Drop in traffic at start of December 2014
-
Hello!
I've noticed a drop in organic Google traffic to our ecommerce site. The drop started on the 1st December 2014. The difference compared with last year is around -25%.
I've taken a look at landing pages for the organic Google traffic:
Homepage: -40%
Product pages: -31%
Category pages: -7%
Blog pages: -7%On the 1st December our site was down for a few hours in the early morning for some scheduled maintenance. I got a couple of emails from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that there was an "Increase in server errors" and "Googlebot can't access your site". Once the site maintenance was complete there haven't been any further emails from Google about this. I doubt the site being down is the cause of the drop in traffic.
I suspect it may have been caused by the latest Penguin updates around the end of November 2014. Can anyone advise if this sounds like it is the cause, and why the homepage and products pages have been hit so severely?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
-
Many thanks Dirk, looks like you've found the problem! Much appreciated!
-
Dave,
While checking your site, it seems that the tracking code is not always loaded - so probably it's more a technical glitch after the maintenance. Not clear what is causing it - when you install the tag assistant plugin you will see yourself. Seems to happen on first visit.
When it's not loaded your source (homepage) looks like this:
Dirk
-
Hi Dave,
How is overall traffic - did you see the same traffic drop. Sometimes Google traffic is reported as referrer traffic (for one of the sites I manage which is largely dependant on image search almost all google traffic is reported as referrer rather than search traffic)
I noticed that you're using a (very) old version of the GA tracker - consider updating to the last version (universal). If I check the page with the Tag Assistant plugin I get 3 warnings (sync version / code outside head / depreciated method get_tracker)
Dirk
-
Thanks for the replies everyone! I've had a closer look at our backlinks and there a few low quality ones in there, but the vast majority seem okay to me.
One thing I have noticed while digging about in more depth in WMT is that there is not a noticeable decline in clicks or impressions within the "Search Queries" section. Does this suggest there is an issue with how our GA is recording the visits from organic?
The domain name is www.edinburghbicycle.com.
-
Dave,
I doubt that the downtime (especially because it has been only a few hours) has anything to do with the drop in traffic. In my experience, even an unscheduled downtime of 24hr doesn't have any impact on SEO traffic.
If you are hit by Penguin, check your low quality links in Google Webmastertools, and try to contact the sites to eliminate the links to your site (if the link quality is very low, almost impossible to get these links removed). For the ones that do not answer, disavow the links.
Do the same for low quality links you can find using other tools: ahrefs.com, majesticseo.com, opensiteexplorer.com.
Check the profile of Marie Haynes - she has quite some experience on link removal and unnatural links & has written some interesting stuff about it http://moz.com/community/users/308135 - check the posts at the bottom of her profile.
Dirk
-
Are you able to share the domain name? This can at least give us some more insight as to what may have occurred.
-
Hi Laura,
It was indeed the timing that made me suspect Penguin! Our backlink profile could be better. Is there a good way of remedying this sort of backlink issue?
The maintenance was just an update to the web server hardware and OS, and I'm not aware of any new competitors, so I suspect it is Penguin that is causing the drop in traffic.
-
Is timing the only thing that makes you suspect Penguin is the cause of the drop in traffic? What does your backlink profile look like? Are there tons of spammy links to your site? If so, then you may be right about Penguin.
It's impossible to say what caused the drop based solely on the information you've provided. I highly doubt that a few hours of downtime had anything to do with your drop in traffic.
Other questions to consider:
- Have you made any significant changes to your website within the last three months? (What kind of maintenance was actually performed on the site?)
- Are there any new competitors pushing you out of the SERPs?
-
Could it also be part of the "penguin double take" or "roll back" as seen here- http://algoroo.com/ ?
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
-
Has anyone else seen a large drop in Domain Authority this week?
A site of ours and its competitors have all seen pretty big drops in domain authority over the past week or so. Just wondering whether this could be something to do with a change in how DA is measured or whether its our backlink profile that is the problem. Any feedback would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEO_Jellyfish0 -
Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?
On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson1 -
Why has my website dropped 20 places
Hi, a bit shocked this morning as my website http://www.in2town.co.uk/ has dropped around 20 places in google. Does anyone know why this has happened. The site is updated all day long so not sure what is going on here any help and advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Sudden drop in ranking google.co.uk ranking
Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Received Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links , but no negative impact on ranking and traffic, What should i do next?
Hello, On May 19 , 2012 Google webmaster sent notification "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to " both sites haven't lost any ranking or traffic as yet. I am worried, Should i panic,what should i be doing , will it be going down anytime soon? how to naturally build links?
Technical SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
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 -
Should I delete Google Places and start over?
My Google Places page is stagnant. It never changes its rank, doesn't find corresponding reviews on directory sites, disappears altogether after a few days for certain keywords and ranks poorly overall. We have had a horrible time getting our web presence to be uniform...name, address, phone, etc. Our business was previously a different name so all those listings were still active, we have had different doctors over the years...those were associated with the business name in different listings, we used a referral service that sponsored listings using a diffferent phone number, change web url in the past year so some sites indicated the wrong address. HUGE HEADACHE Are there any positives/negatives to deleting the Places page and starting over? Here is the page: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&georestrict=input_srcid%3Ab1706925095a8afa Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | PMC-3120871 -
Drop Down Menu as Pagination
Hi, We currently use a drop down menu option for our paginated pages using JavaScript, what would be the best search engine friendly way around this?
Technical SEO | | CameronT0