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
    • 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. Technical SEO
  4. Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?

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.

Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?

Technical SEO
4
7
2.0k
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.
  • Gavin.Atkinson
    Gavin.Atkinson last edited by Jun 11, 2015, 9:20 PM

    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.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
    • Gavin.Atkinson
      Gavin.Atkinson last edited by Jun 15, 2015, 11:43 PM Jun 15, 2015, 11:43 PM

      Hi guys, thanks for picking that up. Don't know why I missed it! GA code was in the header.php of the old theme and was lost when I switched themes. I've added it back now so I'll see what happens.

      I can see how that would have impacted the search traffic graph on Moz Pro, but I'm still not sure if it would have affected how Moz reports my keyword rankings. Did I really suffer big drops in the SERPs as Moz reported? Or was it just a side-effect of Moz not being able to see traffic in my GA account?

      Tony

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • TheeDigital
        TheeDigital last edited by Jun 13, 2015, 11:09 PM Jun 13, 2015, 11:09 PM

        As L Slversen said, your Google Analytics tracking code is missing so you wouldn't be recording traffic. This probably happened with your theme changed and likely the traffic you are still seeing on the site is not legitimate, more than likely ghost referral spam traffic.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • LSIversen
          LSIversen last edited by Jun 12, 2015, 4:33 AM Jun 12, 2015, 4:33 AM

          I would start out by making sure you put back the analytics tracking code, since that's not there right now (checked both with Google Tag Assistant & in the source code). So it makes sense you can't see any traffic from search, since there is no tracking. That probably explains a lot of it.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
          • KyleEaves
            Kyle Eaves @Gavin.Atkinson last edited by Jun 12, 2015, 1:12 AM Jun 12, 2015, 1:12 AM

            I searched for the keyword "asian travel tips" and you were on the 3rd page of Google. I clicked and went to your website, so you should see at least one organic visit. Your site seemed to load pretty quickly, so that is good. Check the stats for today and let me know if the visit shows up. If you don't see it, there must be something wrong with your analytics tracking, which I feel must be the case because your visits dropped to zero. It just doesn't seem right that you wouldn't have at least a couple visits show up.

            Have you been tracking some of your keywords daily with the rank tracker tool? That is a better way to get an update more often on your site's ranking for specific keywords since you can run it every day and see how the keywords have tracked over time rather than waiting for the weekly update.

            I ran a site:www.travelnasia.com query and it looks like you've got 806 pages indexed in Google. Does that seem about right?

            I scanned your site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It's a pretty nice tool, check it out if you haven't yet. It definitely helps with locating and fixing broken links. The tool also gives you access to tons of information about your site. Here are some sample reports from your site:
            Crawl Overview: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/crawl_overview.xls
            404 Errors: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/client_error_%284xx%29_inlinks.xls
            No Response Links: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/no_response_inlinks.xls

            Hopefully you're able to get this figured out quickly. I'll let you know if I think of anything else. Best of luck!

            Kyle Eaves
            SEO Specialist
            KyleEaves.com

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Gavin.Atkinson
              Gavin.Atkinson last edited by Jun 11, 2015, 10:12 PM Jun 11, 2015, 10:12 PM

              Hi Kyle, thanks for taking a look. No, my keyword rankings took a hit (48 up, 149 down) over the past week but I am still ranking for lots of keywords. About half of my #1-3 keywords dropped back to #4-10. If this keeps up I expect my keywords will take a much bigger hit. In fact I am already seeing evidence of that. My URL http://www.travelnasia.com/thailand/wararot-chiang-mai-day-market/ shows in Moz as still ranking #1 for "Wararot Chiang Mai day market" on Friday but in fact I now don't even list on the first 3 pages of results.

              When you say I have a lot of 404s on my site, where are you getting that info? As of Friday, Moz shows 37 404 errors on the site and many of those are leftovers from dropping my premium theme (e.g. placecategory instead of category). But I should fix them, I agree.

              And yes, none of that really points to why Google would stop sending me any search traffic, and yet that seems to be what's happened.

