bad at all. But you're sitting on maybe 50 links from domains that are DR30 and above, and that's not many in the grand scheme of things. You have plenty of other solid links, they're all solid. But you may need to get powered up, because...

Google is likely going to come after the Pet niche as an EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) niche, and I see you're already on top of that with doctors as authors, etc. But if my guess here is true, they're going to be slowly tweaking the dials and making links more valuable over time, which means your current link profile is going to become weaker without continual growth.

With Core Updates though, you need to fix any and every problem you can now so that when the next core update rolls around you'll be "fixed". The problems are only cured at the next core update and not in between. Some ideas you can dig into can be found on the SEO Kitchen Sink thread. You may not need much out of there, but maybe something will make you realize "oh, this is a problem on my site, I need to fix it."

 

[sciencestudent]

The kitchen sink post will cover it all.

Some of the sites that have been impacted had more affiliate content than any other content type. Also, I've seen sites with a lot of thin pages like tag pages get hit.