Huge and sudden fall in SEO traffic
-
Hi,
I’m writing you because we have noticed in Google Analytics account, a huge fall in the SEO traffic of mywebsite, starting suddenly in one precise day.
The difference between this day and the previous one is: -46,36% . Traffic has fallen in all parts of the site in the same way. Some details:
- we did not make any relevant change to the website
- we haven’t been banned by Google (or we don’t have any message about it in GWT)
- the number of the landing pages remains approximately the same
- the number of indexed keywords falls from 9.000 to 4.000.
- around 2 weeks ago we found out around 120 pages with 404 error, but the error now is solved and the pages are currently working
- we open the content to Google about 4 months but still we have not published our Site Map.
I know that the 404 error could could affect the indexation, but do you have any other idea, apart of this, of what could have happened? Thanks!
-
Agree.
Didn't saw any changes in our german website...
-
The 404 errors aside, which are certainly prime suspects for the drop - did the drop occur at the same time as a drop in your competitors rankings too? I recently noticed a 10 position drop for a major keyword and checked the Ranking History for that particular keyword and noticed that at all three of the competitors I initially submitted when I setup my campaign had all dropped an equal (or greater) number of positions for that particular keyword in the same week. Which would suggest to me that a change to Google algorithm has taken place and affected us all equally, rather than as a direct result of changes made to my website content or any temporary issues with the site which would prevent Search engines from crawing the site.
Whilst I am still suffering as a result of this drop it is good to see that it wasn't isolated to my site and therefore likely to be as a result of content changes or technical problems.
-
Candida,
We will need more details from Google analytics in order to determine a more likely cause for the problem. As Daniel suggested, it could be the Farmer Update if these changes occurred over the past month, but it could be something else.
What I suggest you do is view the entrance sources for the actual pages that received the drop in traffic. What keywords specifically received this hit? What keywords didn't? What sort of optimization did you do for the keywords that received the hit?
-
It would be helpful to see the domain so we could analyze the existing link profile. Depending on link types, anchor text percentages, and linking sites there could be a plenty of reasons the recent algo updates earmarked your domain.
Are you using an exact match domain?
Are the majority of your links one type? (Article dirs, blog comments, blog networks, etc.)
What have your search query reports showing recently? (Impressions, Click-thru rates, rankings)
-
Hi Candida, I'm wondering how your rankings are doing now that it's been a few weeks since the (possibly coincidental) update. Have you recovered any traffic? Did you figure out any reasons for the drop?
-
Search results can differ when logged into search engines, so make sure you compare results when you're logged out. After Google indexes your site again and finds the 404s gone, I'm sure you'll work your way back up.
-
Check your recent back link structure. A change in Google's algorithims could have render certain key words as not ranking because they are now considered to have an artificial linking structure.
-
Though it appears her website is targeted at Spain, and the Farmer/Panda update was aimed at US sites at that time, so that may not be the issue.
Can't reply to myself so will edit and correct. I should have said that the update was targeted to users in the US, not sites in the US, so she would need to see if it was just visitors from the US that dropped off to see if it was this update.
-
Yes, the fall has been the same in all sections of the web
-
Thanks I had no clue about this. Better check my feed more eh? That guy definitely thumbed down you lol
-
Do you track any of your rankings? Have they fallen by a uniform amount?
-
There was this pretty major algorithm update over the weekend called the Farmer Update. You can read more about it from Search Engine Land here:
http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071
If this applies to you, then it would definitely explain the drop in traffic.
-
My first thought is to check two things:
-
make sure the Google Analytics code is still present (and correct) on all your pages.
-
Check to make sure there aren't any new filters being applied to your Analytics account.
-
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
-
How to handle SEO redirection after remove www
Recently our https://bestclassifiedsusa.com free classifieds USA website we move from www to non www format. Now old urls still showing in Google SERP. When click they show 404 error pages due to removed old ads.
Technical SEO | | bcuclassifieds
We redirect www to non www version for main domain but still old cache pages affected.
How to dynamically handle this case, all old www version ads pages auto redirect to relevant category pages?0 -
What to do about this subdomain for SEO?
