Organic Traffic Down March-April 2016
-
Hello MOZ Community!
I have been scouring the web to try and assess what may be responsible for our sites traffic decline which fell off quite suddenly between March and April of this year. While I have heard of two specific things that may have impacted us:
- The Mobile-Friendly update (April 2016)
- Phantom Update (May 2016)
I would like to share what we have tried to uncover ourselves, and would welcome your thoughts/feedback on what may have happened, thoughts on repairing the rank damage, and in general.
In May we noticed a large cooling off of our organic searches from Google, the largest a >30% occured in June, but on average we're seeing a trend of 23% less visitors from organic search than only months prior. Paired with this was a decrease in overall visibility, like a number of pages were struck from indexing.
- The number of URLs ranked in the Top 100 listings dropped by ~ 32% at the beginning of April
- We review our visibility with SISTRIX's Visibility Index tool, which showed a visibility plummet of almost 50% between mid-March and mid-April
- Traffic, until towards the end of July, early August has remained low and now only really returning to normal levels in the past few days.
All that said, we're puzzled by what would cause such a sharp decline in visibility > organic search. Regarding the known/unknown Google Updates, while our primary site is responsive, we do have a number of old help/support pages that are not responsive – So that is one theory, but I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you have, or to know if anyone else experienced a drop within the same timeframe.
-
It is highly unlikely that responsiveness would impact your search rankings at such a high percentage. Unfortunately, without knowing much more about your site it would be hard to look into it. Feel free to PM me more info and Id be happy to take a look.
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
-
Direct To Site Traffic Decline
Hi Everyone, My company's site went from Http to Https and responsive design last year. After 6 months passed, we noticed a 40% decline from direct visits but revenue saw an increase. Could the 301 redirects from Http to Https cause the drop in direct traffic? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JMSCC1 -
How to submit Google xml sitemap properly in 2016?
Hello everyone!
Technical SEO | | SEObd
I'm new in the field of SEO. I'm looking for submitting XML web site guideline or tutorial. But there is no proper guideline. All of the tutorials are about the wordpress website. What should I do for my PHP website? Can I submit XML site map without help of developer? Please help me.0 -
Drop in traffic at start of December 2014
Hello! I've noticed a drop in organic Google traffic to our ecommerce site. The drop started on the 1st December 2014. The difference compared with last year is around -25%. I've taken a look at landing pages for the organic Google traffic: Homepage: -40%
Technical SEO | | Bike_Co-op_Webmaster
Product pages: -31%
Category pages: -7%
Blog pages: -7% On the 1st December our site was down for a few hours in the early morning for some scheduled maintenance. I got a couple of emails from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that there was an "Increase in server errors" and "Googlebot can't access your site". Once the site maintenance was complete there haven't been any further emails from Google about this. I doubt the site being down is the cause of the drop in traffic. I suspect it may have been caused by the latest Penguin updates around the end of November 2014. Can anyone advise if this sounds like it is the cause, and why the homepage and products pages have been hit so severely? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!0 -
Redesigning client website and will be losing a lot of landing pages. How to avoid tanking search traffic?
We are working with a client who is changing the direction of the company's marketing efforts. The current site includes many (approx 100) pages for each partner they work with (each partner has its own page). The new site will be losing many of these and we want to be sure we don't destroy organic traffic/rankings in the process. These landing pages don't directly garner the most traffic but it will definitely be a big change in the size of the site. Any advice for how to best handle the redesign is appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | KMofOutlier0 -
On March 10 a client's newsroom disappeared out of the SERPS. Any idea why?
For years the newsroom, which is on the subdomain news.davidlerner.com - has ranked #2 for their brand name search. On march 10 it fell out of the SERPs - it is completely gone. What happened? How can I fix this?
Technical SEO | | MeritusMedia0 -
Site getting referral traffic from its self
Buon giorno from zero degrees C freezing fog Wetherby UK On this site http://www.collegeofphlebology.com i ran a referral report via Google Analytics and was surprised ro see referral traffic being counted from its own url, illustration here http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/referral-anomoly.jpg So my question is please how can a site get referral traffic from the same url? Grazie Tanto, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
90% traffic loss. Pandalized?
Happened several times during this year. After launch as soon as we reach exactly 100K uniques Google kills 90% of the traffic. Then sudden recovery (pretty much without any action from us) after several weeks not connected to any algo updates/refresh. No warnings. No malware. WMT clean as a baby. Only old good whitehat SEO. Not even close to the edge of wrongdoing:) This time it happens again Aug. 22nd right after Panda 3.9.1. What is different now same exact date Bing traffic went down as well. http://bit.ly/eEu27I Need advice:)
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
How to achieve product extensions in organic serps
I have noticed some interesting changes in how google are returning searches for specific branded products. In this case 'tom ford glasses' position 12 result has three product extensions (see image) This is similar to the product extensions which occasionally occur on adwords. Have you seen this happen and if so any ideas how it all works? TR3nz
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0