One day impressions drop... how to figure out why?
-
I went back and looked through webmaster tools. I had around 3000 impressions per day leading up to 3/10/2014. Then on 3/11/2014, I dropped to 1000 impressions per day. Is there a good way to figure out what happened? Anyone know if there was a google update that day.
-
I believe Google webmaster and GA are both trusted tools but if I have to choose one of them I will go with analytics tool as its real time where as webmaster tools take time to get updated. If you lost impression as well as traffic from search in a day you probably have to check your rankings and see if you lost rankings as well in-case of you probably knows the action plan.
Also check the drop date and compare it with the Google penalty calendar to see if you are a suspect of Panda or Penguin.
Hope this helps!
-
So what you're really saying is that your click percentage is double what it was before...
I would only take the impression count with a grain of salt. Also, take a look at all your analytics sources and look at ratios rather than just the raw #s; you will be able to get some more actionable data from ratio analysis. Also, personally, and again this is a preference and some may like it or hate it, but I like statcounter.com for some analytics. I have also used Kissmetrics which depending on what your business model is, can also be good (also shout out to CrazyEgg). Worry much more about how many unique visitors are going to the site and your conversion rate (for whatever product it is).
If you focus on efficiency, you won't have to put as much input (unique visitors) in the top of the funnel. Of course, this is easy for me to say because I have no practical advice on how to make your machine more efficient, but just that it is a good thing to focus on.
-
I've been hands-off for since February because my dad has been really sick. So, no major changes.
What I am seeing is this:
1. In Google Webmaster Tools, the impressions were 3000 per day and dropped to 1000 per day to never return. The clicks averaged around 70 per day then dropped to average around 50 per day. I looked at the keyword lists and did not see anything significant change accept for overall lower volume.
2. I looked in Google Analytics and it shows around 1000 impressions per day before 3/11 and 500 per day afterwards. I DO NOT see any drop in clicks AT ALL. The total number of clicks is WAY higher each day than in Google WMT since I do a PPC campaign. So, if I choose organic only, I still see no change. It is also different numbers day by day than WMT.
So, I guess my question now is... which one do I trust?
-
Calico
Are you saying your total impressions per day are 3K and then in a single day it dropped to 1K and never increased again? Remember, it is very hard to look at one metric in a vacuum and draw any conclusion; I would say this is especially true when it is impressions in WMT. DJ123 asked about traffic which is a very good question. Another thing I will suggest since I know you are making changes regularly to the site is always annotate the changes in analytics so that you have benchmarks to check changes against.
Give us as much additional data as is possible and we will try to assist.Best
Robert
-
Did your traffic also drop at the same time, by a similar percentage?
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
-
Different versions of keywords. Which one to optimize?
For some keywords, we have slightly different versions available. For example: people search for 'webhosting', but also for 'web hosting'. Same for 'cloudserver' and 'cloud server'. I used google trends to compare the keywords and find the more popular one. But in different countries, different keywords are searched more often. So we can't really optimize for the BEST version of the keyword, since there is no real BEST version. What would you suggest to do? We could also just develop pages for both keywords, but that could end in duplicated content. Would be an option to use canonicalization then, but this would not really improve ranking for one of the versions. I'm very confused. If anyone has a good idea on how to optimize here, please let me know. Thank you in advance! Best regards
Algorithm Updates | | hosttech_ch
Klemens1 -
Dramatic drop in SEO rankings after recovering from hacking
A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time. Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?
Algorithm Updates | | FPK0 -
Search Visibilty Score dropped by 50%!
Howdy MOZ community, I have been practicing all the "right" techniques on my website, The website in question was doing pretty well ranking among top 5 on SERP's for over 30 keywords, bounce rate of 65% which has been steady since last year, Since 2 weeks ago I have noticed a MAJOR DROP on more than 80% of my rankings, The website in question has also lost 50% in search visibility score, I have checked my Google webmaster tools and there are no alerts regarding bad links ETC, What could be the reason? I hope I can get this sorted out before my employees quit on me because we have lost business by 70%. Please help!
Algorithm Updates | | DustChasersToronto0 -
Ranking under a non-geobased, one word phrase
We have a local client who would like to score under the words "locksmith" and "locksmiths". What is the best way to get him to rank organically and not just in Google Plus Local for those keywords?
Algorithm Updates | | GregWalt0 -
A Serious drop in Pages crawled per day
On 21st April ,I spotted a sudden decrease in pages crawled per day.Previously it was about 5,000 bust after the drop it reached to 225.From the crawl rate never spiked. Here is my website url - http://www.wpstuffs.com/ 8fQHW2G.png
Algorithm Updates | | vividvilla0 -
Drop in Traffic from Google, However no change in the rankings
I have seen a 20% drop in traffic from google last week (After April 29th). However when I try to analyze the rank of the keywords in the google results that send me traffic they seem to be the same. Today (6th March) Traffic has fallen further again with not much/any visible change in the rankings. Any ideas on what the reason for this could be? I have not made any changes to the website recently.
Algorithm Updates | | raghavkapur0 -
Staff Dumbfounded by Rankings Drop - Please Help Us Understand!
We are completely dumbfounded by the amount of organic traffic we lost virtually instantly back on Aug 22 2012. We are spending much more money advertising as of late but took another massive plunge since rolling out our newer site redesign this past sat 04/13/13. The newer and more updated version of our site seems to all of a sudden have us dropping like a rock again! Our developers and in house SEO guy that is in house here seems to think our content is ok and that our PR and page authority is ok as well. However they have told me it isn't good per-say, but not the reason in their opinion for our sites drop in rankings instantly. We've seen tons of keywords drop 22-40+ positions in google. We've been online since 2001 and I've never seen anything even remotely close to this. Didn't seem to see such an impact with bing or yahoo though. Due to our rankings being slaughtered we decided to hired WebIMAX to come in and figure out what happened. They informed us that we must have been hit with the panda filter they collectively guessed. Said our content was fair lol. They done allot of tests without anything really indicated the real root cause of the problem and most every major change they requested we made. However we've changed the site design and layout now and changed much of the content and overall structure to be better we believe and we for the life of us cannot understand the massive unexplained penalty. I attached an image which illustrates our dramatic drop in traffic. Bare in mind that as traffic drops we spend more $$$ advertising so mere traffic numbers don't even really say it all. Our organic results are really down maybe 60-70%. We really thought WebIMAX would be a big help and give great assistance and insight. I didn't see any of that and I think our IT staff agrees. We paid big bucks for nothing in return it seems. However we are desperate and are actually considering staying with them even though they've produced zero results or maybe negative results. In fact with all that was done over weeks and weeks with WebIMAX we continued to DROP in organic results. We don't know if we should go back to them, choose another SEO company or just go on trying to fix this issue ourselves. Website is http://www.cruizinconceptswholesale.com/ We just want someone that knows what they are looking at to say hey I see something Major Right Here. If we could get that then we would simply fix it. Thanks in advance for anyone willing to help us out with their expert knowledge and I think I would trust the community here more than WebIMAX easily! David. cruizin-traffic-image.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | David_C0 -
Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
Algorithm Updates | | Greg_Gifford0