undefined
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
    • SEO Q&A
    • 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.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    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. Technical SEO
  4. Help. Recently my organic traffic has dropped 40%. Any advice / ideas?

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.

Help. Recently my organic traffic has dropped 40%. Any advice / ideas?

Technical SEO
6
14
4.0k
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.
  • kimtastic
    kimtastic last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 8:34 PM

    Lately my organic traffic has dropped significantly as well as my adsense revenue.  The moz report says, for example, my traffic is down 40%, but I a still #1 for that keyword.

    Also, in the last week, suddenly my number of indexed pages doubled.  We had done some page rewriting and maybe messed that up.  We've fixed that though.  Webmaster tools is still picking up all of our old pages and the new ones.

    Background:

    1. We recently launched our new responsive website in March.
    2. March income was about the same as February.
    3. April dropped off suddenly (maybe late march - no sure)
    4. When we changed site, we did do 301's for all the old pages to the new ones

    Any ideas or advice as to why my traffic and revenue has dropped off so sharply? Never submitted questions before - not sure if I am supposed to put urls here so if you just google Home Spelling Words - that's my website.  Thanks everyone!!!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • evolvingSEO
      evolvingSEO @kimtastic last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 1:43 PM Apr 10, 2015, 1:43 PM

      Kimberly

      Here's a little more background straight from Google on "duplicate content" - http://www.thesempost.com/duplicate-content-penalty-exception/

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • evolvingSEO
        evolvingSEO @kimtastic last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 1:39 PM Apr 10, 2015, 1:39 PM

        Kimberly

        You're welcome. To clarify, there is no duplicate content penalty for this. It just means Google can't crawl your site as efficiently and also might not pass link value (page authority) to all the pages as strongly as they might otherwise.

        This article is pretty advanced, but explains the idea of crawl optimization really well.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • kimtastic
          kimtastic @evolvingSEO last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 1:36 PM Apr 10, 2015, 1:36 PM

          I think this is the problem! I checked and found that Google thinks I have double the pages now.  Maybe they are thinking I have duplicate content.  I will fix this asap. THANK YOU!!!

          "Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links,"

          evolvingSEO 2 Replies Last reply Apr 10, 2015, 1:43 PM Reply Quote 0
          • TheWebMastercom
            TheWebMastercom @mrkidd1985 last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 1:25 PM Apr 10, 2015, 1:25 PM

            I agree, Easter weekend was quiet for us as well.  Starting to pick up again now though.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • evolvingSEO
              evolvingSEO @kimtastic last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 1:11 PM Apr 10, 2015, 1:11 PM

              Hi Kimberly

              I don't think Google did anything to purposely hurt the site. The AdWords and Organic search depts are really huge in themselves, and I don't think there is much cross-conversation there. What sort of quality scores are you getting from AdWords for your pages? Are they good?

              Bounce rate is a weird metric. A lower bounce rate could be bad too, because users are maybe not easily finding what they want on the landing page and are forced to click around.

              Definitely play with the ads. Keep specific notes about what you change and when. And keep in mind, it may take some time (weeks) to reflect in any ranking change.

              You should also make a proper 404 page in the template/design of your site - it's just the default server message. These sort of things help show Google you are a responsible site owner 🙂

              Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links 🙂

              kimtastic 1 Reply Last reply Apr 10, 2015, 1:36 PM Reply Quote 1
              • kimtastic
                kimtastic @evolvingSEO last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 12:24 PM Apr 10, 2015, 12:24 PM

                Thanks.  That's good information.  I have to say, I really dislike the huge ad on the right.  I kept getting emails from Google saying that I don't have enough ads and that they should be bigger.  So, I gave in and put bigger ads and three per page as they suggested.

                I did actually move the main ad down a bit below copy, which it used to be right up top before any copy.  I also removed an anchored ad in mobile that sat at the bottom of the page no matter what.

                Is it possible that Google asked me to do something (more and bigger ads) and then punished me for it?

                My bounce rate is lower than it has ever been so I don't think users are put off.  I'm sure some of my problem is ad blockers and lower click through on mobile ads as mobile traffic increases - but that is not my immediate problem - that's a long slow decline of income.

