Big drop in traffic on 18 Oct
-
Hi mozzers,
One of my client’s sites has a big drop in traffic. The site is topdealshotel.com. The drop was in 18 Oct and I know that there weren’t any algo changes.
The site has 20+ language versions all optimized properly for all languages. In june I made some big changes in site’s structure and I also changed all URLs.
After these new improvements the organic traffic started to grow naturally and very good, but dropped drastically in last 30 days.
Unfortunately I couldn’t 301 old URLs into new ones and in WMT at crawl stats I have almost 2 million 404 errors.
The site has many hotel pages with content that is from hotelscombined.com, but we also add our own content for all pages.
In city pages we have unique content, written by our copywriters. I also made a reconsideration request and there was no manual penalty. I do not have any idea for this drop in traffic. Do you have any suggestions?
-
i did the cleanup before the dropdown.. this was the firs thing i did after i upload new version of website and i sent the new sitemaps...
-
when did you do the cleanup. Might take some time before you bounce back in the results.
-
URLs were removed from WMT and blocked from robots.txt but they still appear i can't redirect them
-
Tudor, google did do 2 updates in Oct, the Penguin # 3 and the Page Layout # 2 , details here
The errors on your WMT might have something to do with it as you mentioned 2 million of them . That is definitely a very high number and might have raised flags with Google. Try cleaning out the 404's, redirecting any of the old url's to the new ones and then resubmit your sitemap.
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
-
Huge Search Traffic Drop After Switching to HTTPS - No Recovery After Couple of Months
Hi In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%). We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543 We fixed the redirects to 301 Double-checked the sitemaps Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com) Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.) We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etakgoz
We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS. It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving. In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?0 -
Is it possible to find out where traffic is comming from on someone elses website?
Is it possible to find out where traffic is coming from on someone else website? I want to know where the new buyers are coming from who are interested in outsourcing. Attached are some of the pages they would be looking at. Who are visiting these pages and where are they coming from: https://www.upwork.com/blog/ https://www.upwork.com/hiring/ https://www.upwork.com/i/howitworks/client/ https://www.upwork.com/signup/create-account/client_direct https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/ https://www.upwork.com/press/ https://www.freelancer.com/ https://www.freelancer.com/about https://www.freelancer.com/info/how-it-works.php https://www.freelancer.com/showcase https://www.freelancer.com/community https://www.freelancer.com/hire/ https://www.freelancer.com/contest/ https://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/ https://www.freelancer.com/freelancers/ http://www.guru.com/ http://www.guru.com/howitworks.aspx http://www.guru.com/about/ http://www.guru.com/help/ http://www.guru.com/blog/ http://www.guru.com/blog/category/hiring-advice/ http://www.guru.com/d/freelancers/ http://www.guru.com/directory http://www.guru.com/answers/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael0 -
New URL Structure caused virtually All rankings to drop 5 to 10 positions in latest report ?.. Is this normal
Hi All, We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' ) and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago. We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions i.e from 3rd to 10th etc... Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells. I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?.. Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated... thanks Pete .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
HTTPS sitewide move has resulted in huge rankings drop...
Hi all, An e-commerce site has recently moved protocol to https sitewide. The site ranked page one for some great terms and now appear to be page 2 or below. Brand terms seem unphased and are still very strong, on both Google and Bing. The following has been done; Everything 301'd from http to https Sitemap Edited Updated Webmaster Tools Robots.txt edited Crawled and Fetched all pages daily. Checked Paged are all follow,index. PPC Ads mass updated to new url's. Most terms were ranked 1 - 9 on Bing, and Page 1/2 on Google. HTTPS upgrade was done less than one week ago. The site is not payday loan related, nor was it hit by latest panda escapades. Everything on the site is relevant to the content. Has anybody else been in this position, what else can be done? I'd appreciate any help and advice. Thank You K9gB7hz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
90% Traffic Drop...
Hey Moz Community Our team has been racking our collective brains about a 90% drop in traffic a niche client of ours has seen. The traffic drop occurred September 20th. The site averages 300-400 unique visits a month (very targeted & niche) & dropped to 30-40 uvm. The domain is on an exact match but other then that I can't see anything that would be deserving of such a significant drop in traffic. Our campaign had been performing very well & we were seeing steady gains in traffic & ranking over the long term until September 20th. I'm curious if the exact match update would have such a big impact months after it was released (July/July if I remember correctly). I also didn't think it could be such a big issue because that domain has been used by us for a couple years. Is the Exact Domain Match such a big deal? eJGe3Vw
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hendersondavidp0 -
Keyword Frequent On and Drop Off
Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am currently doing SEO for a client’s site, over the past few weeks the keywords have gradually gone up steadily. One of the keywords however continues to jump on and off rankings. For a few days it will jump up to 23<sup>rd</sup> in Google Rankings, but then it will completely drop of the radar, not even in the top 200 anymore. I’ve gone through the site to check if there is anything wrong and stuck to guidelines offered here on SEO Moz but I’m stumped to figure it out. The Keyword has a page that helps target it, there is no stuffing, all I can think is if there are bad back-links coming in to us that Google that continues to push down the rankings. Can anyone help shed some light on the situation for me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kal-SEO0 -
Switch hosting to be closer to site visitors, and 99% dropped from rankings?
Last week I decided to switch for a UK server to a US one at Hostgator since most of my visitors are from the US. About nine hours later 99% of my pages disappeared from google rankings, only a few non-relevant pages are at position 100-200. All decent (1000-2000 word) articles on specific topics, are gone. These pages were getting 2-3 minutes per user of readership and a low bounce rate, so I think they were pretty good quality. Does anyone think it's possible I got accidentally added on a blacklisted IP? Or why would something like this happen. Since then, I've tried switching back to the old IP for 3 days, that didn't work. Now I've filed a reinclusion request with the details. Has anyone had a similar experience? What can possibly cause this massive drop in rankings and traffic? Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zpeti0 -
Rankings for keyword variations dropped over weekend?
One of our clients has seen significant decreases over the weekend for a number of keyword variations. There have been no significant site changes, no crawl errors reported and our competitors don't seem to have been affected. The decrease has coincided with the launch of a display campaign, but surely this is just coincidental? Any thoughts would be appreciated...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zealmedia0