Traffic drop after Facebook push
-
Hi all,
We experienced a strange phenonema after a Facebook push, it appears the Google organic traffic was all but dead for five days after. Totally not sure why!
It has since returned to about 80% of previous levels.
-
Hi,
When you say that referral traffic was unaffected - did you see the burst of traffic in Analytics or not?
In webmaster tools - do you see that clicks go down to zero during this timeframe. Was there an increased number of crawl errors during this period?
Was your site able to handle the traffic or did it go down - sometimes when sites are unstable or frequently offline Google temporary removes them from the SERP's until the situation has normalised.
Without additional info it's difficult to judge what exactly could be the cause. I never heard that a sudden peak of traffic from one source had an impact (in the negative sense) on search traffic - normally more visits from other sources are rather positive for your rankings.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Okay all, I'm going to mark this as solved. After digging deeper in the cPanel stats, it looks more like the whole site went offline for a couple days! Yikes.
| 12 Apr 2015 | 46 | 201 | 1,016 | 28.07 MB |
| 13 Apr 2015 | 356 | 752 | 9,115 | 239.04 MB |
| 14 Apr 2015 | 1,823 | 3,897 | 50,698 | 1.15 GB |
| 15 Apr 2015 | 289 | 602 | 6,375 | 175.32 MB |
| 16 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 17 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 18 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 19 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 20 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 21 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 22 Apr 2015 | 28 | 51 | 603 | 13.89 MB |
| 23 Apr 2015 | 73 | 1,302 | 2,514 | 36.23 MB |
| 24 Apr 2015 | 65 | 167 | 1,111 | 28.60 MB |
| 25 Apr 2015 | 59 | 142 | 1,115 | 27.35 MB |
| 26 Apr 2015 | 56 | 101 | 1,134 | 27.36 MB |
| 27 Apr 2015 | 74 | 192 | 1,353 | 31.16 MB | -
Hi Dirk,
Nothing was changed during that time and it appears all the direct/social traffic was unaffected. It was as if the sudden rush of a thousand plus people over social caused an issue. I've never seen Google traffic zero out like that, in fact, it appears as if it was zero until WordPress automatically upgraded (that should have occurred on or around the 22nd).
-
Did you seem a similar drop in Webmaster tools?
When I see such a sudden drop & fast recovery my first guess would be that something went wrong with your analytics tag. How was you overall traffic during this period? Did you see the Facebook traffic appearing in referrals?
Apart from the Facebook push - did you do technical changes to your site in the same timeframe?
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Site hacked and now being spammed and rankings dropping
I have a client's site that was hacked in December and a whole bunch of spam pages were created. We've since removed those pages and they serve a 404 error now. But I pick up a new link almost every day from a another spammy site linking back to the pages that were created. I'm updating the Disavow as I see the new links reported in ahrefs but what else can I do to stop these buggers and how can I recover rankings other than building links and creating content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Decreased organic traffic but increased Webmaster Tool Queries
We have a client who has had a significant decrease in organic traffic this last month (about 20%) but in Webmaster tools it tells me there was an increase in impressions and clicks. How can these both be accurate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Search traffic down 30% this month
Our search traffic has been growing at a steady clip for the last year but is down about 30% this month. As part of a redesign, we've repurposed our home page (blog.getvero.com). Rather than serve as a feed of recent posts, it's now an email signup page. We created a new page (blog.getvero.com/posts/) to display new posts. I think this is likely the reason for the drop in search traffic but I'm frustrated that it's losing us thousands of visitors per month. A few questions: 1. How long will it take to recover from this? 2. Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery process? 3. Why are some of our best performing posts seeing less search traffic even though the URL hasn't changed? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116983020420 -
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? eJGe3Vw
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hendersondavidp0 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Planning for Website traffic on a self-hosted web server
How would you plan for the levels of traffic on an in-house web server? The scenario is that website is basically running on a T1 (1.5 Mbps) connection pipe, and traffic projects to increase significantly with content growing from about 40 uniques a day (on less than 20 poorly optimized web pages + associated PDF documents), to over 150 search optimized content pages + offsite traffic and link building. I'm trying to figure out what kinds of avg traffic levels (plus spikes) would represent a maximum bandwidth capacity for this...given that its a narrow specialty B2B focus. Any answers would be useful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GLogic0 -
What would cause a drastic drop in pages crawled per day?
The site didn't go down. There were no drop in rankings, or traffic. But we went from averaging 150,000 pages crawled per day, to ~1000 pages crawled per day. We're now back up to ~100,000 crawled per day, but we went more than a week with only 1000 pages being crawled daily. The question is, what could cause this drastic (but temporary) reduction in pages crawled?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatwallet0