My direct traffic went up and my organic traffic went down. Help!
-
So on Oct. 21, our direct traffic increased 3x and our organic traffic decreased 3x. And it has been that way ever since. Almost like they flip flopped. Additionally, that was the same day I started retargeting to our site. I have tagged all the links from the ads and they're being counted as google paid clicks in GA. And our accounts are linked. I am just dumbfounded as to how this could happen.
-
Hey Arnold Ambiel,
cheguei a esse tópico porque estava tendo um problema como o seu. O tráfego orgânico e direto foram revertidos. Vi que você tinha esse problema em 2016 e o meu ocorreu em junho.
Você encontrou alguma solução para esse problema? -
haven't checked yet but did find this article about serp sitelink changes on the exact day i saw traffic drop.
-
Awh, shucks! Thanks for the kind words!
I look forward to seeing what you find! Let me know if I can help any further!
Regards,
Trenton -
It's contributions like Trenton's above that make me love the Moz community. I will check all that you suggested and report back.
-
I'm going to chime in here as the conversation has already started from which I want to reference a few items.
While Sean is correct that there is a redirect on page load, - which is weird & not likely optimal - the redirect isn't causing the UTM parameters to be dropped here.
If you check the Network tab of the debug console of Chrome you'll see the two requests for the URI you listed above. If you click the requested file (in the network tab) & navigate to the 'Headers' tab you will see that Query String Parameters are still there & being passed.
Now let's circle back to the original problem & see if we can't get to the bottom of it!I checked out the graph you linked and while it does seem that there's an inverse correlation there, I wouldn't assume too quickly that they switched. I would encourage you to dive into the data a little bit more. Specifically:
-
I would use Google Search Console's Search Analytics (the actual interface, not the section in Google Analytics) & look to see if the number of clicks around that same time changed much.
-
If there is a noticeable change, dive into the keywords & Landing Pages that saw the shift
-
If there is not a noticeable change, we can cross an actual organic change off our list.
-
I would also look at the change over that period in GA's landing page report. Look to see if there are any pages that saw a gain/loss over the period in question.
-
If there is, add a secondary dimension of medium & see where the change lies
-
If not, mark it off
-
The final door I would check is the changes that were made for remarketing
-
What if any changes were made within Google Analytics? Specifically the admin portion, while I'd check all changes you may have made here, I'm specifically curious if you may have added the URL Query Parameters as exclusions?
-
Were any tags, tracking codes, etc added during this time & are the implementations correct?
If you dive into these and summarize your findings here, I'll be more than happy to help you further. Though, I have a hunch that the answer is behind one of these doors.
Good luck!
Trenton -
-
thought i'd add the GA graph that shows the switch
-
so would a JS redirect make the session count as direct traffic?
-
Hey,
It looks like there was a JS redirect in place that redirects users to a fresh page view of the same page - don't know if this might be something having an effect?
I used Ayima Redirect Tool for chrome to find this - see the screenshot attached.
Hope this helps,
Sean
-
Thanks Sean!
Here is the final URL:
http://www.oneworldplayproject.com/buy-bulk-soccer-balls/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=bulk&utm_content=bulk10&utm_term=300Here is the URL in the ad that people could type in. This is a redirect to the www. version:
oneworldplayproject.comAlso, these are only image ads so there is no display URL being shown.
I am also curious why Organic would drop though. But let's play this out first.
-
Hi there,
Although you say you've tagged your ad traffic correctly, it sounds like your UTM tracking isn't set up correctly - 95% of the time wrong tracking from ads forces a sudden unnatural increase in Direct traffic. The other possibility is that you're sending traffic to a page that's then redirecting to your site which may trim off the UTM tagging and force the traffic as 'Direct'.
Give me an example of one of the URLs you've tagged up and I'll see if anything is going wrong.
All the best,
Sean
-
direct traffic can be from bookmarks and such, as well as it could depend on proper implementation of ads and retargetting too.
That does seem a bit odd of a coincidence though, I have never dealt with such a switch scenario like that and to that degree, I have only seen more negligible or at least less worrisome amount of such changes in the past which we ended up not spending time to find out what was the underlying sitch with it as it corrected itself as a trend after a short period of time.
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
-
301 re-direct affect on SERPS
Hi Moz Community, please can I hit you with a scenario and get your thoughts? We have a client site - clientsite.com - with reasonable rankings for some of our client's target search terms/branded terms. We have built language specific subdomains - it.clientsite.com, de.clientsite.com - which have been manually translated into local languages. These subdomains have robots 'noindex' as we only want to drive traffic to clientsite.com. We've installed a geo location tool on clientsite.com that 301s visitors to the appropriate subdomain, so content is served in their local language. clientsite.com will be the 'catch all' for locations where sub domains have not yet been created. If Google crawls clientsite.com and is 301ed to a sub domain, will we lose SERPS? The sub domains will have the same content (99% the same content anyway) as clientsite.com, but in local languages. Cheers guys. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviechat1 -
How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site once this happens?
