Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
-
Hi,
I'm unsure if I've been hit by penguin/panda. I've attached screenshots below. The first one is April 1st to today. The second is all of April and the 3rd is 1st June to today. The site was offline at the beginning of July which explains no traffic. My traffic took a dip though on April 6th which as I understand it wasn't a panda/penguin roll out? I then got hardly any traffic for May to mid June. Then the site was offline due to a server problem but when it came back on traffic was the highest it has ever been. Today however I am getting zero search engine traffic?
I can't figure out what's going on. Can anyone shed any light on the issue?
-
The directory /feed/ is for your RSS, this wont cause site wide drops in traffic so that isn't the problem.
If you have an RSS go to { http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/ }
-
In webmaster tools I have 5 access denied to urls that end in /feed/
-
As long as it is in the header.php and that header appears on every page of your site your ok.
-
I am using Wordpress and have analytics code installed in the header. Is that right?
-
Have you checked the source of traffic in your analytics report? That should be able to explain a lot.
Are you tracking SERPs (rank positions) for your site?
-
Thanks for your reply. I suppose it could possible be the 3rd April update. However that wouldn't explain how the traffic returns even stronger in July.
The site was offline for about 10 days. I do see search terms related to the click and have been receiving enquiries which leads me to believe the traffic sent is genuine.
All the pages are indexed in google but as of this morning I am getting no traffic whatsoever. As you can see apart from the site downtime I have always got a few clicks every day from long tail keywords. (just to confirm the site is up and working fine today but no traffic).
-
This looks like it could be a code issue, have you made sure that the analytic code is inserted correctly in either your header or footer. If you are 100% happy that you have it inserted correctly can you check through another source to see if you are getting traffic from them Bing or yahoo will do.
If Bing and Yahoo are producing traffic this might suggest that there is an issue with Google accessing your site, check your robots.txt to make sure that it isn't blocking Google accessing certain content.
Also check your keywords and indexed pages to see if they have dropped with your traffic.
-
Hiya,
Please look at the following link to find out the chronology of updates made by Google:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
I see an update that happened on 3rd April; this could possibly explain the dip in your site traffic in the 1st week of April.
Coming to your 2nd question, how long was your site offline? Do you see any indexed items of your website in Google?
Finally, for the spiked traffic in July, do you see any organic traffic details such as the keywords etc.? It could very well be malicious code or script that could be generating false views/hits on your site.
Thanks,
Rajesh Dhawan
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
-
Tracking 301 redirect traffic in Google Analytics
if I 301 redirect www.mywebsite.com to go to www.yourwebsite.com, how can I track the traffic in Google Analytics that is coming from mywebsite.com?? I don't think that's a referral traffic, is it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO0 -
Organic Traffic going to Direct? How to find the ultimative proof
Hi there, a few months ago we had a new site launch. As we operate internationally, visitors in different countries do get redirected to the specific country subfolder. e.x. domain.com/it Since site launch. Direct Traffic is performing really really well(almost to good to be true) while organic is doing decent but not more. I'm quite sure, that a part of direct belongs to the organic channel. Though now I need strong arguments to fight against our own web development team. Do you have any suggestions, where and how I can find strong evidence of my hypotheses? Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | ennovators0 -
Looking for a GA developer to block internal traffic and integrate with Snipcart JS API - paid
Hi There, We're looking for someone to help us setup: Blocking internal traffic using a custom dimension/query URL as described here: http://www.simoahava.com/analytics/block-internal-traffic-gtm/ Integrate Google Analytics ecommerce tracking with the Snipcart API as described here: https://snipcart.com/blog/integrating-snipcart-with-google-analytics-ecommerce-tracking Discuss Kiss Metrics and possibly integrate with Snipcart We're a small, 2 person startup so are ideally looking for a freelancer or small firm to help - Any recommendations or pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated. Cheers Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | cmscss0 -
How do i know that my website affected by Panda Updates ?
If website is affected by Panda updates then how do we know that? If have any type of tools or strategies or alert to find out affected website by Panda then update as soon as possible.
Reporting & Analytics | | renukishor0 -
Why would our client's site be receiving significant levels of organic traffic for a keyword they do not rank for?
We have a client that has received 100+ organic visits for the keyword 'airport transfers', yet the site does not rank in the top 100 search results for this keyword. We have checked that it is not untagged PPC traffic. Truly baffling. Can anybody help?
Reporting & Analytics | | mrdavidingram0 -
Organic Traffic From...Mountain View, CA?
I've noticed something a little odd in my organic search traffic lately. Looking at several websites that target the Minneapolis area, I'm seeing some organic searches come in (typically using head keywords - no geo-modifier) from Mountain View, CA. There's no way we are truly ranking well on these terms in California, so it certainly feels like Google sniffing around. I was worried that perhaps they were checking into penalizing us or something, but we've actually seen upticks in search traffic lately. This traffic is not showing up in Google Analytics, just Adobe SiteCatalyst. In the past, spikes from random locations were probably some sort of crawler, like the preview bot, but these are coming in as searches with (for now) keyword data. Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahLK0 -
Amazon.com inc.increase in direct traffic
Hi All, I have seen a increase of direct traffic from hostname amazon.com inc. This only happened on one day. Any ideas what/why it is? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sayers0 -
Segmenting traffic from referring sites in GA
Most of our traffic is from Referring sites, and in referring sites, job sites are sending most of the traffic. How can we segment traffic from job sites. There are about 40 such sites. We would like to receive a report which shows traffic excluding from these job sites.
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050