Major drop in visitor numbers?
-
Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service . We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress. What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits? Would appreciate feedback.
-
Dana is correct - you need to ride the wave a little while Google looks at all of the changes and then recalculates where you should be.
Something else, how have you been dealing with the duplicated content? If a change in content on landing pages has happened, it could be worth using CrazyEgg and looking at a heatmap of those pages to see where people are the most active. Can be a real eye-opener!
Really need to know more about how the changes were made before we can look at other possible reasons.
Andy
-
i checked your domain authority which is very less. you might have to do make some quality links to our site again to get back the trust of Google and increase domain authority.
-
Hi Dana,
We thought it was our analytics configuration however we did the SEOMoz crawl and that highlighted the same issues. Thanks for the other comments though it is worth checking those basics too.
-
My first inclination is to say "be patient" and ride out the dip. I have never seen a complete site overhaul that didn't experience a dip in traffic. Next, I would say "Are your ducks in a row?"
What I mean by that is:
- Have you set up appropriate 301 redirects if any of your URLs were re-written?
- Are those 301 working properly (did you test them)?
- If no 301 redirects, did you implement canonical tags?
- Are you actively monitoring Google Webmaster Tools? Are you acting on those reports?
- Have you created and resubmitted a new sitemap to Google?
- Did you reinstall analytics or are you using different analytics? It could be that your analytics have changed more than your traffic (This is a big one....really consider this carefully).
If the answer is yes to all of the above. Be patient. I know it's hard, but don't freak out and sit tight. You should be fine after a little time.
Dana
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
-
Sudden Drop in Mobile Core Web Vitals
Web Vitals Screengrab.PNG For some reason, after all URLs being previously classified as Good, our Mobile Web Vitals report suddenly shifted to the above, and it doesn't correspond with any site changes on our end. Has anyone else experience something similar or have any idea what might have caused such a shift? Curiously I'm not seeing a drop in session duration, conversion rate etc. for mobile traffic despite the seemingly sudden change.
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
Recent redirect leading to keyword ranking drop
Hey all! Someone I work with recently redirected one of their site pages via Squarespace. They used Squarespace-provided code to make a 301 redirect. Following this, the primary keywords for the page that was redirect to have dropped pretty significantly. Any Squarespace pros out there who can help me figure out what's going on?
Technical SEO | | kelseyworsham0 -
Another company is coming up in search results when I type in my phone number
If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541, another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up. We do not come up at all for this search. However, if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not. Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
How can I use MOZ to investigate a my recent drop in domain authority?
Between MOZ's last scan of my site and the one before my domain authority dropped from 35 to 29. I'm not sure where to begin investigating this and how I can leverage MOZ in this case. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Ranking Drop
hey guys, I know there is always someone here asking this questions, but I have done my fair share of investigation and have not come up with a cause. my ranking dropped from page one to page 2 or 3 last sunday in time span of 4 hours. After that I read that google was updating panda with 4.1, but don't know why I got hit exactly. my competition is all clear and some have even gained rankings, and mine dropped even though my domain and page authority increased as well. any ideas would help. I already checked all the obvious ones (such as spam, links, content, etc)
Technical SEO | | s-s1 -
"Spam emails" : ranking drop?
Hello, Is it possible that a website gets penalised by Google because your hosting company blocked you from sending emails? Basically I got a message from my hosting company saying that they were blocking me from sending emails from our server and domain because too many had mistakes or were complained about. The same day we dropped from 2<sup>nd</sup> on a keyword to about 600<sup>th</sup> while still being ranked for other keywords. The drop was for our main keyword. Can the fact we sent “bad emails” be related to a rank drop? For the record, those were confiormation emails for account creation, they were legit, not spam. That's off-topic though.
Technical SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Could a large number of No Followed links in to my site have caused a penalty?
On 22nd Feb, I placed a text ad on a respected industry recruitment website. As the site has many pages, the webmaster made a point of NOFOLLOWING the links back to my site. 6 days later, my site lost 30% of its daily traffic overnight, and it's stayed there ever since. I looked on Webmaster Tools just now, and it says that there are 125,000 links coming in to my site from the site I'm advertising on (even though the links are NOFOLLOWED). Could this have triggered the fall in search traffic to my site? Thanks for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | tofftrader0 -
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 | | sandlappercreative0