March 1st Decline in Visits and Pageviews
-
This site was upgraded from Joomla 1 to Joomla 3 and launched on Feb 27th. The SEF structure has not changed. The extension sh404sef tracks the 404s and there are only a few dozen from mistyped urls, so I have to assume the historical ranking has not been affected.
How can I figure out why there is such a decline on March 1st from 4400 to 1500 visits?
Is it coincidence after the new launch or did something happen with google on March 1st?
-
Hi Jeff,
This is truly bizarre. The news that there is no drop in Webmaster Tools is very good though - you'd see something similar there if there was truly a traffic drop as opposed to a tracking problem.
I see you are using different GA accounts for each site - have you contacted the host? When I have seen tracking problems in the past that did not match up to actual traffic, it was because the JS code to trigger the analytics visit was being delayed or stopped by something else running on the site. For example, a custom analytics package my former agency built for one of our clients was not being triggered upon page load for two reasons. One, a heavy Conversion Rate Optimisation JS package was loading further up the page and taking an extremely long time, and two - most visitors clicked quickly to a target page, before the CRO JS and our JS could load properly.
-
Jane,
The page source shows that the GA code is on every page.
Since this is happening to all 14 sites I am managing in GA, many that have had the same GA code for years, I have to assume it does not have to do with the installation.
GWT shows the same weekly cycle of impression from 1500 on Mondays to 900 on Saturdays. There is no additional drop on March 1st.
-
Hi Jeff,
This sounds like a problem with the GA installation rather than actual traffic if you are not seeing this in the log file analyser for all these sites. Sounds really basic but have you checked that the GA code is included properly across the sites, especially the pages that have gone from 400 daily visits to 0?
If you're also running ranking reports and not seeing a drop in rankings, then the issue is almost certain to be reporting rather than actual traffic.
Do you see a drop in impressions / clicks in Webmaster Tools too?
-
This is a critical issue for me.
Is there anyone here that can help me resolve this server wide decline?
Or help me track down why GA is showing the decline but AWstats is not?
-
What would cause all the sites on the same VPS to show a decline in visits on GA but not on the servers AWstats?
-
However, when looking at the visits using AWstats I do not see the sharp decline on March 1st that I see in GA.
-
I am going through all google analytics for the sites that I manage and are all hosted on my VPS at siteground.
These sites also had a decline on March 1st.
- http://admarneuro.com
- http://heartland-designs.com/
- http://www.lawofficesofdanielkaminsky.com/
- http://www.ocjoomlausergroup.org/
- http://www.primocraft.com/
- http://www.modernmagic.com/
- http://azbaa.org/
- etc.... I'll stop here since it appears that all are affected.
Now, I think we are getting to the root of the problem. It probably has to do with the host since every site shows the decline starting on March 1st.
Do you know what could make this happen on a VPS Cloud hosting account?
-
1. per GWT there is only 473 indexed from the sitemap. How do I gauge if the 1000 is accurate. When I search for site: transitionconsultants.com I see "About 7,300 results". Am I doing this wrong?
2. Is there any harm in resetting the URL params? Seems like a lot of URLs being monitored. Did you see the screenshot?
3. Since I am the new webmaster, I am not sure what the ranking was before or what key phrases they were ranking highly for. How do I figure this out?
-
After doing a "site:", I am seeing almost 1,000 pages indexed by Google. Does this sound about right?
It is possible parameters have changed, but I don't feel this is the issue.
What are you seeing when you look at your search phrases in the SERPs? Have key phrases dropped a bit, a lot or not at all?
-Andy
-
The previous webmaster had possibly set up all these URL parameters. I do not know if I should reset these as they were in place before the migration but maybe the parameters have changed and these are now dropping pages from the index.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/30q8ba7winj7tt8/Screenshot 2014-04-11 11.12.01.png
-
-
Sitemap appears to be ok
| | http://transitionconsultants.com/index.php?option=com_xmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1 | Sitemap | Apr 10, 2014 | - | Web | 487 | 473 |
-
"No manual webspam actions found."
-
Yes, new content has been added.
-
No new link-building.
-
OSE: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x1nlz93ghrrxmu1/Screenshot 2014-04-11 11.08.59.png
-
-
If it wasn't for the fact that this has happened just 3 days after the move, then I would have put this down to a Google penalty, without a doubt.
However, this would be one heck of a coincidence! I'm not ruling that out, but can't help but feel something else might have gone unchecked.
- Is the sitemap intact and correct?
- Have there been any manual actions in GWT?
- Has any new content been added?
- Has there been any link-building going on, or have you had a look at your link profile through Open Site Explorer?
-Andy
-
I just ran it through the Screaming Frog SEO Spider app and all 467 URLs are 200-OK.
All pages show the same decline from the same date.
And pages like this went from 400 pageviews to 0 on March 1st: http://transitionconsultants.com/practices-for-sale/dental-practices/
-
Hi Jeff,
Have you run the site through Screaming Frog to see if there has been anything inadvertently changed during the transition? It is more common than you might realise across many different platforms.
It might also be worth looking to make sure there are no canonical issues, pages accidentally noindexed, etc.
Outside of that, the last confirmed update was early February (Page Layout), so it is unlikely to have been this. That said, they are always tweaking and releasing new updates and refreshes, so it is very possible that that has also happened.
With the decline in visitors, is that for traffic across the board to all pages, or just to the homepage and for a specific phrase?
