Why is my traffic dropping so hard?
-
Hi guys,
My traffic has been dropping pretty hard from just over 3k to around 250 in the last few days. I've ran a few tests using Google webmaster tools and Open Site Explorer, as well as answering a pretty cool quiz that was created by an SEO to determine if I'm the victim of any Google updates etc, and everything is looking okay...
What do you think could be causing this issue? We're only just gearing up to start on a SEO campaign. At the moment no SEO is being done other than just casual blogging.
-
Thanks. Nothing wrong with inbound external links as far as I can see. I'll just continue implementing advice from everyone here and hopefully this will amend itself as we pump more traffic through the site!
Cheers.
-
Looking at the graph you posted the traffic from May doesn't look like it dropped all that much, especially given the variability of your traffic over the past few months. Your post is unclear if the graph is overall traffic or organic search traffic - so it's hard to say what exactly is going on, but it could just be normal fluctuation as some posts get more attention than others.
The traffic for June is low, but it's only a weeks worth of traffic. If you average it out over the entire month, it will probably be similar to May's.
I would run a quick Open Site Explorer search on the site to see if your inbound link profile looks fishy at all. If it does, you may have been hit by Penguin. If you see any fishy links, you can consider disavowing them.
-
Did you make any structural changes to your site before this happened? Did the URL structure change or the main navigation structure? I would first check your robots.txt and meta robots tags to make sure nothing was accidentally changed to block the search engines/remove the pages from the index. An accidental change of a setting can often make major differences for a site.
If you can provide the URL, we can take a quick look.
Mark
-
Have you slowed down your publishing rate? If so you should return to former level and stabilize there then recheck graph.
With all the changes going on there are bound to be new contenders in your landscape and you already stated SEO is lax right now so I would move forward with plans. Ensure you tech/server is healthy and user metrics are positive.
Best to Audit with P Bear consideration and then puto your head down.
-
I would also add:
- Check if you didn't stuff too much keywords or links.
- Search in Google if you have a new successful competitor and try to beat him.
Hope it helps, good luck!
-
Couple of things of the top of my head.
- Check your rankings to make sure that nothing has changed (sorry if that is a no s***)
- Check the Google trends for your keyword to see if it is on the decline or not. You can check on either google.com/trends or google keyword tool but I totally blanked on how to do it.
- Has anything like bounce rate/site speed or down time change? These could account for the issue
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
-
Help needed - traffic reduced by half for no apparent reason - not sure what to do
My client site, https://www.helpinhearing.co.uk/ - has regularly been showing traffic of between 1000 & 1500 sessions per month. I've just looked at their Analytics for September and the sessions have dropped to just over 600! And not only was there a period of around 11 days from September 19th onwards when there was either zero traffic or 1 or 2 visits, but also from October 4th to today (8th Oct) also no visits at all. This has never happened and we've managed this website for several years now. I cannot fathom out why this may be the case. We haven't changed anything on the site from a technical point of view, just added content and usual blog etc pages. Search Console lists 147 pages as 404 errors but there are no urgent messages or alerts/warnings. I really don't know how to proceed and try and find out what is going on with the site. Can anyone offer suggestions?
Reporting & Analytics | | mfrgolfgti0 -
How do I exclude fake direct load traffic from networks in Google Analytics?
Starting on Friday 1/20, we noticed a huge, unnatural spike in Direct Load traffic. While researching where it was coming from, the big flags were huge spikes in countries that normally only have <5 sessions a month like Russia, Singapore, Brazil, etc., each sending 1400 a week, with >99% bounce rate and <0:00:05 average session duration. While looking into networks, we saw an influx in Networks that had never sent traffic before, each with >1300 sessions a week, 100% bounce rate, and 0:00:00 session duration. The list of these Networks are: astute hosting usa incorporated
Reporting & Analytics | | ServiceMichael
nephoscale inc.
network transit holdings llc
serverbeach
coreix ltd
2ezhost llp
nforce entertainment b.v.
mir telematiki ltd
servers australia pty ltd wholesale services provider for abuse
reliablehosting
dimenoc servicos de informatica ltda
c0715718213 I have seen a lot of guides of filtering out Referral traffic, but these are all coming in as Direct Load and are skewing our Direct Load results. Any idea how to filter or remove this traffic from Google Analytics?0 -
Senuke and traffic generator program is a good idea?? I think i got some problems now.
