[Hypothesis] Websites Drop Traffic / Rankings Few Months To 2ND Birthday

[Encrypted]

I have a website that lost around 50% of its traffic in the last 5months. At first i thought it was a penalty but further analysis revealed a number of possibilities as well as a disturbing (maybe) trend that affects websites that are close to their 2nd year anniversary.

Before we proceed i'ld like to share what (i think) happened to my website / niche and the actions i've taken so far.

What Happened :

1) I stopped doing off-page SEO. Until recently , the last time i built a link was probably mid 2016.

2) New competitors came and brushed me aside. I was too relaxed and underestimated my competitors and they outranked me on a lot of keywords. The funny thing is that alot of them are ranking via spammy links.

3) I lost some powerful links and failed to replace them. A powerful website that linked to me changed their template and automatically nofollowed all outbound links. I was completely unaware and didn't react on time.

4) I had a couple of low quality / thin content pages ranking for a couple of high volume keywords.

5) I had a shitty design with aggressive ads

6) My website is getting closer to its 2nd anniversary (I'ld talk more on this below)

7) Maybe i was hit by Google's algorithm albeit very little

What i've done so far :

1) Completely removed all thin content pages and updated the low quality articles

2) Revamped the website's design and drastically reduced the ads.

3) I did outreach and spent over $1k on POWERFUL nofollow & dofollow links from websites in my niche.

The result :

I'm yet to fully recover but i'm already seeing signs of improvement. Rankings are still fluctuating butTraffic has stabilized ( i lost traffic month over month for 3 straight months) and i had a little growth last month. This month is also looking good.

I finished the last batch of outreach last week so it would probably take till end of next month or January 2018 for the links to fully kick in. But i'm glad that traffic has stopped dropping.

Now to the main topic , i notice that websites tend to lose their Google traffic and rankings a couple of months to their second year anniversary. This trend happens for months and then immediately after the 2nd year , they begin to regain what they lost

My website will be 2years in December and i began to lose rankings around June. This didn't just happen to me , it happened to about 3 websites i tracked.

See screenshots below. Count 2 years from when they were registered and take a look at how the graph went down and how it stabilized / came up immediately after hitting their 2nd year.

My website :

Website 1 :

Website 2 :

Website 3 :

Unfortunately i couldn't pull whois data for this domain but this site is in my niche and i know they started early 2015 (I've been following them)

I maybe exaggerating things but it wouldn't hurt to take a second look at this.

** An admin should please help me format those images. I still don't know how to add images to a post on BuSo

Your thoughts?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Google's updates in the past few months, with the mobile first index rolling out and whatever else they've been doing nearly weekly, has been pretty rough. They seem to be offering older sites more of the short tails and buyer keywords while giving newer and bigger sites, but maybe less authoritative, a lot more long tails.

That could account for your decline in traffic. I know it hurt my by a good 20% of organic traffic, especially with a lot of it being buying traffic.

I'm not sure I can get down on your 2 year theory, not for any other reason than I've never seen it in 15 years, but I could be in the wrong niches too. Here's my most current project and the 2 year period, organic traffic only:

​

My question is whether or not we can come up with a feasible reason Google might create a drastic traffic drop at that point. I can think of reasons algorithmically, like suddenly you get a boost in trust and age factors and you get a giant bounce, but I also think Google would patch that bounce up too, since it's a boost you're getting on their end and not one due to your own SEO efforts.

 

[turbin3]

If this is actually a thing, maybe it has some relation to their ranking transition algorithm(s). We know from documentation that there can be at least a 90 day transition period, though there was no data they showed that demonstrates longer transitions.

I could see there being a set of much longer time series transitions, like 12-24 months. I mean that makes sense to me, and I could see the reasoning in implementing something like that, for the purposes that they've documented.

The reason I mention that is, some of the behaviors they have are inverse or initially inverse transitions (the dip prior to an increase), or spikes up or down. Could be a coincidence, but just an idea.