March 1st Decline in Visits and Pageviews
-
This site was upgraded from Joomla 1 to Joomla 3 and launched on Feb 27th. The SEF structure has not changed. The extension sh404sef tracks the 404s and there are only a few dozen from mistyped urls, so I have to assume the historical ranking has not been affected.
How can I figure out why there is such a decline on March 1st from 4400 to 1500 visits?
Is it coincidence after the new launch or did something happen with google on March 1st?
-
Hi Jeff,
This is truly bizarre. The news that there is no drop in Webmaster Tools is very good though - you'd see something similar there if there was truly a traffic drop as opposed to a tracking problem.
I see you are using different GA accounts for each site - have you contacted the host? When I have seen tracking problems in the past that did not match up to actual traffic, it was because the JS code to trigger the analytics visit was being delayed or stopped by something else running on the site. For example, a custom analytics package my former agency built for one of our clients was not being triggered upon page load for two reasons. One, a heavy Conversion Rate Optimisation JS package was loading further up the page and taking an extremely long time, and two - most visitors clicked quickly to a target page, before the CRO JS and our JS could load properly.
-
Jane,
The page source shows that the GA code is on every page.
Since this is happening to all 14 sites I am managing in GA, many that have had the same GA code for years, I have to assume it does not have to do with the installation.
GWT shows the same weekly cycle of impression from 1500 on Mondays to 900 on Saturdays. There is no additional drop on March 1st.
-
Hi Jeff,
This sounds like a problem with the GA installation rather than actual traffic if you are not seeing this in the log file analyser for all these sites. Sounds really basic but have you checked that the GA code is included properly across the sites, especially the pages that have gone from 400 daily visits to 0?
If you're also running ranking reports and not seeing a drop in rankings, then the issue is almost certain to be reporting rather than actual traffic.
Do you see a drop in impressions / clicks in Webmaster Tools too?
-
This is a critical issue for me.
Is there anyone here that can help me resolve this server wide decline?
Or help me track down why GA is showing the decline but AWstats is not?
-
What would cause all the sites on the same VPS to show a decline in visits on GA but not on the servers AWstats?
-
However, when looking at the visits using AWstats I do not see the sharp decline on March 1st that I see in GA.
-
I am going through all google analytics for the sites that I manage and are all hosted on my VPS at siteground.
These sites also had a decline on March 1st.
- http://admarneuro.com
- http://heartland-designs.com/
- http://www.lawofficesofdanielkaminsky.com/
- http://www.ocjoomlausergroup.org/
- http://www.primocraft.com/
- http://www.modernmagic.com/
- http://azbaa.org/
- etc.... I'll stop here since it appears that all are affected.
Now, I think we are getting to the root of the problem. It probably has to do with the host since every site shows the decline starting on March 1st.
Do you know what could make this happen on a VPS Cloud hosting account?
-
1. per GWT there is only 473 indexed from the sitemap. How do I gauge if the 1000 is accurate. When I search for site: transitionconsultants.com I see "About 7,300 results". Am I doing this wrong?
2. Is there any harm in resetting the URL params? Seems like a lot of URLs being monitored. Did you see the screenshot?
3. Since I am the new webmaster, I am not sure what the ranking was before or what key phrases they were ranking highly for. How do I figure this out?
-
After doing a "site:", I am seeing almost 1,000 pages indexed by Google. Does this sound about right?
It is possible parameters have changed, but I don't feel this is the issue.
What are you seeing when you look at your search phrases in the SERPs? Have key phrases dropped a bit, a lot or not at all?
-Andy
-
The previous webmaster had possibly set up all these URL parameters. I do not know if I should reset these as they were in place before the migration but maybe the parameters have changed and these are now dropping pages from the index.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/30q8ba7winj7tt8/Screenshot 2014-04-11 11.12.01.png
-
-
Sitemap appears to be ok
| | http://transitionconsultants.com/index.php?option=com_xmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1 | Sitemap | Apr 10, 2014 | - | Web | 487 | 473 |
-
"No manual webspam actions found."
-
Yes, new content has been added.
-
No new link-building.
-
OSE: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x1nlz93ghrrxmu1/Screenshot 2014-04-11 11.08.59.png
-
-
If it wasn't for the fact that this has happened just 3 days after the move, then I would have put this down to a Google penalty, without a doubt.
However, this would be one heck of a coincidence! I'm not ruling that out, but can't help but feel something else might have gone unchecked.
- Is the sitemap intact and correct?
- Have there been any manual actions in GWT?
- Has any new content been added?
- Has there been any link-building going on, or have you had a look at your link profile through Open Site Explorer?
-Andy
-
I just ran it through the Screaming Frog SEO Spider app and all 467 URLs are 200-OK.
