50% Organic Traffic Drop In the last 48 Hours
-
Hello,
My site had a 50% decrease in the last 48 hours (9/26/18) and I looking for ideas/reasons what would cause such a dramatic drop. Year to year organic traffic has been up 40% and September was up 30%. The site has a domain authority of 39 according to Moz and keywords positions have been flat for a few months.
I made a change to the code and robots.txt file on Monday, pre-drop. The category pagination pages had a "NoIndex" with a rel =canonical and I removed the "NoIdnex" per: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html. I also removed "Disallow" in the robots.txt for stuff like "/?dir" because the pages have the rel =canonical. Could this be the reason for drop??
Other possible reasons:
1. Google Update: I dont think this is it, but ti looks like the last one was August 1st: "Medic" Core Update — August 1, 2018
2. Site was hacked
3. All of keyword positions dropped overnight: I dont think this is it because Bing has also dropped at the same percentage.Any help, thoughts or suggestions would be awesome.
-
Hi Chuck
As Donna also mentioned, there was a small update which was finally just confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-small-search-ranking-algorithm-update-this-past-week-306103#.W7AVMNe0y5g.twitter
So that is the most likely reason for the drop you saw.
As with any traffic change, I would recommend segmenting your traffic data by both queries and landing pages (this can both be done in search console) - to isolate which/if specific pages and keywords saw drops. If so, you can then determine if it was a site-wide drop, or specific to a set of pages and keywords. If site-wide, perhaps it is more technical related, but if keyword/page specific it could be more closely tied to the algo changes.
-
Search Engine Roundtable is reporting they're seeing indications of a possible update on 9/27.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-26437.html
I'd don't think the changes you made to robots.txt are the reason for the drop.
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
-
50 nofollow outbound links is too much?
Hello, I was reading that having many nofollow outbound links is bad for SEO. Could somebody give me an idea how many is "many"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabx0 -
Gradual Increase in Domain Authority After Domain Migration But No Improvement in Organic Traffic Yet
We migrated our domain in early April and simultaneously added an SSL certificate. Everything was done by the books. All redirects implemented perfectly, very few errors. Google notified via Search Console. Despite all steps being done perfectly our domain authority dropped from 24 to 8. Organic traffic dropped from about 80 per day to about 10. Each month domain authority increases by 2 or 3. We are now back up to a DA of 16. But no improvement in organic traffic yet. At what point should organic traffic start to return? Hopefully the consistent improvement in DA is a good sign. I have been told that adding SSL and moving the domain at the same time was a very bad idea. We are starting link building next week. Hopefully that will help further. Any ideas as to when this situation will improve? Needless to say it has been awful for our business.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Decline in organic but all other sources up--should i be worried?
We migrated to a new CMS in Feb (put in redirects as needed). Since the migration, organic traffic is down 11% YOY, but direct is up 22%, FB referrals up 1,000% and PPC up 500%. Page views are up 35%. Should I be worried about the decline in organic traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BGR0 -
Only The Google Plus URL Appearing In Organic Search (No Images or Info)
Just a quick one, when I search for my brand in Google I see my normal listing but the Google Plus URL is appearing on the right hand side as a link on it's own. I see that other brands have there company info pulled in here. Is there anything I can do to make it appear like other brands have it, (with the images, text, etc.)? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Dropped from Google?
My website www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk appears to have been penalised by Google. I ranked fairly well for a number of venue related searches from my blog posts. Generally I'd find myself somewhere on page one or towards the top of page two. However recently I found I am nowhere to be seen for these venue searches. I still appear if I search for my name, business name and keywords in my domain name. A quick check of Yahoo and I found I am ranking very well, it is only Google who seem to have dropped me. I looked at Google webmaster tools and there are no messages or clues as to what has happened. However it does show my traffic dropping off a cliff edge on the 19th July from 850 impressions to around 60 to 70 per day. I haven't made any changes to my website recently and hadn't added any new content in July. I haven't added any new inbound links either, a search for inbound links does not show anything suspicious. Can anyone shed any light on why this might happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Will I lose traffic from Google for re-directing a page?
I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches: 1) Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before. 2) Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages. I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Serps drop on 21st
Hi, This is my website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 Earlier i used to be on #1 and #3 page results for most of my results. But after 21st dec, my results went to 10th and 13th page of results. Is it due to latest panda update? http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-16121.html If so, can you guys examine my website and provide me your suggestions please... PS: i have followed only genuine kinda link buildings, my content is 100% unique. Will be waiting for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0