Normal that Home Page Generating Less than 4% Of Organic Traffic?
-
Greetings MOZ Community:
My firm operates www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a commercial real estate brokerage in New York City.
Prior to the first Penguin update in April 2012, our home page used to receive about 10% or 600 of total organic visits. After the first Penguin was launched by Google organic traffic to the home dropped to maybe 5% or 200 visits per month.
Since May of this year, it appears we have been penalized by Penguin 4.0 and are attempting to recover. Now our home page only generates about 140 organic visits per month, or less than 4% of organic traffic.
Our home enjoyed good conversion rate, so this drop in traffic is a real loss.
Does this very low level of traffic to the home page indicate something abnormal? Dropping from 10% to less than 4% is a major decline. Should we take specific steps regarding the home page like enhancing the content?
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Moosa:
Actually we were hit by Penguin in April 2012, and then by Panda 4.0 (for thin content) in late May of this year.
Regarding the Penguin issue, we identified bad links, requested removal and filed a disavow with Google listing the domains that refused to remove links. We are also re-writing as much content as possible. In terms of creating links, I have been instructed that the best way to do so is to create high quality onsite content that others will link to. So I am hoping we are on the right track.
But getting back to my original question, I don't know why the home page has been punished disproportionately.
Thanks, Alan
-
Interesting question.
The "Home" was removed from the top menu in June. Now the logo on the upper left of the header on every page still links to the home page. But is this sufficient? Did we kill valuable links by removing the "Home" item in the top menu?
The body text in the hundreds of pages does not have may links. Would it be useful to add text links on those pages back to the home page?
Thanks, Alan
-
Do you have links back to your homepage on all of your pages?
-
If you are not sure that this action is actually a penguin attack or not then you probably should get in to your analytics and see on what dates your website receives a major dip in rankings and compare it with the algo updates… if you see the similarities in dates you probably are a victim of it.
You can also check your Google webmaster tool to see if you receive any manual action penalty in GWT.
If you are sure this is a penguin attack and not panda or any other update then it is most probably because of the links that point back to your site. Here are some of the ideas that you should consider as important.
- Audit your website links and see which of them harmful links are. You can use software like Link Risk and Link Detox to see how many harmful links you have in your link profile.
- Remove as many bad links as possible
- Re develop your content (if possible)
- Create new good and high quality links that points back to the site.
- Submit a disavow file
Crate new content and link on continuous basis. This will take a bit of time for your website to start receiving that organic traffic back but continuous effort will take you to that point again.
Hope this helps!
-
Thanks, Searchbuzz!!!
That is interesting!!
We have focused updating the user interface and have done so about 6 times this year. As a result we have reduced the amount of new content (blog posts, updates of static pages).
So if I now focus on upgrading and adding content, this should result in a bounce up??
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi SilverDoor:
Thanks for your feedback!!
In April an SEO firm requested removal of links from 120 low quality domains. Some voluntarily removed links and we filed a disavow with Google for the rest.
We have not looked at internal link structure. In fact the site does not use many text links.
Would it make sense to create text links when relevant from other URLs and point them to home page?
Content on the home page could be improved and I intend to rewrite it.
In your experience, what is the normal percentage of new organic inquiries that the home page should generate? 5%, 10%??? That will at least provide some guideline on what is normal.
Thanks,
Alan
-
Hi Alan,
Sorry to hear that this has happened.
The first thing I suggest you do is some detailed analysis of your homepage.
Here are the things I propose you look into:
- The overall link profile, including internal and external links. Take all relevant action to remove any external links which may be detrimental to your rankings (e.g. comment spamming, directories etc). Also, look at how many internal links point to the homepage. Internal links tell search engines which pages you deem to be the most important.
- Look at the on-page content. Is it unique, high-quality, relevant content which provides value to the user? If not then change it.
- Ensure that all basic SEO elements are implemented and fully optimised. All metadata, H-tags, strong tagging etc.
Obviously, the most important thing to do before you make any changes is to benchmark all current stats (rankings, traffic etc.). That way, you will be able to efficiently measure the impact of any changes you make.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks
SilverDoor
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
-
Issue with AMP pages
Hello, We have implemented AMP on our blog pages, but now some of the Web pages are also being shown like AMP pages. ( no footer and no navigation ) What could have gone wrong ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johnroger0 -
Menu interlinking Pages
Hello, I have my most important pages in my menu. Those pages are present on all my pages because they are on the menu. Are those pages considered to be linking between each other because they are in the menu or should I create links between those pages in my text if I want them to link with each other ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Landing Page Drop Out
Hi, If a product page drops out of organic ranking, but you've made no changes is there a good place to start in order to find out why? I feel like it's almost impossible? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
New pages not ranking
I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better. The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages. Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Organic search traffic improved (besides Google) for last 6 months
Hi, to follow up on my previous post (http://moz.com/community/q/low-on-google-ranking-despite-error-free), I was wandering if someone can tell me whether we are penalised by Google or not? Since the last 6 months, we see a rise in organic visitors coming from Bing, yahoo but Google remains the same. Despite the advice given in previous post, I just feel that something else must be wrong. Perhaps more inbound links with high PR? Socially, we are pretty much engaging 50-60% of our audience, yet no link flow will count for our organic ranking sadly enough... Hopefully someone can have a look at our site www.mercadonline.es in more detail? Ask me in a PM for more info! Thank you Ivordg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
Is there an optimal ratio of external links to a page vs internal links originating at that page ?
I understand that multiple links fro a site dilute link juice. I also understand that external links to a specific page with relevant anchortext helps ranking. I wonder if there is an ideal ratioof tgese two items
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Apluswhs0 -
There seems to be something obvious stopping our product pages from being listed in organic results - help!
Hello All Firstly new to SEO MOZ but what a fantastic resource, good work! I help run a platform at ethical community (dot) com (have phrased it like that so google doesn't pick up this thread hope thats ok). We seem to have something glaringly obvious with the SEO ability of our product pages. We now have over 7000 products on the site and would like to think we have done a pretty good job in terms of optimisning them, lots of nice keywords, relevant page titles, good internal links, and even recently have reduced the loading speeds a fair amount. We have a sitemap set up feeding in URLS to Google and some of them are now nearly a year old. The problem, when doing an EXACT google search on a product title the product pages dont show up for the majority of the 7000 products. HOWEVER.... we get fantastic ranking in google products, and get sales through other areas of the site, which seems even more odd. For example, if you type in "segway" you'll see us ranking on the first page of google in google products, but the product page itself is nowhere to be seen. For example "DARK CHOCOLATE STRANDS 70G CAKE DECORATION" gets no results on google (aside from google products) when we have this page at OURDOMAIN/eco-shop/food/dark-chocolate-strands-70g-cake-decoration-5592 Can anyone help identify if there is a major bottleneck here our gut feeling is there is one major factor that is causing this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ethicalcommunity0