Traffic drop after Facebook push
-
Hi all,
We experienced a strange phenonema after a Facebook push, it appears the Google organic traffic was all but dead for five days after. Totally not sure why!
It has since returned to about 80% of previous levels.
-
Hi,
When you say that referral traffic was unaffected - did you see the burst of traffic in Analytics or not?
In webmaster tools - do you see that clicks go down to zero during this timeframe. Was there an increased number of crawl errors during this period?
Was your site able to handle the traffic or did it go down - sometimes when sites are unstable or frequently offline Google temporary removes them from the SERP's until the situation has normalised.
Without additional info it's difficult to judge what exactly could be the cause. I never heard that a sudden peak of traffic from one source had an impact (in the negative sense) on search traffic - normally more visits from other sources are rather positive for your rankings.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Okay all, I'm going to mark this as solved. After digging deeper in the cPanel stats, it looks more like the whole site went offline for a couple days! Yikes.
| 12 Apr 2015 | 46 | 201 | 1,016 | 28.07 MB |
| 13 Apr 2015 | 356 | 752 | 9,115 | 239.04 MB |
| 14 Apr 2015 | 1,823 | 3,897 | 50,698 | 1.15 GB |
| 15 Apr 2015 | 289 | 602 | 6,375 | 175.32 MB |
| 16 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 17 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 18 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 19 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 20 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 21 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 22 Apr 2015 | 28 | 51 | 603 | 13.89 MB |
| 23 Apr 2015 | 73 | 1,302 | 2,514 | 36.23 MB |
| 24 Apr 2015 | 65 | 167 | 1,111 | 28.60 MB |
| 25 Apr 2015 | 59 | 142 | 1,115 | 27.35 MB |
| 26 Apr 2015 | 56 | 101 | 1,134 | 27.36 MB |
| 27 Apr 2015 | 74 | 192 | 1,353 | 31.16 MB | -
Hi Dirk,
Nothing was changed during that time and it appears all the direct/social traffic was unaffected. It was as if the sudden rush of a thousand plus people over social caused an issue. I've never seen Google traffic zero out like that, in fact, it appears as if it was zero until WordPress automatically upgraded (that should have occurred on or around the 22nd).
-
Did you seem a similar drop in Webmaster tools?
When I see such a sudden drop & fast recovery my first guess would be that something went wrong with your analytics tag. How was you overall traffic during this period? Did you see the Facebook traffic appearing in referrals?
Apart from the Facebook push - did you do technical changes to your site in the same timeframe?
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Drop in Mobile & Tablet Rankings
We have pretty strong rankings and have done since we launched our business in 2004. Over the past two months, we have seen a strong growth in rankings after a bit of a drip last year, however over the past week we have seen a significant drop off in organic traffic. Further analysis has shown that this is coming from mobile/tablet traffic, as the desktop traffic has been fairly consistent. There does appear to be a drop (across all main keywords) on mobile/tablet, but again there is no noticeable drop in desktop rankings. I am obviously aware Google treats these differently, but we can find no obvious reasons why this might have occurred. It is almost as if some sort of penalty has been applied on mobile/tablet only. There are no warnings or obvious problems in webmaster tools and our mobile/tablet site is mobile optimised. At a bit of a loss and would appreciate a bit of guidance in where you think we should start to understand what is causing this and how we should go about correcting it. Thanks in advance for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
How to increase traffic?
This may seem a bit of a broad question but grateful for all knowledgeable input! There are many things to focus on when looking at organic SEO, but where should I be spending the most time/effort in order to increase traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Traffic by Country: Is It Possible to Change it?
Let's say you have a .ng domain but you receive more traffic from USA than from Nigeria. Let's say you want traffic only from Nigeria. How do you correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YESdesign0 -
Rankings dropped - Why?
At the end of November a client site dropped significantly in the rankings. The drop effected almost all the keyphrases we monitor. Historically the homepage has always ranked higher than the sub-pages - however now it seems Google is no longer ranking the home page, and instead ranking the sub-pages, just far far lower down. Any ideas what could cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
Why do pages with a 404 error drop out of webmaster tools only to reappear again?
I have noticed a lot of pages which have fallen out of webmaster tools crawl error log that had bee 404'ing are reappearing again Any suggestions as to why this might be the case? How can I make sure they don't reappear again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Is traffic and content really important for an e-commerce site???
Hi All, I'm maintaining an e-commerce website and I've encountered some related keywords that I know will not convert to sales but are related to the subject and might help becoming an "authority". I'll give an example... If a car dealership wrote an amazing article about cleaning a car.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Obviously it is related but the chances of someone looking to clean his car will go ahead and buy one now are quite low. Also, he will probably bounce out of this page after reading the piece. To conclude, Would such an article do GOOD (helping to become an authority and having more visitors) or BAD (low conversion rate and high bounce rate)? Thanks0 -
Can you spot the reasons for our site dropping in rankings so significantly?
We've been racking our brains over this since the recent search engine changes (the notorious and non-cuddley Google Panda update) and have, within reason, corrected as many of the problems that we possibly can yet still our traffic drops further. http://www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com used to rank fairly equally with it's competitors however since the update (and a number of suggestions from another SEO company), the traffic has dropped by about 90% and it's dropped almost completely from the search results (unlike the competitors who are breaking many faux-pars yet remain well ranked). I don't think we're seeing the wood from the trees anymore so I'd be grateful if someone could take a look and see if we've missed anything glaringly obvious? Any thoughts welcome. Thanks Tim Big changes around the same time/since that might be worth noting: Setup a canonical domain name of www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com and (using IIS7) 301 redirect all other traffic over. Setup canonical URL meta tag for all results pages so they point to a single page Moved the redirect page (the one which sends users to the B&B's site) to another subdomain. Redesigned the URLs where possible to use "friendlier" and more keyword rich urls and 301 redirecting for the old urls Added XML sitemaps to the various tools (we found out they weren't there before) Added a robots.txt file Lowercased all urls Where possible removed duplicate results pages and pointed them at a single page Restructured the page titles to be more relevant Setup nofollow on the external urls
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimGaunt0 -
Suddenr Ranking Drop
Hello all . Im experiencing a sudden ranking drop for one of my websites . Keyword = Green Tea Search Engine = google.lk URL = www.eswaran.com/greenTea.html This page was at 7th on 1st page . Since coupe of weeks back its moving backwards . I didn't even do any link building for this page other than doing little changes to titles tags . What would be the reason for such a issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Osanda0