                I think I will play with the ads and also see about the new information on adsense about how much ad is visible as I am sure that will have an impact on future revenue too.

                evolvingSEO 1 Reply Last reply Apr 10, 2015, 1:11 PM Reply Quote 0
                • kimtastic
                  kimtastic @mrkidd1985 last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 12:13 PM Apr 10, 2015, 12:13 PM

                  I agree.  I checked and found that I got much less traffic than last year though.  Thanks for answering!  My traffic really dies on holidays.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • evolvingSEO
                    evolvingSEO last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 12:07 PM Apr 10, 2015, 12:05 PM

                    My initial thought is "ads above the fold". It's hard to tell in Archive.org's archive of your old design, but it looks like ad space increased a lot on the new site? You have the block on the left which kind of interferes with the content, as well as the banner ad on the right which is pretty large (but doesn't distract from the content much).

                    Plus these ads are not just on the homepage, they are on the inner content pages as well.

                    They way Matt Cutts explained "ads above the fold" - it's not so much you need to cut down the pixel size of ads, but make sure not ALL your pages have too many ads - so only make a %% of pages on your site have ads, and some not.

                    I would play with how ads are appearing on the site to begin with.

                    Your issue does not sound like a migration error, because that is usually immediate. This sounds like something Google takes a little longer to process (page layout / design, user metrics, ads etc).

                    kimtastic 1 Reply Last reply Apr 10, 2015, 12:24 PM Reply Quote 1
                    • mrkidd1985
                      mrkidd1985 @Humanovation last edited by Apr 10, 2015, 6:25 AM Apr 10, 2015, 6:25 AM

                      I work for a UK company, and by the looks of things the school holidays and easter played a part in the slight traffic drop for us.

                      kimtastic TheWebMastercom 2 Replies Last reply Apr 10, 2015, 1:25 PM Reply Quote 0
                      • kimtastic
                        kimtastic @Humanovation last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 11:59 PM Apr 9, 2015, 11:59 PM

                        I guess that would at least make me feel better in that it's not something I did wrong.  Thanks for responding.  I feel like my site became invisible.  I hope traffic comes back!

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • kimtastic
                          kimtastic @Christy-Correll last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 11:57 PM Apr 9, 2015, 11:57 PM

                          Thanks for your help. My url is www.HomeSpellingWords.com.  I've been tracking my ranks in Moz and it seems like my site is getting a little better every week.  However, my page views are steadily dropping, while my rank remains the same or better.  The CTR for ads has not changed much.  It's almost like I'm ranked but invisible?  Anyway, I rank fairly well for many good keywords like spelling words, 1st grade spelling words, 2nd grade...etc and so forth.  I've never done any kind of strange link building - was too busy and maybe too lazy.

                          When I think about this problem, it seems like I'm there (ranked) but invisible???

                          I need to get an imgur account - will upload images if I can find some that make sense.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Humanovation
                            Humanovation last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 10:26 PM Apr 9, 2015, 10:26 PM

                            Interestingly, our site traffic is down ~ 25% in the past 3 weeks as well, with no loss in keyword rankings.  We are presently assuming that it has something to do with Google's removal of the separators from between paid ads and organic search results.

                            Just something to think about ...

                            kimtastic mrkidd1985 2 Replies Last reply Apr 10, 2015, 6:25 AM Reply Quote 0
                            • Christy-Correll
                              Christy-Correll Staff last edited by Apr 9, 2015, 10:14 PM Apr 9, 2015, 10:14 PM

                              Hi Kimberly, welcome to the forum, and thanks for your question! Yes, a URL would be very helpful, as would any relevant screenshots of analytics.

                              Christy

                              kimtastic 1 Reply Last reply Apr 9, 2015, 11:57 PM Reply Quote 0
                              • 1 / 1
                              1 out of 14
                              • First post
                                1/14
                                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

                              • Tom3_15

                                Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"

                                Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.

