Why is my traffic dropping so hard?
-
Hi guys,
My traffic has been dropping pretty hard from just over 3k to around 250 in the last few days. I've ran a few tests using Google webmaster tools and Open Site Explorer, as well as answering a pretty cool quiz that was created by an SEO to determine if I'm the victim of any Google updates etc, and everything is looking okay...
What do you think could be causing this issue? We're only just gearing up to start on a SEO campaign. At the moment no SEO is being done other than just casual blogging.
-
Thanks. Nothing wrong with inbound external links as far as I can see. I'll just continue implementing advice from everyone here and hopefully this will amend itself as we pump more traffic through the site!
Cheers.
-
Looking at the graph you posted the traffic from May doesn't look like it dropped all that much, especially given the variability of your traffic over the past few months. Your post is unclear if the graph is overall traffic or organic search traffic - so it's hard to say what exactly is going on, but it could just be normal fluctuation as some posts get more attention than others.
The traffic for June is low, but it's only a weeks worth of traffic. If you average it out over the entire month, it will probably be similar to May's.
I would run a quick Open Site Explorer search on the site to see if your inbound link profile looks fishy at all. If it does, you may have been hit by Penguin. If you see any fishy links, you can consider disavowing them.
-
Did you make any structural changes to your site before this happened? Did the URL structure change or the main navigation structure? I would first check your robots.txt and meta robots tags to make sure nothing was accidentally changed to block the search engines/remove the pages from the index. An accidental change of a setting can often make major differences for a site.
If you can provide the URL, we can take a quick look.
Mark
-
Have you slowed down your publishing rate? If so you should return to former level and stabilize there then recheck graph.
With all the changes going on there are bound to be new contenders in your landscape and you already stated SEO is lax right now so I would move forward with plans. Ensure you tech/server is healthy and user metrics are positive.
Best to Audit with P Bear consideration and then puto your head down.
-
I would also add:
- Check if you didn't stuff too much keywords or links.
- Search in Google if you have a new successful competitor and try to beat him.
Hope it helps, good luck!
-
Couple of things of the top of my head.
- Check your rankings to make sure that nothing has changed (sorry if that is a no s***)
- Check the Google trends for your keyword to see if it is on the decline or not. You can check on either google.com/trends or google keyword tool but I totally blanked on how to do it.
- Has anything like bounce rate/site speed or down time change? These could account for the issue
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
-
Drop in indexation but increase in organic traffic
We've had a puzzling drop in indexed pages on our ecommerce website. My crawl returns just over 25k items. Until 19/6 we had about 23-24k indexed. Then we experienced a sudden drop from 19/6 to 26/6: from 23,400 to 18,999, losing 4.4k pages from one week to the next. At the same time, our organic traffic has not decreased, it actually increased, however, it's only been a couple of weeks so that may be coincidence. A few things that have happened during the past few weeks: 31/5: we implemented pagination on category pages to avoid issues with duplicate content - could it be that this led to a decrease in indexed pages 3 weeks later? However, I can only find about 1.5k pages in my crawl that are page 2+ 18-19/6: we had some website outages over the weekend; as a B2B business, we don't get much traffic over the weekend, so I can't see an impact to traffic. However, the following week, indexation dropped by another 250 (then stayed the same this past week), so I don't think this was a factor. 21/6: we retired another website and migrated it to our main website. However, all pages were redirected to existing pages so no new pages were created for the migration. This doesn't really explain a decrease in indexation, but may account for some of the increase in organic traffic; however not all as the retired website hardly got any organic traffic. So, should we be worried? As our website is quite large, it would probably be quite difficult to pin point exactly which pages dropped off the index, but a loss of 19% of pages is quite significant. Then again, it doesn't appear to have negatively impacted organic traffic... Have you got any suggestions for what I should be looking at to find out what happened? Should I be worried at this point? I will definitely continue to have an eye on how our organic traffic (and indexation) develops but I am not sure if there is anything I can do at this point. I'd appreciate your advice on this, to make sure I am not missing something blindingly obvious. Thanks! RmWaNib JJm4tC3
Reporting & Analytics | | ViviCa10 -
Traffic by keyword- phenomenon
I have several keywords that seem to bring visitors in but when I look at my rankings it shows that I have no ranking authority at all. Are these just robots or some non human click? Or how do I even get these visitors?
Reporting & Analytics | | Retail_Endeavors0 -
Turkish Invasion? Massive influx of non-english traffic
Last month, a client of mine has had a very large increase in irrelevant traffic. This traffic is all being sent by Google from mostly eastern Europe, but also from Egypt and Brazil. The largest influx is from Turkey. The traffic is all landing on only two URL's. The magnitude of this traffic is about 350 visits per day. The main keywords sending traffic are: müzik indirme programları (Turkish which translates to "music download programs") تحميل برنامج اوبرا (Arabic translates to "download Opera") program za skidanje muzike (Bosnian for "program for downloading music") My client is a small nonprofit summer music festival (with a strong emphasis on Opera music) so some of the on-page at least relates to these keywords. But the site is entirely in English. Since the words are related to a traditional sketchy vertical I'm worried that my client site has been hacked. Though, for the life of me, I can't imagine what anyone can gain from this. My questions are: Does anyone have any idea what is going on? What are the potential ramifications of this irrelevant traffic? (I'm worried about the traffic slowing down the site, I'm also worried that 350 visits per day and a 95% bounce rate is going to hurt my clients reputation with search engines) What can be done about it? Thank you for any insight you can provide.
Reporting & Analytics | | JesseCWalker0 -
Direct Traffic Source?
Hi all, Having some trouble figuring out a metric I'm dissecting. We have a large amount of traffic going to deep pages and I'm looking at the traffic source and an alarming amount are coming as Direct traffic. The thing is this can't type in or bookmarked traffic, so what else could it be? We have numbers like 80% and 60% for direct traffic, which judging by our previous efforts, that just can't right. Anyone can figure out what I may be missing out? Deeper pages should usually not get as much Direct traffic, so what can it be?
Reporting & Analytics | | William.Lau0 -
What extra shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?
One of my clients has english language websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but60%-70% of the content on site remains the same. The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk and one is on brandname.com. The precuations that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are: 1. used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages2. currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD3. have tried to differenttate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:Author Vis a vis Written byFormat vis a vis binding type Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on What remains the same: 1. Title structure 2. Description 3. Product Name 4. About the product text
Reporting & Analytics | | CyrilWilson0 -
How to see traffic for specific keywords in GA
Hell guys, What i want to achieve is to generate a list of specific keywords showing traffic for a certain periode of time. I also want so be able to compare this time period with historical data. I want a list as shown in: Traffic sources -> sources -> search -> organic. This shows a list of keywords generating traffic out of the organic search results. When you use a filter you can only use one word so it seems. I just want to create that list but with the specific keywords i choose to display. I tried advanced reports and advanced segments but that doesn't really give me what i want. The idea behind this whole thing is that i want to give my client an overview of the traffic received on the words we are optimizing for. this traffic has to be compared to the previous month so they can see clearly if there were changes. Thx !
Reporting & Analytics | | 5MMedia0 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0 -
Has Google changed its algorithm? My traffic has almost doubled and I don't know why.
My traffic has nearly doubled over the past few days, and my conversion rate has doubled as well. It looks like our rankings haven't changed... We haven't done anything to the site recently, although we did submit a couple of press releases through the wire not too long ago (within the last few weeks). I do not think that this is a cyclical/seasonal jump in traffic because last year this did not occur. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | deuce1s0