Organic search traffic has dropped by 35% since 18 September, we don't know why.
-
Organic traffic to our website has dropped 35% since 18 September 2017 to date. From 1 January to 18 September 2017 organic traffic was up by just under 1% over all (Google up by 1.32%). Paid search traffic over the same time has remained steady. There is nothing we can think of that we've done that has caused the drop. We had an issue with Google page speed test failing when running a test but we resolved this issue on 20 November and in that time we've seen an even greater drop (44% in the last week).
The drop is seen across the 3 main search engines, not just Google, which points toward something we've done, but as mentioned, we can't think of any significant change we made in September that would have such negative effects. There is little difference across devices.
Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic?
Any help gratefully received.
-
thanks Donna, much appreciated.
We're having a meeting about it on Wednesday with developers and marketing. We know the site is slow, we're working on a new back end to the site that will increase speed significantly, but it's still 6 months away. I think it will need to be brought up in the Wednesday meeting.
The one caveat is that the site as always been slow (even slower!). Maybe google have lost patience.
-
As far as I know, only comparing before and after page traffic using Google Analytics.
All those pages that are canonicalized to https://www.scottscastles.com/property/unavailable/ and https://www.scottscastles.com/property/enquire/ are eventually going to get noindexed. There are 335 of them.
Your site is slow. Google's bots might not be allocating enough time to index the entire site.
-
Thanks Donna
To your question about whether the dropped pages have healthy link profiles, do you know how to identify the pages that were indexed that are no longer indexed?
-
Were significant changes made to the site around that time? You seem to have a mix of non-html, html, http, https, 301 and 302 (temporary) redirects.
Do Google and Bing have your most up-to-date sitemap?
Have you orphaned any pages?
Have you checked messages in Google Search Console?
Do the dropped pages have healthy link profiles?
Do you have a large amount of duplicate content that has not been accounted for in canonicals?
Pages with 5xx and 4xx errors won't get indexed.
Hosting problems (inaccessible or slow responding host) can prevent pages from being indexed.
-
Thanks very much for your feedback Donna.
We've identified a strong correlation between a sharp drop in indexed pages around 18 September and our drop in organic search traffic. We're stumped as to why google sharply reduced the number of indexed pages. There was a similar drop around the end of April but this had little influence on our organic search traffic.
Does anyone know why this would occur for a reason other than removing the pages or no-indexing pages?
-
I've also seen a decent drop in our organic traffic the last two weeks, it started November 15th. Our longer tail keywords for our FAQs started to creep back up but our root high volume keywords show almost a 5% average position drop over the past 30 days. Our competitors did not experience this drop from my analysis and OSE tools. Nor am I able to find anything that we may have done to cause this. I'm assuming it's an algorithm update, just keeping my fingers crossed that our root high volume keywords start going back up sooner than later.
-
Look at your landing page report comparing the before and after time period for organic traffic. Is it specific landing pages that have lost traffic or is the 35% drop roughly consistent across the board?
You have a bunch of pages (787) ending in html that are timing out with a 504 Gateway error.
Here are a few examples.
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/baronial-castle-54.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-historic-mansion-31.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-holiday-house-23.htmlI sampled a few with a site: command. Many are still indexed so that could be the problem. A few are tagged as no-index, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Many are canonicalized to https://www.scottscastles.com/property/enquire/ or https://www.scottscastles.com/property/unavailable/ but none are redirected.
I'd start there.
-
The something that "happened" might have been a Google algo change. Or it could have been Google giving one of your competitors a promotion. If a website has made significant improvment, many pages on the site could be promoted at the same time.
If you want to know when "something happens" in Google check here.
-
Thanks for your response. It hasn't been a gradual drop off of organic search traffic. It can be pinpointed to 18 September. That's why I was wondering if anything happened around that time to cause the sudden drop.
-
Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic?
Many things could cause a drop in traffic. Here are the things you should check where data is available or consider if you don't have the data.
- Google is showing more Adwords ads above the fold
- Google is showing more Shopping ads above the fold
- Google is showing more "people also ask" units
- Google is showing more features in the SERPs like news, images, video, etc.