                                Technical SEO | Sep 4, 2018, 11:15 AM | Tom3_15
                                0
                              • cckapow

                                Organic Traffic Decrease WOW and YOY sitewide

                                My site is experiencing a decrease in organic traffic WOW for the last two weeks and for the first time all year is showing a decrease compared to last year's traffic for the same weeks. At first I thought this was a seasonal pattern due to spring break (we are mostly b to b), but the dip has sustained for another week. The only changes made during this time period were a few on-page updates and some title tag updates to a specific group of pages. However, the decrease is sitewide including branded clicks and impressions. I haven't noticed any changes in rankings. Impressions and clicks are down per Search Console, but CTR and Avg Rank haven't changed. Is it possible that we've been penalized or hit by an algo shift? What's the best way to know for sure? VLGLUTt

                                Technical SEO | Apr 18, 2016, 7:57 PM | cckapow
                                0
                              • Gavin.Atkinson

                                Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?

                                On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.

                                Technical SEO | Jun 15, 2015, 11:43 PM | Gavin.Atkinson
                                1
                              • evoNick

                                Product Images with organic results in SERP

                                Hey Mozzers, I've noticed that several of our product page results in Google have the product image associated with them.  Today is the first day I've seen this.  Does anyone know anything about these?  Has Google put anything out about this?  Here's a couple examples: http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/08a16dcf-505e-443c-866d-fae6d805743e/2014-03-31_1031.png http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/04972e7b-f6b2-4e78-ab11-95c52d69a200/2014-03-31_1056.png What's interesting is that they don't show for me when I use Chrome's Incognito mode. Any insights much appreciated! Will

                                Technical SEO | Apr 2, 2014, 5:14 PM | evoNick
                                4
                              • RoxBrock

                                Do I use /es/, /mx/ or /es-mx/ for my Spanish site for Mexico only

                                I currently have the Spanish version of my site under myurl.com/es/ When I was at Pubcon in Vegas last year a panel reviewed my site and said the Spanish version should be in /mx/ rather than /es/ since es is for Spain only and my site is for Mexico only. Today while trying to find information on the web I found /es-mx/ as a possibility. I am changing my site and was planning to change to /mx/ but want confirmation on the correct way to do this. Does anyone have a link to Google documentation that will tell me for sure what to use here? The documentation I read led me to the /es/ but I cannot find that now.

                                Technical SEO | Mar 18, 2014, 2:53 PM | RoxBrock
                                0
                              • yanaiguana111

                                Double Slash // in URL

                                My client is using double forward slahes in URL like this "//" is this affecting SEO?

                                Technical SEO | Feb 26, 2013, 2:22 PM | yanaiguana111
                                0
                              • Allstar

                                Location Based Content / Googlebot

                                Our website has local content specialized to specific cities and states. The url structure of this content is as follows: www.root.com/seattle www.root.com/washington When a user comes to a page, we are auto-detecting their IP and sending them directly to the relevant location based page - much the way that Yelp does. Unfortunately, what appears to be occurring is that Google comes in to our site from one of its data centers such as San Jose and is being routed to the San Jose page. When a user does a search for relevant keywords, in the SERPS they are being sent to the location pages that it appears that bots are coming in from. If we turn off the auto geo, we think that Google might crawl our site better, but users would then be show less relevant content on landing. What's the win/win situation here? Also - we also appear to have some odd location/destination pages ranking high in the SERPS. In other words, locations that don't appear to be from one of Google's data center. No idea why this might be happening. Suggestions?

                                Technical SEO | Jul 23, 2012, 6:48 AM | Allstar
                                0
                              • sandlappercreative

                                Sudden ranking drop, no manual action

                                Sort of a strange situation I'm having and I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts. Here's what has happened... Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected. I immediately figured that this was some sort of keyword-specific penalty that I had incurred. I had done a bit of link building over the weekend (two or three directory type sites and a bio link from a site I contribute to). I also changed some anchor text on another site to match my homepage's title tag (which just so happened to be the exact phrase match I had dropped in) - I assumed this was what got me. I was slowly beginning to climb up the rankings and just got a bit impatient/overzealous. Changed the anchor text back to what it originally was and submitted a reconsideration request on Tuesday. This morning, I get the automated response in Webmaster Tools that no manual action had been taken. So my question is, would this drop have been an automated deal? If that's the case, then it's going to be mighty hard to pinpoint what I did wrong, since there's no way to know when I did whatever it was to cause the drop. Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions to regain my modest original placement?

                                Technical SEO | Nov 28, 2011, 8:58 PM | sandlappercreative
                                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
                              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.