Hi, we will be moving a clients’ site address from one domain to another and will of course be doing 301 redirects and notifying Google of the site address change in WMT. The problem is, that at some point in the future (say 3-6 months), the old domain will be going live with a new site as the current client does not own the domain and the owner will be wanting it back unfortunately. How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site (new domain) once this (old domain with new site) happens? Will the site address change be enough to keep the rankings but it will lose backlink traffic? Or will rankings go down since the 301 redirects will in essence no longer be in affect? Many thanks for your help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSIDW0 -
Can someone help me understand why this page is ranking so well?
Hi everyone, EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality. Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC" This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site. The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc. The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it? Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags? There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares. It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site. Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
Organic listings disappeared I don't know why!
Brief history: I am MD of a medium sized health organisation in the UK. We have one of the leading websites in the world for our industry. We were hit by a Google algorithm update last year (Penguin or Panda, I can't remember, but that's not relevant here I don't think) and our daily visits went down from around 10,000 to around 5,000 in two separate hits over a couple of months. Then there was a steady decrease to about 3,000-4,000 visits a day until we totally updated the design of the site and did some good work on the content. We have always been white-hat and the site has around 3,000 pages with unique content added daily. So things have really been on the up for the past couple of months. We have been receiving around 6,000 visits a day in recent weeks (a slow incline over the past few months), until Sunday. Sunday morning around 10am all of our organic listings pretty much disappear, including for our brand name. Monday morning a few come back, including our brand name and our main, most competitive keyword, which we were showing up on the third page for and we returned to this page. Then Tuesday morning another few of our most competitive keywords show up, back where they were before. This includes images which had disappeared from Google images. Our PPC and business listings were not really affected at all. My developer submitted a site map through webmaster tools on Monday morning and I'm not sure if this is the reason pages started to show up again. In our Webmaster tools the indexed pages are about a quarter of all of the ones on the site - all pages were indexed before. I just don't know what has happened! It doesn't make any sense as 1. Google don't seem to have rolled out any algorithm updates on that day 2. we do not have any messages in Webmaster Tools 3. a number of our main keywords have re-appeared - why would that happen if we had been hit by a Google update?! Our organic hits, which previously made up about 80% of all our hits, have gone down by 80% and this is drastically affecting business. If this continues it is likely we will have to downsize the business and I'm not sure what to do. When I saw that the 'indexed pages' in Webmaster tools started to increase (they were around 600 on Monday, around 900 yesterday and then this morning, around 1,300), I thought that we were on our way up and maybe this problem would just resolve itself and our listings would re-appear, but now our indexed pages have reduced slightly since this morning, back down to around 1,100 so the increase has stalled. Can anybody help?! Do you have any idea what could be causing this? Apparently there have been no changes made to robots.txt and my developer says that no changes were made that could have affected our listings. ANY ADVICE WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH11 -
Rich Snippets - Aggregated Review in Organic Search
Hi All, Let’s say you are a service provider such a Garden Landscaper, and over time your customers have placed reviews on Google Local Places. As part your sites redesign your looking to implement "Rich Snippets Aggregated Reviews". Your organic natural search results should include the reviews; aggregated star picture, aggregated review value and total reviews. Question #1 Is this possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
#2 What is the best way of achieving this via Wordpress as a plugin?
#3 Do you need to file for consideration via Google? Any other useful advice will be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Organic Links and Skimlinks Affiliate Program
Hi All, If you're not familiar with Skimlinks, what they do is turn organic links into affiliates links so that publishers can earn commission through our affiliate program. Pretty much every SEO's nightmare. myfashionlife.com/archives/2013/07/16/get-anne-hathaways-paper-denim-and-cloth-look/ anchor text "Floppy straw hat" Looking at the source code the link looks clean, but as soon you click on it you get redirected via a 302 to our site. My questions is; is it just users that get redirect or is it the same for search engines? Screaming frog recognises the link as a 200. Are we losing all the link juice, or is it fine? I've have half a mind to kick them out of the program. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Help Me find a Great Seo for my Budget!
I am looking for a Good SEO for my tech news site and would like your help in recommending a good SEO that will fit in my budget of 300-500 per month.I have contacted many firms in the Moz directory of recommended firms but found they are out of my monthly price range.Google search for a decent SEO can be scary with so many so called SEO companies.I would like to work with a experienced SEO individual who can come up with a great plan for our site and also implement them.We just had a SEO forensic audit done with Alan Blieweiss and implemented his suggestions and are now looking for someone to work with long term for the rest of our SEO needs.I understand that I cannot afford the top SEO firms or industry leaders but with your help and suggestions I am sure we can afford and find a great SEO. Please reply here or message me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisyak0 -
My Domain rank is falling but my traffic is improving?
I have been here for one month today and have been reworking many pages to improve my On-Page results for my site www.antiquebanknotes.com I have seen some really nice improvement in my organic, search and non paid keywords. (up 38%, 21% and 29% this week) But last week all of a sudden my domain authority dropped from 10 to 9. Not tragic but still odd since I have been getting some decent results from my optimazations. My competitors have domain authority in the 20's so it's something I am sure I need to work on. I have added links out to relevant sites and added lots of content but my domain authority falls? Is this common when a site makes lots of changes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0