Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    8
    1380
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • AdamThompson
      AdamThompson last edited by

      Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present.

      I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions?

      • Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects)
      • They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed.
      • The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages.
      • The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language.
      • Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop
      • I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues.
      • Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt
      • Canonical URLs are good
      • Site has about 20K pages indexed
      • They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped.
      • I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences.
      • It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site.
      • Page load speed is good

      I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • JaneCopland
        JaneCopland last edited by

        Hi Adam,

        Not to point out something that is likely well taken-care of, but did the GA / Analytics code populate across the site?

        Also, is there any heavy JavaScript on the site, especially above analytics code, that might prevent analytics code from loading properly. We had this happen with a client a few years ago. We built custom analytics for this client (they did not want to run GA). Client placed our code in the footer. Client placed slow-loading CRO code in the header. CRO code took so long to load that people had often clicked away from the page they landed on before our code had had a chance to record their visit, as JavaScript generally loads in the same order as it's placed on the page. We had them move our little piece of code up to the top of the page. Problem was solved (in the mean time, we were recording a 20,000 visit loss each week!).

        I'm just wondering if this is a tracking issue since all search traffic, not just Google has been affected. It would be quite rare to find an issue that has the same effect at the same time to both Bing and Google's algos. They're similar, but they're not identical and Bing generally tends to take longer to respond to change than Google as well.

        Any chance you have raw server logs to compare analytics stats to?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • AdamThompson
          AdamThompson @MichaelC-15022 last edited by

          I don't see anything that I would think would trigger that. Let me PM you the URL.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • MichaelC-15022
            MichaelC-15022 last edited by

            Did the layout of the header area change significantly?  If, for instance, the header area went from 1/10th of the "above the fold" area to 1/3rd, that might run the entire site afoul of the "topheavy" part of Panda.

            AdamThompson 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • AdamThompson
              AdamThompson @MichaelC-15022 last edited by

              Thanks for the suggestions!

              1. The homepage, category, and product pages have all lost traffic.

              2. So far, I haven't found any noteworthy changes in content.

              3. I've been wondering if this might be part of the issue.

              4. I've reviewed Majestic link data, and only see a few deleted backlinks, so I'm thinking it's not a backlink issue.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • AdamThompson
                AdamThompson @EGOL last edited by

                Thanks for the suggestion. So far the only significant difference in optimization I've found has been that they added Schema.org markup.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • MichaelC-15022
                  MichaelC-15022 last edited by

                  Possibilities:

                  1. The layout of the product pages for the new shopping cart is pissing off Panda.  If that's the case, the traffic to the home page shouldn't have changed much, but the product pages will have dropped.
                  2. Panda now sees the pages in general as having less content than before, perhaps images aren't getting loaded in the pages in such a way that Google sees them whereas they were before, something like that....and Panda now thinks the entire site is less rich in content.
                  3. It often seems to take Google a month or so to "settle out" all of the link juice flows when you do a bunch of redirects, have new URLs, etc. I would expect that the link juice calculation is iterative, and that would be why it would take a number of iterations of the PageRank calculation in order for entirely new URLs to "get" all the link juice they should have.
                  4. Their backlinks were moderately dependent upon a set of link networks, and those link networks have shut down all their sites (so that neither Google nor Bing still see the links from them).

                  Those are the ideas that come to mind so far.

                  AdamThompson 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                  • EGOL
                    EGOL last edited by

                    Did the new cart generate product pages that were differently optimized than the old cart?  (if cart-generated product pages were used)

                    AdamThompson 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • McTaggart

                      How old is 404 data from Google Search Console?

                      I was wondering how old the 404 data from Google Search Console actually is? Does anyone know over what kind of timespan their site 404s data is compiled over? How long do the 404s tend to take to disappear from the Google Search Console, once they are fixed?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
                      0
                    • NicheSocial

                      Which search engines should we submit our sitemap to?

                      Other than Google and Bing, which search engines should we submit our sitemap to?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NicheSocial
                      0
                    • Caro-O

                      Home page suddenly dropped from index!!

                      A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
                      Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
                      Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
                      Caro

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
                      0
                    • Bob_van_Biezen

                      Crawled page count in Search console

                      Hi Guys, I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console. History: Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this: Noindex filterpages. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages. This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day. To complicate the situation: We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well. Questions: -          Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right? -          Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages? -          What am I missing? BxlESTT

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen
                      0
                    • vanGoGh-creative

                      Why differents browsers return different search results?

                      Hi everyone, I don't understand the reason why if I delete cookies, chronology, set anonymous way surfing in Chorme and Safari, I have different results on Google. I tried it from the same pc and at the same time. Searching in google the query "vangogh"  the internet site "www.vangogh-creative.it" is shown in the first page in Chrome but not in  Safari. I asked in Google webmaster forum, but nobody seems to know the reason of this behavior. Can anyone help me? Thanks in advance. Massimiliano

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vanGoGh-creative
                      0
                    • infotrust2

                      My Domain authority dropped 9 points... Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this significant drop.

                      My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infotrust2
                      0
                    • WizardOfMoz

                      Redirect Search Results to Category Pages

                      I am planning redirect the search results to it's matching category page to avoid having two indexed pages of essentially the same content. Example http://www.example.com/search/?kw=sunglasses
                      wil be redirected to
                      http://www.example.com/category/sunglasses/ Is this a good idea? What are the possible negative effect if I go this route? Thanks.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WizardOfMoz
                      0
                    • TextStylesUK

                      Page position dropped on Google

                      Hey Guys, My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week. The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk the school signs are a product of text styles. I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more. They have also said that duplicate content within the school site  http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site) Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market. I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750. They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished. Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions. Either way I'm very confused. Thanks Thomas

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TextStylesUK
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.