Why Did GeeksforGeeks’ Traffic Vanish Overnight | What Happened and Why?

Hey SEO folks, have you heard about what hap­pened to Geeks­forGeeks? That huge­ly pop­u­lar edu­ca­tion­al site was recent­ly de-indexed from Google search results, and thou­sands of its pages van­ished! If you run a quick site search on Google, you’ll bare­ly find any­thing from them any­more.

Why is this such a big deal?

To put it into per­spec­tive, Geeks­forGeeks is a giant in the search world — mas­sive traf­fic and strong author­i­ty. So, why did it van­ish overnight?

What about their subdomains?

You would have thought that even if the main site had been penal­ized, their sub­do­mains would have remained unaf­fect­ed, right? After all, Google had often stat­ed that sub­do­mains were treat­ed sep­a­rate­ly and didn’t impact the main site’s rank­ings. But that wasn’t the case. When peo­ple searched for “Geeks for Geeks,” they didn’t find links to their site or any of their sub­do­mains. Just a few days ear­li­er, those sub­do­mains had still been vis­i­ble.

Some spec­u­lat­ed that Google’s inter­nal data leaks sug­gest­ed sub­do­mains might, in fact, have been con­nect­ed to the main domain when it came to rank­ings. There had even been a case study from Monster.com, where mov­ing con­tent from a sub­do­main to a sub­fold­er had result­ed in a 116% increase in search vis­i­bil­i­ty. It seemed Google had linked the main domain and sub­do­mains, par­tic­u­lar­ly when spam was involved. This could have explained why Geeks­forGeeks was affect­ed across the board.

So, what really caused this?

A big part of why a site ranks well is its top­i­cal author­i­ty — basi­cal­ly, how focused and rel­e­vant the con­tent is. Geeks­forGeeks start­ed branch­ing out into top­ics that had noth­ing to do with their core focus. Most SEO experts think this “top­i­cal drift” was the main rea­son for their down­fall.

I real­ly like this quote from Live Breathe SEO: “You can’t teach algo­rithms to code and also gos­sip about celebri­ties on the same domain. Not with­out con­se­quences.” Google cit­ed “thin con­tent” as the rea­son, but the real prob­lem was los­ing focus.

But wait, there’s more nuance here

Remem­ber when Forbes got a man­u­al penal­ty on just one fold­er of their site for “site rep­u­ta­tion abuse”? That penal­ty hit only a part of their site, not the whole thing, and they’re already recov­er­ing traf­fic by mov­ing con­tent around.

So why did Google pun­ish the entire Geeks­forGeeks site instead of just a part of it? The answer lies in how their con­tent is orga­nized. Forbes had the prob­lem­at­ic con­tent iso­lat­ed in a fold­er, but Geeks­forGeeks had their con­tent spread out flat across the whole site — no neat sub­fold­ers to iso­late the bad stuff. That meant Google had to penal­ize the entire domain.

Also, a quick side note — it looks like Geeks­forGeeks used UTM para­me­ters in their top nav­i­ga­tion links, which isn’t a great SEO prac­tice and might have con­tributed to issues.

What about backlinks?

Some peo­ple blame their back­link pro­file, but that’s prob­a­bly not the main issue. Big sites often get spam­my back­links, and Google has got­ten pret­ty good at ignor­ing those over time.

What can we learn from this?

• Expand­ing your con­tent top­ics is fine, but make sure the new top­ics are relat­ed and make sense. Geeks­forGeeks went off the rails with irrel­e­vant con­tent, and that was a big prob­lem.

• How you struc­ture your URLs mat­ters a lot. If you want to test new top­ics, try to keep them iso­lat­ed in sub­fold­ers or sub­do­mains so any penal­ties don’t take down your whole site.

• Keep an eye on your sub­do­mains. Even if they seem sep­a­rate, spam­my behav­ior there can affect your main domain’s rank­ings.

So yeah, that’s the sto­ry of Geeks­forGeeks’ sud­den fall from Google’s grace. It’s a reminder that SEO is tricky and you’ve got to stay focused and orga­nized if you want to keep your spot on top.