First of all thanks for reading, especially if you are the one whose bright ideas will help me out:) I started using senuke xcr about 3 months ago, obviously at the beginning i didnt make much success(not like I do now). Later i bought that inferno thingy and it actually works. First 2 weeks didnt make much difference(although i could see some little but stable uprising) but after 4th week ended, the average impression and queries doubled up, 6th went up again, its like every week or two it jumps up and keeps it there. Also the actual traffic from keywords went up! When about the second week finished, i started using a traffic generator program, first it leveled out the impressions and seemed to help a bit. Lately i think it messed it all up, plus about 2 weeks ago there was 2-3 dayswhen i sent a bit more traffic than usual and around that time the average rising of impressions didnt happened, it might even went down. Now i stopped using traffic g. and everything stayed the same no improvement!! Anyone could help me? I need to get it moving up again! Also im still nowhere near the top as the keywords are competitive well at least for me. What do i do wrong and what should i do? Also what about traffic generator? ps is it safe or/and or allowed to write that? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sugafree0 -
Webmaster tools traffic on one keyword dropped through the floor - ideas?
Hi there, We design and sell our own product range in a narrow niche, and we are also stocked by Amazon and a lot of other big retailers in the UK. During the first two weeks of Dec 2012 the position of one of our main keywords, which was in google SERPs on page 1 (8 or 9), dropped to page 4. The keyword describes the niche we're in. The drop is shown in the webmaster tools traffic report for that keyword. But it's the only one of our keywords where this has happened, and furthermore it hasn't happened for variations of the keyword. And in Adwords our quality score for the keyword is 10 For example say we were making and selling shopping trolleys - our keyword "shopping trolleys" has dropped through the floor, but "shopping trolleys (on) wheels" is just fine. Can anyone shed any light on what's going on here? Losing this one keyword has cost us some good organic traffic. i1uxSlB.png
Reporting & Analytics | | w1ll1am0 -
Moved Up in SERPS & Traffic, Need Help Converting
Hello, After listening to the advice of many of you on this forum, I have managed to move my site up in the SERPS, close enough to where I want/need to be. My traffic has increased heavily, yet I am still not seeing a large increase in orders being placed. I am positive that I have the lowest prices on these items, and the most information available about them, yet I still can't seem to convert a lot of this traffic into sales. Can you guys please take a look at my site and provide some guidance on what I can/should do to help convert these visitors to customers? my site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Prime850 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0 -
How much direct traffic is really direct?
Does anyone else think that a large chunk of traffic labelled as "Direct" in your analytics isn't direct at all. When you analyse traffic trends it seems that a large percentage could just be browsers with their referring URL hidden so it only appears direct. Here's the evidence: When we've been affected by major search algorithm changes, we've seen big changes in direct traffic as well as organic, but not in referral traffic. If direct traffic is just bookmarks, typed-in URLs, and people clicking through from emails why is direct traffic 85% new visitors? We don't do any offline advertising, so you'd expect genuine direct traffic to be returning visitors -- either our brand loyalists or subscribers to our email newsletters. If you segment direct traffic into new and returning visitors and look at a major algo update as discussed in 1), you find all the drop in direct traffic is from New Direct visitors, with no drop at all in Returning Direct visitors. Can anyone explain who these New, Direct visitors are if not simply mislabelled new, search visitors. Cookie deletion can't be the problem (ie: they can't be Returning, Direct really) because the traffic doesn't behave like returning, direct (that is, it varies too much). I'd be really interest to hear theories, and whether anyone has any figures on the extent of HTTP referrer blocking.
Reporting & Analytics | | Dennis-529610