Why would my Bounce Rate drop from 40% to 2% over 3 days without making any major changes to my site www.hiltonhead.com?
-
Our Wordpress site has had an historical bounce rate of 40% for the last 3 years but last Thursday it dropped to 17%, Friday to 7% and now is running at 2%. The pageviews per visit have also increased from 3 to almost 6.
Thanks
-
Serge and Keri,
thanks for your response, after getting your replies i checked and indeed there was an additional google_analytics_auto.js file that was installed. Turns out that Hostgator's cpanel has a google analytics integration program that was activated on the 9th (when everything started getting weird) and it modified my .htaccess file to load the additional .js file ... hopefully that was the problem ,will keep you updated.
Thank you!
-
I'm looking at the source, and I see /google_analytics_auto.js as well as Yoast's wordpress script. You might want to ask about that and see if someone just installed one of those and if that's causing the problem.
-
I'm thinking the same way Serge is. I've seen that happen when you get two analytics scripts firing at once, especially if one is a plugin and one is custom-coded.
-
have you installed any new js scripts? analytics + commerce?
any new plugins?
any suspicious traffic?
-
umm that's a loaded question. I'd start by segmenting your traffic - that is search, direct and referral - compare the different timeframes. If there is a dramatic difference work out why? If nothing starts out just compare everything in your analytics account, could be a new ranking, referral. Also you could have lost a ranking or a link so actually your bounce rate has gone down because your overall traffic has gone down.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Massive unexplained organic traffic drop; disappeared from Google
Hi there,
Search Behavior | | katelynroberts
Our site has experienced a huge organic traffic drop, specifically from Google. The drop occurred on Feb 19 and I've got no clue why it happened. We have not made any significant changes to the website and it doesn't look like there was an algorithm update last week. We don't have any Google penalties or indexing issues noted, and the drop isn't specific to any particular segment/region/keyword. What am I missing? Any advice or insight is super duper appreciated. Our site is a Wordpress/WooCommerice e-commerce site with a blog and long-standing #1 ranks for keywords related to our main product offering. Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.12.25 PM.png
Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.07.52 PM.png0 -
Should i switch from .com to .fr / .de etc
Hi, I have a seo question that I just cant seem to get an answer for. Right now I have an international ecommerce shop selling to several european countries.
Search Behavior | | Internet360
The setup is like this:
www.domain.com -> 301 -> www.domain.com/nl (dutch)
www.domain.com/uk (english)
www.domain.com/fr (french)
www.domain.com/de (german) I also have the domainnames for the countries I sell to:
www.domain.nl / www.domain.fr / www.domain.co.uk / www.domain.fr Its quite easy to switch to the later because I allready own the domains and can technically change this within an hour in our magento2 multistore. I think the customers would trust their local tld more than the .com and my question is: Is it also better for SEO?
Or will the splitting of the backlinks hurt me. Thanks for your insights.0 -
How does Google treat significant content changes to web pages and how should I flag them as such?
I have several pages (~30) that I have plans to overhaul. The URLs will be identical and the theme of the content will be the same (still talking about the same widgets, using the same language) but I will be adding a lot more useful information for users, specifically including things that I think will help with my fairly high bounce rate on these pages. I believe the changes will be significant enough for Google to notice, I was wondering if it goes "this is basically a new page now, I will treat it as such and rank accordingly" or does it go "well this content was rubbish last time I checked so it is probably still not great". My second question is, is there a way I can get Google to specifically crawl a page it already knows about with fresh eyes? I know in the Search Console I can ask Google to index new pages, and I've experimented with if I can ask it to crawl a page I know Google knows (it allows me to) but I couldn't see any evidence of it doing anything with that index. Some background The reason I'm doing this is because I noticed when these pages first ranked, they did very well (almost all first / second page for the terms I wanted). After about two weeks I've noticed them sliding down. It doesn't look like the competition is getting any better so my running theory is they ranked well to begin with because they are well linked internally and the content is good/relevant and one of the main things negatively impacting me (that google couldn't know at the time) is bounce rate.
Search Behavior | | tosbourn0 -
Blog Post SEO - Bounce Rate & Layout
Mozzers, I wrote the following blog post about Microsoft’s current offer to receive $100 free in bing ads. http://www.cildermansolutions.com/blog/free-bing-ads-coupon-for-2017-get-100-in-free-advertising-credits I noticed that the bounce rate on the post is higher than i was expecting; I am wondering if this is because I put the eligibility rules for collecting the ads coupon in the 2nd paragraph...and people are just seeing that right away and bouncing. I obviously don’t want to lie or trick readers, but i am wondering if the community has any idea/suggestions. Thanks, Matt
Search Behavior | | matt.nails0 -
How can I reduce my high bounce rate?
I've recently upgraded to a WP site but i have a very high bounce rate. It is typically 75-80% and recently I saw a 95% bounce rate. I found part of the issue was I neglected to change the urls for my adwords acct but I did that weeks ago and its still very high. Last week, for 1 day only i had 18% but it shot back up when I made some code changes that didn't pan out as expected. The site is an online store and is www.cheaptubes.com I really need to fix it. my business is severely hurting. Any and all ideas are appreciated.
Search Behavior | | cheaptubes0 -
Google search operator "site:" show different result.
Search operator "site:" show incomplete information. When I search with just domain name it show only 3 link that got crawl in past week, this is the link https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=mLr3VfrhN4_BuATQuYugBg&gws_rd=cr&fg=1#q=site:sierralivingconcepts.com&safe=off&tbs=qdr: but when i look a specific link it show them in any time (search tools), https://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.sierralivingconcepts.com/p-6300-white-silver-regence-louis-xiv-mango-wood-ornate-hall-console-table.aspx&safe=off&biw=1600&bih=775&noj=1&tbas=0&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0CBUQpwVqFQoTCJ-4iOLK-McCFQFwjgod43gI9A But when i look in cached page it says "appeared on 11 Sep 2015" I am total confused why google not showing all the new link that it crawl from my site.
Search Behavior | | Sierra-Living-Concepts0 -
Google Analytics: advanced segment for hour of day
Cioa from 17 Degrees C cloudy Wetherby UK 🙂 In Google analytics I want to report specifically on Blackberry Mobile traffic next to hour if the day. Whilst this customised report I ripped off did the job @ http://bit.ly/hourdays I only resorted to this after battling with advanced segments thinking I could do the same thing. So my question is please how can I get this report http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/hrs-day-examplecopy_zps4f15d4a1.jpg by building it via advanced segments and not ripping off via http://bit.ly/hourdays Grazie tanto,
Search Behavior | | Nightwing
David0 -
Would you say it is more bennificial to seperate keywords in the title tag tag of a page using a common ( keyword , keyword | Domain.com) or using a hyphen as SEOmoz best practices reccommends (keyword - keyword | domain.com)?
Title tag best practices according to seomoz is the following keyowrd - keyword | brand.com but I have seen some interesting results from using a comma as to a hyphen to seperate keywords as reccomended and wanted to know which method is more crawler friendly.
Search Behavior | | JHSpecialty0