              I've added some screenshots below which may be helpful.  I am still getting traffic, but not from organic search.

              132b5cfdfc27ef5792f83a81e5ac739c 95ccf8387df343022b3a7aad2e17c8e1 95ccf8387df343022b3a7aad2e17c8e1

              KyleEaves 1 Reply Last reply Jun 12, 2015, 1:12 AM Reply Quote 0
              • KyleEaves
                Kyle Eaves last edited by Jun 11, 2015, 9:55 PM Jun 11, 2015, 9:55 PM

                Have you checked your keyword rankings yet? Have they completely dropped off too? Hard to believe Google would completely drop your site overnight. Maybe there is an issue with your analytics tracking code being removed when you switched your website's theme. Are you seeing other traffic in GA?

                Regardless, it looks like you've got a decent amount of broken links & 404 errors on your site. I doubt Google would kill your traffic over that, but it wouldn't hurt to fix these items so that once you're back online the Google Bot is not tripping over broken links.

                Kyle Eaves
                SEO Specialist
                KyleEaves.com

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                1 out of 7
                • First post
                  1/7
                  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

                • Digital-Murph

                  Spam URL'S in search results

                  We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing.  The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?

                  Technical SEO | Jun 24, 2017, 9:03 PM | Digital-Murph
                  0
                • Jcoley

                  Sudden jump in the number of 302 redirects on my Squarespace Site

                  My Squarespace site www.thephysiocompany.com has seen a sudden jump in 302 redirects in the past 30 days. Gone from 0-302 (ironically). They are not detectable using generic link redirect testing sites and Squarespace have not explanation. Any help would be appreciated.

                  Technical SEO | Jul 27, 2015, 11:24 AM | Jcoley
                  0
                • Exotissimo

                  Parked domain is first in search results

                  We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed. But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed? But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks. exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.

                  Technical SEO | Feb 17, 2015, 10:08 AM | Exotissimo
                  0
                • csmm

                  Fixing a website redirect situation that resulted in drop in traffic

                  Hi, I'm trying to help someone fix the following situation: they had a website, www.domain.com, that was generating a steady amount of traffic for three years. They then redesigned the website a couple of months ago, and the website developer redirected the site to domain.com but did not set up analytics on domain.com. We noticed that there was a drop in traffic to www.domain.com but have no idea if domain.com is generating any traffic since analytics wasn't installed. To fix this situation, I was going to find out from the developer if there was a good reason to redirect the site. What would have prompted the developer to do this if www.domain.com had been used already for three years? Then, unless there was a good reason, I would change the redirect back to what it was before - domain.com redirecting to www.domain.com. Presumably this would allow us to regain the traffic to the site www.domain.com that was lost when the redirect was put in place. Does this sound like a reasonable course of action? Is there anything that I'm missing, or anything else that I should do in this situation? Thanks in advance! Carolina

                  Technical SEO | Dec 12, 2012, 1:10 AM | csmm
                  0
                • JohannCR

                  Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt

                  Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I  know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million

                  Technical SEO | Apr 13, 2012, 7:13 PM | JohannCR
                  0
                • idiHost

                  How is a dash or "-" handled by Google search?

                  I am targeting the keyword AK-47 and it the  variants in search (AK47, AK-47, AK 47) .  How should I handle on page SEO?  Right now I have AK47 and AK-47 incorporated. So my questions is really do I need to account for the space or is Google handling a dash as a space? At a quick glance of the top 10 it seems the dash is handled as a space, but I just wanted to get a conformation from people much smarter then I at seomoz. Thanks, Jason

                  Technical SEO | Apr 4, 2012, 12:58 PM | idiHost
                  0
                • SmartWebPros

                  How to search HTML source for an entire website

                  Is there a way for me to do a "view source" for an entire website without having to right-click every page and select "view source" for each of them?

                  Technical SEO | Mar 21, 2012, 8:27 PM | SmartWebPros
                  0
                • Techboy

                  Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?

                  I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.

                  Technical SEO | Sep 6, 2011, 8:02 PM | Techboy
                  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.