-Andy
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
-
Web traffic in steady decline since launching responsive design in July
The launch of the responsive design is the only event we can correlate to the beginning of the decline in overall visits to the website since July, however we're not sure if this is the issue. To give you some background, the website http://www.precisionpestcontrol.com.au/ is a pest control site in a highly competitive industry where there are many black hat tactics going on with huge keyword competition on a small range of keywords, however historically the website traffic for the above site has been gaining momentum. We create/ update 2 or 3 pages every month with rich content and post 8 blogs every month on pest control related topics. We have done the initial keyword research and all the keywords we used are medium to high volume terms. We don't do any black hat tactics or dodgy link building, we have invested time submitting the site to legitimate business listings in the past. It just seems strange that all of a sudden we go responsive and start to lose searchengine traffic. Possible Issues What we've been able to find so far were some pages that were not redirected properly, probably about 5, and 2 pages that seemed to lead to a 404 error. These have only just been fixed recently, otherwise the mobile site has been functioning effectively. Could this be the reason we have been in decline over the past few months? We also seem to have lost a whole lot of external links somehow, the external link measurement in MOZ has gone from 1500, up to 6,000 then down to 300 or so in the space of a few months. Basically we're trying to figure out what we're doing wrong, or what we can do to try and stop the decline of visits. We've checked the algorithm updates and don't think that Panda or the shift to the Google AI would have penalised us, but then again we could be wrong. Any advice anyone could offer would be hugely appreciated. Happy to provide any data for anyone to have a look at.
Reporting & Analytics | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Deleted Rarely Visited Pages - Traffic Dropped (Big Time)
Hi folks: I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts. We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year. As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year. This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year. Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site. We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month. I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics. I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages. Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now. Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it? Thanks very much
Reporting & Analytics | | jnfere0 -
Direct traffic decline
I've noticed a few of our sites (tour, hotel, and local attraction) which are very established and reasonably high brand recognition that have experienced a significant decrease in branded traffic (-20-30% compared to same period from the previous year) the past few months. There have been no changes in offline marketing though we are seeing a slight decrease in visitor arrivals (-5%) and higher hotel room rates. Is there a chance that Google's not set may be affecting direct traffic numbers? Any other thoughts on how we can figure out why brand traffic is dipping? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | SoulSurfer80 -
Conversion Rate Question: Should I Measure Visits or Unique Visits?
When you measure conversion rates, is the equation: conversion rate = visits/conversions or conversion rate = unique visits/conversions I ask because it can actually make a pretty big difference in the conversion rate. For example, if you visit my ecommerce website 100 times before buying something (and assuming you're my only visitor), then my conversion rate is 100% _if I'm determining conversion rates by unique visits/conversions. _However, it's only 1% _if I'm determining conversion rates by visits/conversions. _Wow! Now this is clearly an extreme example, but it should serve to illustrate the point that in more reasonable cases, the way the data is measured can have a potentially significant impact on the conversion rate. Is there an industry standard for this? Am I missing something really basic? Also, here's a little bit of context for the question: I run an ecommerce website powered by the Magento CMS and I'm trying to measure my conversion rate in Google Analytics for individual products. Google Analytics shows me my site wide conversion rate, but apparently I have to do some customization in order to measure conversion rates on the product level. That's fine, but I want to make sure I'm measuring my product conversions in a standard way. Thanks for any and all help! Adam
Reporting & Analytics | | Adam-Perlman0 -
SEOMoz crawls skewing Avg Visit Duration in Google Analytics
Hello, We are a UK based company. Our Google Analytics account is showing a rise in Avg Visit Duration for 'Direct traffic' since we started using SEOMoz. Are any other users experiencing this issue? We tracked it down to City Seattle, and when doing an Advanced filter by removing Seattle, the results are normal again. What does SEOMoz or other users recommend we do besides continuously using advanced filters? We have enquired about excluding Roger's IP address, but have been told that Roger uses the Amazon cloud, so the IP is not static. See attachment for screenshot of our Google Analytics account of Avg Visit Duration since we began with SEOMoz. Rich Talbot 718g3.gif
Reporting & Analytics | | STL1 -
Page Rank Decline in Webmaster Tools
Hello Forum, My team and I just got through completely redoing an eCommerce website for a yoga company and I noticed that in Google Webmaster Tools our site's average daily position changed from ~25 to ~40 in the last 5-6 days (during this time period we submitted our sitemap). I exported the Webmaster Tools results and found a high number of new keywords (which weren't there pre-launch) related to yoga. However, these keywords are not related to the products we sell. Several of these keywords have positions of 240 or higher and are skewing our avg page rank. These terms include words like "cricket logo," "animal yoga," "dog pose," "cat yoga," We did move our blog into our domain name now and there are some articles related to animal poses. Any thoughts as to what may be going on? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pano0 -
How Can a Page Have More Unique Pageviews than Total Pageviews?
The question and the attached image say it all... how is this possible? 2v1uo8w.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | glennfriesen0 -
Sort referring sites by visit change over time comparison in GA
I can't believe I've never done this before, so I'm going to assume that I previously must have figured it out via excel, but I'm hoping there's an easier way. So I want to compare the referring sites between April and May and see which have sent (specifically) less traffic. The problem with doing a comparison in GA is that it only sorts by the highest traffic for May, when actually I want to see the largest negative change (by number, not percentage) between April and May. Is there a way to do this via the dashboard or am I just going to have to play about in excel for 10 minutes?
Reporting & Analytics | | StalkerB0