All pages show the same decline from the same date.
And pages like this went from 400 pageviews to 0 on March 1st: http://transitionconsultants.com/practices-for-sale/dental-practices/
-
Hi Jeff,
Have you run the site through Screaming Frog to see if there has been anything inadvertently changed during the transition? It is more common than you might realise across many different platforms.
It might also be worth looking to make sure there are no canonical issues, pages accidentally noindexed, etc.
Outside of that, the last confirmed update was early February (Page Layout), so it is unlikely to have been this. That said, they are always tweaking and releasing new updates and refreshes, so it is very possible that that has also happened.
With the decline in visitors, is that for traffic across the board to all pages, or just to the homepage and for a specific phrase?
-Andy
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
-
My website has been declining in rankings!
Hello everyone, I have been doing the SEO on the following site: www.painters-decorators-london.co.uk for the past few years and the rankings are slowly declining since last year. (not the recent Google update). I can't seem to figure out what exactly is causing this to happen The page authority and domain authority is higher than my competitors. The on page SEO I believe is done appropriately but I'm not sure whats causing this decline. How can I find out exactly using the MOZ Pro account that I have. I don't think I'm totally aware of the important metrics that one can use on this site to determine the problem. Please advise!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ready2Paint0 -
Huge Decline in Links
Good Morning Everyone, Looking for some feedback as to why all of my Backlink metrics might be way down (as well as rankings)... Please see the details below that show some of the metrics from MOZ reports from August and from October. Does anyone know why these metrics are all so down? We have not done any link removal exercises or anything that would cause this drop --- please let me know if there is any insight any of you have as to what is the reason for this drop. Thanks Linking C Blocks August 3: 124 October 14: 23 External Followed Links August 3: 4486 October 14: 1558 Total External Links August 3: 4795 October 14: 1680 Total Links August 3: 21338 October 14: 17809 Followed Linking Root Domains August 3: 323 October 14: 116 Total Linking Root Domains August 3: 442 October 14: 143
Reporting & Analytics | | Prime850 -
GA Event: to use this feature visit: EVENT-TRACKING.COM
Hi guys, Two days ago our Google Analytics Event tracker began to show this Event/Label, etc. I cannot find its source. Anybody knows what is this about? Thanks for your answers. Ana
Reporting & Analytics | | anagentile1 -
Spike in Direct visits with Drop in Google Organic Visits
Does anyone have an explanation for why Google organic visits plummeted while direct visits rose the same amount. Total visits have been very normal. jI1Bn2B,UuzONNK kepV0eu
Reporting & Analytics | | phogan0 -
Google Analytics Not Tracking 100% of Visits?
Hi all, We're having an issue with Analytics where we are getting different figures from what Silver Pop are saying. For example email campaign A sent via Silver Pop, with Google Analytics tracking code show's 50 unique clicks in Silver Pop. Looking at Google Analytics there are only 10 visits from that campaign. So I thought it could be something with the tracking, but there wasn't a significant rise in web visits = either Google Analytics is not recording visits properly or Silver Pop figures are wrong. I'm more inclined to think that it's something to do with Google Analytics. Has anyone come across something similar? Where one system is showing you X amount of visits but the figures on Google Analytics don't add up? A few quick things already covered: Double checked the links have been tracked properly, but this doesn't explain the low increase in web visits generally We've double checked that Google Analytics tracking code is properly installed (and it is / was at the time of send). Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks guys.
Reporting & Analytics | | RKHStaff1 -
Has anyone experienced Google Analytics track the page visit to a "thank you" page, but not the goal conversion?
Has anyone experienced where Google Analytics would track the page visit to a "thank you" page, but not the goal conversion that should result? The goal had worked for a long time as it is as just a goal url with head match. No funnel. Not case sensitive. For about four days now, no conversions have been recorded, but Google Analytics shows hundreds of people visited the page that should trigger the goal. Additionally, we have received the hundreds of leads. A Screaming Frog search shows the code is embedded throughout the site. For the interested, the GA code looks like (and the 8 Xs are the correct number on the site): Am I missing something?
Reporting & Analytics | | 352inc0 -
Why does this domain never pass 150 organic visits from Google?
Hello, The domain http://bit.ly/fwTEsT has been out there for one year, it has about half million indexed pages. We made a lot of changes that could affect SEO and I don't know if Google likes it but the one thing it's sure is that in one whole year the organic visits from Google never got pass 150 visits per day. We've got about 2000 PPC visits but organic don't go up. I'd like to know what our main errors would be so we can focus more on fixing them. Thank you, Alexandru.
Reporting & Analytics | | elwebmaster0 -
How to measure number of visits from Google News coming from Google Universal Search (NOT referral coming directly coming from news.google.com) with google analyitcs
I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias0