Site traffic halved not sure why
-
Hi guys, not sure if anyone can help, but we had a client's google organic traffic literally halve from the week at the end of August to September (29 Aug 2016 to be precise) and it hasn't recovered since (here's a screenshot from GA http://puu.sh/sAmd3/b071dd1e57.png) I've been doing a lot of digging around on Moz and elsewhere about any Google updates that may have gone through around that time and there doesn't seem to be anything that I would think would affect it. I thought it might be to do with Penguin, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A while ago before then we did have some domains and pages 301 redirected to the main site when multiple other sites were rolled into the one, but I wouldn't have thought that should affect it. After that I've also gone and removed all those sites and redirects too (couple of weeks ago) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. There's no black hat SEO done on the site so very odd to have this happen. I'm rather out of ideas what it could be that has impacted things so suddenly and that we couldn't get it recovered from. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
-
Hi Martjin,
Yes, this is the first thing I checked. In fact I checked it in GA > Acquisition > Search Console which enables you to filter the data quite well by regex. What I found is that it's pretty much across the board with the homepage as well as individual product pages taking a hit of around 50% reduction. It's definitely NOT traffic on a few higher volume keywords as the major drop that's hurt quite a lot is traffic to individual product pages. That indicates to me that it seems to be some kind of a site-wide penalty. I did also notice that traffic to product print pages (where the product is in a print-friendly format) effectively went from say 300 to like 30 (and probably not much can be done there), but it's the overall traffic from SERPs that's more concerning, particularly to long-tail product pages. So I'm pretty confident it's some sort of a penalty, but no idea why it's would be applied besides what I've already flagged in my original post
-
Hi,
So did you check in Google Search Console if there are any more errors that you noticed or any volume in terms of keywords that has gone up or down? Usually with your amount of weekly traffic it could be a penalty but it's also still very likely that just your traffic on a couple of higher volume keywords went down and that's what you're seeing in your analytics data.
Another thing could be to check what kind of landing pages from organic search were affected so you can get a better sense of what's happening across your site. Because with this decline it seems unlikely to me that potentially all your pages were affected.
Martijn.
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
-
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
Ecommerce sites we own have similar products, is this OK?
Hello, In one of our niches, we have a big site with all products and a couple more sites that are smaller niches of the same niche. The product descriptions are different with different product names. Is this OK. We've got one big site and 2 smaller subsides in different niches that cross over with the big site. Let me know if Google is OK with this. We will have a separate blog for each with completely different content. There's not really duplicate content issues and although only the big site has a blog right now, the small ones eventually will have their own unique blog. Is this OK in Google's eyes now and in the future? What can we do to ensure we are OK? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW1 -
Substantial drop in organic traffic and keyword rankings
My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information. KDc8dMp fyVtrYo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kheberger0 -
Different site behind the flag
Hello, I am in a very complicated situation. I have a site in Itaian which is targeted in Italy by webmaster tools so the majority of the organic traffic comes from there and everything is fine. However this site got a link from a major international site. So now I get traffic from all over the world but I can't take advantage of it. From the Italian traffic I get from this site I see high pageviews numbers and many minutes in average visitor time. The problem in this situation is that for many reasons this website cannot be translated so I can put many language choices in this site. I want to ask, If I put, let's say an English flag in top of my site, that will indicate the English language, but instead of the user to see an English version of the site he/she will be redirected(no follow link) to another site of the same content in English, will this violate any of Google's guideline or hurt the seo of the original site? Thank you all!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Why did this fabric site disappear for "fabric" and why can't we get it back?
Beverlys.com used to rank on the first page for "fabric." I'm trying to get the date of their demise, but don't have it yet so I can't pinpoint what Google update might have killed them but I can guess. In doing a backlink analysis, there were hundreds of poor quality, toxic sites pointing to them. We have carefully gone through them all and submitted a disavow request. They are now on page 9 from nowhere to be found a week ago. But, of course, that's not good enough. They are on page 2 for "fabric online" and "quilt fabric." So Google doesn't completely hate them. But doesn't love them enough even for those terms. Any suggestions? They are rebuilding the site to use a different ecommerce platform with new content and new structure. They will also be incorporating the blog within the site and I've advised them on many other ways to attract traffic and backlinks. That's coming. But for now, any suggestions and help will be much appreciated. Something has got to be holding them back for that one gem of a keyword. Also, I would like to know what experiences others have had with the disavow request form. Does Google absolutely hold you to making every attempt you can at getting those links removed? ANd how does it know? No one responds so it seems to be such a waste of time. And many now actually charge to remove your links. Thoughts? Thanks everyone!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Obscene anchor text linking to non-existent pages on my site
My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene. Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinDS0 -
Many sites added some excerpts of my Blog post and linking back ? Most of them are Spamy site !
Many sites added some excerpts of my Blog post and linking back ? Most of them are Spamy site ! Some are great blogs, but some blogs just copy some excerpts and link back to them - which i never approve. Will it affect my blog. i ask them to remove it. no use. !
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Esaky0 -
Should this site be punished?
Every summer for the past 4 years one of our customer's competitors suddenly has a big jump in Google's (.co.uk) rankings for some of the main industry phrases, particularly "air conditioning". We were always under the impression that they bought links before the busy summer season, as they have these strange massive jumps in the rankings. (for the rest of the year they often drop down) I recently checked out some of the back-links going to their site and noticed something I'd not seen before. Of the (approx) 480 links that showed up, around 80% of the SourceURL's ended with "?Action=Webring" (see 1st attached image). To me it doesn't look natural at all and I'm surprised that Google hasn't picked up on. Their site is www.aircon247.com. It had been mentioned to me that this may be to do with link sharing sites (which I assume is black-hat) but I'm not 100% sure that they are doing this. They also have an identical long spammy-looking footer at the bottom of every page which is clearly only for search engines to see. We reported it to Google a year ago but no action was taken. Do you think that it is acceptable to have it on every page? (see 2nd attached image) I would be interested to know your thoughts on both of these, and whether this would be a dangerous tactic to try and emulate? Gc5MU.png iXGA9.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | trickshotric0