Huge Dip in Traffic Last Week - New Algo Update?
-
Hi Mozzers,
We experienced a huge dip in traffic on Thursday, 8/14, across our entire site. It was not a specific set of pages, it was sitewide. Google Webmaster Tools notes our impressions are down as well. The traffic has not recovered. It appears our pages are still indexed in Google, just not ranking well.
Here are some questions I have to help isolate the cause:
- We recently completed a major redesign of our entire website on 7/26. We did not notice any dip in traffic after the new design launch - in fact, it actually increased a bit. Is it possible that only now Google sees our new site design and this is the reason for our dip? Is there a way to see Google's past cache dates?
- Did anyone else experience a similar dip in traffic since Thursday?
- Was there a recent Google update?
It would be much appreciated if someone takes a look at our site - www.consumerbase.com for any glaring SEO errors (missing necessary meta tags, etc.).
What steps do you guys suggest I take to isolate the cause in this dip in traffic?
Thanks!
-
There was a Panda update that happened on September 5th. For reference:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-update-19126.html
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/panda-update-september-5-2014/
-
Hey There
Few recommendations;
-
Your robots.txt may be blocking CSS/JS - http://www.consumerbase.com/robots.txt which is now something Google recommends NOT blocking. See this article for backstory and about the fetch and render tool in webmaster tools.
-
How long has the homepage redirected to /index.html? Google does they they actually sort this out for you, and it doesn't quite cause the harm some people assume - but it can't hurt to use the normal domain for the homepage.
-
This one returns a 404 http://www.consumerbase.com/index.php
-
One troubling issue is that bad URLs don't return a 404, they 301 to the homepage: http://www.consumerbase.com/bad - I'd highly consider using a standard 404 not found response code with an error message.
-
This ALSO makes it impossible to run a proper crawl test on the site to check for bad pages. It's possible old pages are not being 301 redirected to the right new pages when they break, and you're losing traffic because Google won't pass value if the redirects don't match in content (more info here)
Did you change URLs with the redesign? It doesn't look like it, but just checking. You may want to export a list of trafficked pages prior to the migration from analytics, and run a crawl test on them. As said above, this is almost impossible to test properly right now because bad URLs 301, and aren't being picked up as 404s.
In terms of next steps. You have to get really granular. Segment, segment, segment - and isolate things until you find a "smoking gun" (which you don't always find, but you should look for).
The redesign date seems suspect - and your increase in traffic could have been in the lag time Google has from crawling and caching the updated site. It's just my hunch about the redesign - I'd look thoroughly everywhere.
-
-
To my knowledge this was just speculation by the author "reading between the lines" and there was no such update.
-
1. Google likes to see fresh new content, so the fact that you saw an increase in your ranking for a short period is not a huge surprise. Once they crawled all the pages, you saw the realistic position of your pages.
"Is there a way to see Google's past cache dates?"
You could try using this:
http://www.googleguide.com/cached_pages.html2. We moved down one spot. Doesn't look like it.
I think you are seeing movement due to an error in the sites documents, meaning redirects, sitemaps, etc. Check to make sure all items and old pages have been redirected and resubmitted.
-
There's a good chance that the issues you're experiencing are related to your redesign, but as an FYI there has been rumblings of a Penguin update over the past week or so. There's a bit more coverage over at SERoundtable, which might be worth taking a look at: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-three-19009.html
-
Why does your site redirect to index.html when i goto the url ?
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
-
Check website update frequency?
Is the tools out there that can check our frequently website is updated with new content products? I'm trying to do an SEO analysis between two websites. Thanks in advance Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
No Domain Authority after 6 weeks
Hi, We have just launched a new e-commerce site and 301'd a lot of the products and categories to the new site. I have also added a link or 2 from other domains. We launched it on 10th of June - but still using site explorer, there is no domain authority showing - just a 1. Why is that? Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Leaking organic traffic - how to debug?
Hi all, We've been running an eCommerce marketplace for more than 2.5 years now. Most of our traffic and revenue have been from organic traffic, which have been growing steadily with our inventory and brand, peaking at March this year. From there, we started losing organic traffic (and revenue) each month, at a rate of about 15-20% - for no reason we can understand. In addition, some of our older pages no longer appear in search results (unless we add the name of the site to the search query). We launched a redesign on the end of May, which seemed to initially improve engagement, but didn't affect this trend of lower organic traffic. Our webmaster tools doesn't show anything special - if anything, we made an effort to clean-up every 404 that appears there and other small issues. We did make the following changes very recently, but it did not seem to have a positive effect (so far): We have deep pagination for some categories of the site, and we just added rel=prev,next in the head of every paginated series on the site. We started generating a dynamic sitemap and submitted it to google. For some reason only about a fourth of the pages on the sitemap are indexed. In addition, the "index status" as reported by webmaster tools shows some weird numbers. First, the number there is way bigger than the amount of pages we have - possibly all the combinations of our listing categories and pagination. That number was constant for a while, before taking a deep earlier this year, rising back up and declining again for the last couple of months. Screenshot of the graph What would be the first steps you'd take to understand the core of the problem? we're really at a loss here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | erangalp1 -
New links not showing in site explorer ?
I have built links to my site this past month that I know are live and in place and some do follow and some no follow ... Are the no follow links just not going to show up in my site explorer data ? And the others - why would they not be showing up yet ? SeoMoz updated thier link data aug 1st , my site has been crawled since then , but this new work I have done for link building have not shown up - None of them ? Its like I did not do any work ? how long could it take for them to show up and affect my site trust ect ? Also is there anything I vould be doing to speed the process up of having the new links found ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Huge spike in 404s and 500 erros
I'm curious what might cause an inordinate amount of 404s in the reporting from SEOMoz's dashboard. I'm exploring links that are marked as 404s and they are (for the most part) working. I talked with the sysadmin and there were no outages this weekend. We also had a number of 500 errors reported in Webmaster Tools but everything seems to be up. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SystemIDBarcodes0 -
Traffic has dropped off a cliff
I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why? www.UltimateBasicTraining.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports1 -
Our URLs have changed. Do we request our external links be updated as well?
Hello Forum, We've re-launched our website with a new, SEO-friendly URL structure. We have also set up 301 redirects from our old URLs to the new ones. Now, is there any benefit to asking those external websites that link to us to update their links with our new URLs? What is the SEO best practice? Thanks for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0