90% Traffic Drop...
-
Hey Moz Community
Our team has been racking our collective brains about a 90% drop in traffic a niche client of ours has seen. The traffic drop occurred September 20th. The site averages 300-400 unique visits a month (very targeted & niche) & dropped to 30-40 uvm.
The domain is on an exact match but other then that I can't see anything that would be deserving of such a significant drop in traffic. Our campaign had been performing very well & we were seeing steady gains in traffic & ranking over the long term until September 20th.
I'm curious if the exact match update would have such a big impact months after it was released (July/July if I remember correctly). I also didn't think it could be such a big issue because that domain has been used by us for a couple years.
Is the Exact Domain Match such a big deal?
-
Nice - I didn't consider an issue with reporting.
-
We've never checked the server logs but I'm going to put in a request for that. Analytics hasn't been touched & we've checked to ensure it's correctly installed.
Unfortunately the client has seen a drop in leads & sales.
-
Again great thoughts & questions. We have a few years worth of analytics & the vertical type is bankruptcy (chapter 11). There is seasonality but not at this particular time of year & we've never seen a drop that was this significant.
From a ranking standpoint we'd never actually gotten to page one but we'd seen a very steady climb & traffic was starting from zero when the site was launched. So there was no rank drop per but we weren't on page one.
No other marketing at the time & certainly nothing that could have impacted traffic.
We've started to see a very slow increase in traffic so we'll monitor it closely & continue to do the best work we can.
-
Was there any work done to the site on that date? Could GA code have not been put on some of the pages? Could there have been duplicate codes that had been inflating the numbers that were removed? Do you have access to awstats or some other form of server log files to check for a corresponding drop there? Have your leads and sales changed?
Just want to narrow down that we are looking at a traffic drop and not a reporting issue.
-
I would check Google Trends for a possible drop in search volume for your targeted terms. I am not sure how long you have had this site up and running but you may just have hit a seasonality drop (we see this with hotels) and you may simply need to wait it out. You may consider deepening your 'bucket' of phrases if there are relevant terms for which you are not targeting that may still be receiving some decent search volume.
Because you have not dropped in ranking for the specific term I am confident in saying this has nothing to do with your exact match domain - any penalty would have been to your rankings which would have effected traffic but Google can not cut out the middle man - they can't keep you where you are in the rankings but still control your traffic amount.
Hmmmm - that makes me wonder - have you narrowed the traffic loss down to search engines? Were you perhaps running some other type of marketing that may have been driving direct or referral traffic that you have stopped?
-
Good question, no there hasn't been a drop for the exact match keyword specifically. It may be important to note that we've focussed on a bucket of 25-30 phrases that are similar & relevant.
I've been insisting the same thing as you mention here, the exact match doesn't give you the boost it once did but I've never seen a "penalty". This is where I believe that Google is letting us down, without a penalty it becomes incredibly difficult to see an issue.
-
Is there any correlation with ranking drop for the exact match keyword (or any other keywords for that matter)? I know that exact match domains may not get the boost they used to but I certainly don't recall seeing any penalties.
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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
Positions dropped and do not recover
Hi all, Site: https://www.fascinators.com.au k/w: fascinators (this is the main one I am looking at) About 2 years ago, I redesigned the site. It used to be on first positions in Google Australia. After redesign, positions dropped and never recovered. No matter what I do, I can not get them back. I even involved professional SEO agency for the last 6 month to help build links, but nothing works. (old site used really old non mobile-friendly engine) As far as I know site is technically sound with no issues. In the last few month position for my main keyword 'fascinators' jumps really wildly. From position 9 to not being in Google first 100. And jump can happen overnight. As of today it disappeared from first 100 again. I am really tearing my hair out on what can be wrong. Link building is underway. This is one area I am aware of. Thinking of keyword spamming, i removed lots of 'fascinators' from URL, but that did not seem to help much. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Rudolf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rudolfl1 -
Organic search traffic improved (besides Google) for last 6 months
Hi, to follow up on my previous post (http://moz.com/community/q/low-on-google-ranking-despite-error-free), I was wandering if someone can tell me whether we are penalised by Google or not? Since the last 6 months, we see a rise in organic visitors coming from Bing, yahoo but Google remains the same. Despite the advice given in previous post, I just feel that something else must be wrong. Perhaps more inbound links with high PR? Socially, we are pretty much engaging 50-60% of our audience, yet no link flow will count for our organic ranking sadly enough... Hopefully someone can have a look at our site www.mercadonline.es in more detail? Ask me in a PM for more info! Thank you Ivordg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
How stupid is it to launch a new URL structure when our traffic is climbing?
We decided to redesign our site to make it responsive as Google is ranking sites based on mobile friendliness. Along with this we have changed our URL structure, meta tags, page content, site navigation, internal interlinking. How stupid is it to launch this site right in the middle of record traffic? Our traffic is climbing 10,000 more visitors every day with the current site. Visitors have increased 34% over the last 30 days compared to the previous 30 days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Blocking some countries and redirecting that traffic
Hi there, I have a video site, which is on CDN and is really expensive to run. So I want to block most of the countries and only keep HQ ones. I wonder if there's a difference if I just block them and show blank page, or if I show them a page with text and let's say a link to a different site or if I just simply redirect to some other site. Do you think I can still get good ranking on google on countries that I don't block?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
Traffic drop off and page isn't indexed
In the last couple weeks my impressiona and clicks have dropped off to about half what it used to be. I am wondering if Google is punishing me for something... I also added two new pages to my site in the first week of June and they still aren't indexed. In the past it seemed like new pages would be indexed in a couple days. Is there any way to tell if Google is unhappy with my site? WMT shows 3 server errors, 3 Access denied, and 122 not found errors. Could those not found pages be killing me? Thanks for any advise, Greg www.AntiqueBanknotes.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
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 -
Site dropped rankings when changing host from US to Spain
My site was ranked very well in the UK & US for multiple keywords but we changed hosting from the US to Spain and since then the rankings in the US & UK have dropped between 5 to 35 positions on all keywords and are showing no signs of returning 3 weeks later. What can be causing this? The site was down for about 3 to 5 hours a few days before we transferred hosting (this is why we changed hosting due to the previous hosting being down too often). It does seem as though the new location of the hosting server seems to be affecting rankings but I need confirmation on this or any other ideas why the rankings may have dropped. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0