I had a massive ogranic traffic drop in the past 72 hours (80%). What should I do? I
-
I am very very worried as my organic traffic suddenly came to pretty much a halt last Friday. We have been working very hard on content in the last 2 years and have 0 duplicated content with many thousand travel guides, tips and other travel related info. We are also publishing a successful travel blog which used to get quite a bit off traffic. Everything stalled last Friday and since we are operating in the travel industry which is very competitive, this will be very hard on us. In fact, I fear that we will not survive this drop for more than 2-3 months.
How do we find out about what happened and what can we do to get our SERPs back?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the reply Peter. By reviewing your site I can share the following:
-
your site is still indexed by Google.
-
you could open a Reconsideration Request with Google to determine if your site has received a manual penalty: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration
-
you need to analyze your traffic using Google Analytics. EXACTLY where is the traffic drop? You need to analyze specific sources such as Google organic search traffic for specific keywords.
-
I tried a longtail keyword search for your site based on the first blog article I located "top 5 reasons to visit honduras". You ranked #7 for the phrase. It's not surprising as the page has a PR of 1.
-
have you noticed any ranking drop for a specific keyword or page?
The only way to troubleshoot this issue is to dig into your analytics data.
-
-
Thank you so much for all the questions.
I am trying to keep it short, so here are the clarifications:
- we have not done anything specific in the past 6 weeks or 3 months that could have caused this
- no Malware is found via Webmastertools
- We use Analytics
- The drop is broad and sudden, we lost some 90% of our organic traffic
- The site is this one http://bit.ly/8CsakX
- No special inbound or oubtbound links were found that would have caused this
- the drop is broad across all pages and all keywords
Attached is an image... our SEO was ok... slowly increasing, interestingly our blog which fresh content that we write ourselves every day also got the hit and dropped 80% as well.
please help. Thanks
-
All the previous responses are great. I would look into Google Webmasters and check to see who's linking to you. Once you figure it out and 'if' you are being penalized, contact google through Google Webmasters and ask for a reconsideration.
-
The owner of the website is the person who is best able to diagnose a traffic decline. Anyone else is guessing.
The thing that you need to do is to check the analytics and determine.....
--- did you lose traffic for specific keywords?
--- did you lose traffic to specific pages?
--- did you lose traffic from specific sources?
Information like the above is the only way to diagnose a traffic loss.
Get into your analytics and see what happened. Then an action plan can be developed.
-
Hi Peter.
Itrogers asked some good questions. A few additional questions I would ask:
-
What tool are you using to measure your traffic?
-
What is your site's web address?
-
Which pages of your site normally receive the highest amount of traffic?
-
Is there any search term for which you had the #1 or 2 rankings in Google?
-
Are there any ad campaigns or other traffic sources which recently began? I realize you are asking about organic traffic but your ads may compete with the organic traffic.
-
What changes to your site have been made in the past 6 weeks? Any chance pages could have been blocked with robots.txt or noindexed?
Basically we need to understand exactly what traffic it was you previously received that is no longer present. Then we can begin to diagnose why that traffic is missing.
-
-
Have you purchased or obtained any spammy links to your content?
Have you checked Google webmaster tools for any malware warnings?
Did the traffic just stop completely? Make sure that you didn't remove your analytics code from your header. This will make it obviously look like you have 0 traffic when you actually might be. Sometimes technical changes (especially with a CMS) can cause some parts of the site to stop working together.
What did you do recently that might be of question to Google?
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
-
My PA and DA dropped Higest Rate
hi i got a domain with 49 DA and 36 PA and bought it through namecheap after uploading on their server with https:// after 5 days the site lost its PA and DA now it was 1 PA and 9 DA Could any one tell me what the issue behind this the links is fair and not spam but why the dropping of cause for???
Technical SEO | | gamajunova0 -
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 -
Pagespeed drop on https
Hi all, Since I have moved from http to https my pagespeed has dropped. My hosting company/ programmer say this is normal but I am not happy with the results. Before: mobile 69 desktop 89 Now: Mobile: 52 desktop 69 Anybody experience with this issue? All help is welcome! Thank You in advance Tymen
Technical SEO | | Tymen0 -
Sudden Drop in Keyword Rankings
We launched http://www.manufacturedfun.com/ earlier this year and had been ranking 1 & 2 on Google SERPs for the keywords we optimized, but last week we experienced a sudden drop in rankings that pretty much took us off the radar. For instance, 'popcorn machines' went as far back as page 5 and 'popcorn poppers' dropped even further to page 9. We are currently working on fixing the numerous Duplicate Page Title and Duplicate Page Content errors identified by SEOmoz, but since we have had those for about 6 months and ranked well anyway, I wonder if there's something else that we are missing. Any insight you can offer will be sincerely appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | GRIP-SEO0 -
90% traffic loss. Pandalized?
Happened several times during this year. After launch as soon as we reach exactly 100K uniques Google kills 90% of the traffic. Then sudden recovery (pretty much without any action from us) after several weeks not connected to any algo updates/refresh. No warnings. No malware. WMT clean as a baby. Only old good whitehat SEO. Not even close to the edge of wrongdoing:) This time it happens again Aug. 22nd right after Panda 3.9.1. What is different now same exact date Bing traffic went down as well. http://bit.ly/eEu27I Need advice:)
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Site dropped after article submissions
I have a site about back pain. The name is lower back pain relief. It has a lot of content on how to treat back pain with natural remedies. I paid for botw.org and yahoo directories as well as submissions from submit edge. My site was doing well within a few months. I was floating around at the bottom of page two for "lower back pain relief" and lower back pain. I found out about Unique article wizard. I started using that to write and submit articles. Now, my website is not ranking anywhere. I submitted a request for reconsideration to Google. They said no manual action had been taken. The question: How long does this penalty last? Is that website toast now? I think it was penalized for using the anchor text too much or adding too many links at once. It has been penalized for about 6 weeks now.
Technical SEO | | Naturalhealth150 -
Keyword rankings improve but traffic doesn't
I am working on a couple of SEO projects and have noticed over the past couple of months that the keywords rankings have improved immensely with most of them amongst top 10 on google, but still the traffic on the website doesn't improve much. Can somebody explain me the possible reasons behind this, and what can I do to attract more traffic?
Technical SEO | | KS__0 -
Massive amount of 404s after forum prune
So I pruned my vbulletin forum the other week and now webmaster tools detects over 4000 urls as not found. Is there a solution to this? Is this something that could negatively effect rankings? Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | TheTippingPoint0