This is a bit of an unusual structure and I'm having difficulty explaining the question so pardon my being a 'noob', haha. The website I'm working on has some content under Forums that is hosted on another domain. The main website is https://yournorthside.org.au/ and if you select under the main Nav > Forums > Lived Experience it will take you to https://yournorthside.saneforums.org/t5/Lived-Experience-Forum/ct-p/lived-experience-forum. So it's as if it's a subdomain. (notice even the appearance of the main menu changes, weird) Apparently, saneforums.org has a requirement for that content to be on that subdomain. So therefore it's not part of my sitemap and now crawled or indexed. My question is is this structure okay? What are the implications for SEO? Should I be looking to implement some type of no follow link or something? Or is it actually beneficial in terms of all their content gives us 'link juice'? Can you link me to any resources / articles that give further insight?
Technical SEO | | kelseyc0 -
Loading images below the fold? Impact on SEO
I got this from my developers. Does anyone know if this will be a SEO issue? We hope to lazy-load images below the fold where possible, to increase render speed - are you aware of any potential issues with this approach from an SEO point of view?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng1 -
E-ccomerce SEO conundrum
I work on the marketing for an eccomerce website. And lately we have been having an issue with the "wrong" page ranking and the right page "being nearly unfindable." For example the product bit o honey - there is a brand page, category page and individual product pages. We want the category page to be the top level bit o honey "hub" page and have placed all of the products onto it. We've written a nice description about Bit O Honey on that page and spent time running social campaigns around that page to try and get social activity on page as well. There have even been a few back links from blogs or reviews onto that category page. It also has the highest page authority among all of the bit o honey pages. But for some odd reason it is always the absolute last result among the 3 options when i search? In fact the only time I can even find it is if I type in about 3 sentences worth of text from that page and it find exact match. I'm really pretty confused as to why the highest page authority page with the most content, activity and link profile, would have the worst ranking capability among the three nearly identical pages.
Technical SEO | | Jonathan_Murrell0 -
Traffic drop with no explaination
Hello Everyone, I made a post a few months ago about one of my sites, Poker On A Mac dropping off the face of google. I found out that it was hacked, and redirecting traffic from google to other, pharmacy websites. Doing some research, I found out it was the WordPress PharmaHack, and we ended up recovering from it. Now, since October 23rd traffic has went down again mainly organic traffic, I tried to see if it was hacked again, with the same thing and their was nothing I noticed. I was wondering if anyone could give me any insights as to why this happened? Thanks Zach CwFda.png
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Buying new domains to help with SEO
Hi, Does buying new keyword related domains and 301 redirect them to my site have any seo benefit?
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Site forwarding - seo friendly or not?
Recently i decided to change my domain name - and although i have written several useful and working .htacess files with 301 redirects, this one became more complicated by the fact that I went through TWO domain name changes, before settling on the second one. Having seen some issues with the browser not being able to interpret correctly the .htaccess file, i temporarily suspended the .htaccess file, and opted instead for site forwarding. I don't know the mechanics behind site forwarding, or whether it is seo friendly or just a method for ip addressing, a sort of pseudo domain name server record change.
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites
I let it lie for a few weeks, until the dust settled, and yesterday put back the basic .htaccess file, with a 301 redirect, which directs the original domain name to be forwarded to the new one ( also it has a conditional in place to solve canonical issues). It works fine. But right now i am not seeing the link juice, the domain age, the domain page rank that it has. It has gone to zero, when it used to be three, sometimes four. I also made the change of address using webmaster tools. How long ( forever?) will it take to see my old page rank come back, even if it loses 10% from the change? And does site forwarding help or hinder seo ranking?0 -
Advertising and negative impact on SEO
On one of my sites, I've been trying to get the word out by contacting blogs and asking them to share my site with their readers. This has resulted in some free publicity for my site, as well as quite a few paid reviews/sponsored posts. Note, however, that I've never paid for links, just reviews of my site... When I started this about 2 months ago, my site was a PR3 and getting fairly lowsy organic search traffic (i.e. 30-40 visits a day from Google). Then a few days ago, my PR dropped to 1. I didn't worry too much though, because my organic traffic was still around 30-40 visits a day. Now today, I checked and I only had 1 visitor the entire day from Google. Obviously I've been penalized. My most important question is, what can I do? Do I have an recourse, or do I need to just shut the domain down and move elsewhere? Second, wtf is Google penalizing this? I understand the argument against paid links, but should I not be allowed to advertise my site? Apparently I can buy links all day long through Google and they'll happily take my money, but the minute I pay some poor blogger to write an article about my site to their audience, I get penalized? Please help, I can't believe I just destroyed one of my sites like this!
Technical SEO | | dustin9990