- Google is showing more knowledge boxes and featured snippets
Lots of people have lost traffic to the above in the past year - even if their organic rankings are HIGHER
Maybe competitors are hammering away at your traffic.. Amazon and WalMart and Ebay are working really hard and spending billions to dominate the SERPs - and there are millions of third-party sellers listing items on all of these websites. Lots of dirtbag sites are stealing images, rewriting and spinning the content of other websites. Your competitors are working every day to take positions from you. If you are not working every single day they are doing that to take your positions. They are hungry and working hard.
A person or a small team or even a huge company can be working like mad and not be able to stand up to all of the above. For as long as there has been competition on the web, these things and more have been killing business almost as fast as they arrive. There are only ten organic positions (or less) on the first page of google and everybody wants them and Google is now using up to 50% or more of the real estate on the first page of the SERPs for their own stuff.
All of the above assumes that you have a great website with worthy content. If you website is anything less then Google's quality filters might hit you. If you are not compliant with Google's guidelines then other filters might hit you.
This is the way of the web and all of the above are accelerating and not slowing down.
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
-
Rankings Dropped to Nothing
We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next. Site: https://indoorgardening.com Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago. 1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability. 2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase. 3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one. 4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. 5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary. 6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary. Results:
Technical SEO | | Jbyron
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google. At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated. Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide. -John0 -
Sudden Drop in Rankings
I manage a site and this past month have noticed some pretty significant drops in rankings for some of our main keywords. I'm trying to understand why and what I can do to correct it. We did do some 301 redirects a little over a month ago so I've been wondering if that has anything to do with it as Google indexes the new URLs. One thing I did notice in Moz is that it is showing that Google is indexing the new URLs but associating them with the wrong keywords in the wrong location. The company services three locations and each location has a service page on the site. But Moz is showing that in Atlanta, the indexed URL is the Nashville one, etc. Is there any way to affect that? Another thing to note is that organic search traffic is actually up so it doesn't appear to be affecting them which I find a bit strange. Just looking for any insight as to things I should be looking into to explain the sudden drops. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | maghanlinchpinsales0 -
Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if 'off-site' such as on the devs own media server ?
Hi Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if 'off-site' such as if they are on the developers own media server ? As opposed to on the actual websites server or file structure ? In the case i'm looking at the image files are hosted on a totally separate server (a media subdomain of the developers site server) from the subject sites dedicated server. Will engines still attribute the properties of files hosted in this manner to the main website (such as file name, alt attributes, etc etc) ? Or should they really be on the subject sites server own media folder ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Webmaster tools doesn't pick up 301 redirect
I had a few hundred URLs that died on my site. Google Webmaster Tools notified me about the increase in 404 errors. I fixed all of them by 301 redirecting them to the most relevant page and did multiple header checks to ensure that the 301 has been implemented correctly. Now a few weeks later, Google is giving me the exact same message in Google Webmaster Tools but they are all still 301 redirected. WTF?
Technical SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
My Domain Authority is high but don't rank in serps
So i'm a beginner/intermediate SEO and uptil about 3 weeks ago i enjoyed Top 3 rankings for all my keywords(VIrtual Assistant,Virtual Assistants, Virtual Personal Assistant,Virtual Personal Assistants and so on) for my site www.247VirtualAssistant.com. All of a sudden i dropped in rankings and can't figure out why. I ran a link analysis and nothing looks like it changed, in fact i still command much higher domain authority than my competition, but i'm stuck on the bottom of the 2nd page. I can't tell if i'm being penalized, if the other sites all of sudden just outperformed me or something else is happening here. I've also noticed a lot of "dancing" in my serps, I've been in 2nd last position on the 2nd page, then 1st of the third page, then last on the 2nd page and so on. Can someone please help me make sense of this?? Thanks! Thomas, a very confused an desperate website owner
Technical SEO | | Shajan0 -
Traffic has dropped from my site.
Hello, I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this. The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com Does any one have any ideas that can help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
Ignore url parameters without the 'parameter=' ?
We are working on an ecommerce site that sorts out the products by color and size but doesn't use the sortby= but uses sortby/. Can we tell Google to ignore the sortby/ parameter in Webmaster Tools even though it is not followed by an = sign? For example: www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/size-m www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/color-black Can we tell WMT to ignore the 'shopby/' parameter so that only the tshirts page will be indexed? Or does the shopby have to be set up as 'shopby=' ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
How do I know which page a link is from
I've got an interesting situation. I hope you can help. I have a list of links but I'm not sure which pages of my site they are from. How do I know which page a specific link is from? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | VinceWicks0