Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis
      Moz Pro

      Enhance Keyword Discovery with Bulk Analysis

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?

    Technical SEO
    4
    7
    2110
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Gavin.Atkinson
      Gavin.Atkinson last edited by

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Gavin.Atkinson
        Gavin.Atkinson last edited by

        Hi guys, thanks for picking that up. Don't know why I missed it! GA code was in the header.php of the old theme and was lost when I switched themes. I've added it back now so I'll see what happens.

        I can see how that would have impacted the search traffic graph on Moz Pro, but I'm still not sure if it would have affected how Moz reports my keyword rankings. Did I really suffer big drops in the SERPs as Moz reported? Or was it just a side-effect of Moz not being able to see traffic in my GA account?

        Tony

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • TheeDigital
          TheeDigital last edited by

          As L Slversen said, your Google Analytics tracking code is missing so you wouldn't be recording traffic. This probably happened with your theme changed and likely the traffic you are still seeing on the site is not legitimate, more than likely ghost referral spam traffic.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • LSIversen
            LSIversen last edited by

            I would start out by making sure you put back the analytics tracking code, since that's not there right now (checked both with Google Tag Assistant & in the source code). So it makes sense you can't see any traffic from search, since there is no tracking. That probably explains a lot of it.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
            • KyleEaves
              Kyle Eaves @Gavin.Atkinson last edited by

              I searched for the keyword "asian travel tips" and you were on the 3rd page of Google. I clicked and went to your website, so you should see at least one organic visit. Your site seemed to load pretty quickly, so that is good. Check the stats for today and let me know if the visit shows up. If you don't see it, there must be something wrong with your analytics tracking, which I feel must be the case because your visits dropped to zero. It just doesn't seem right that you wouldn't have at least a couple visits show up.

              Have you been tracking some of your keywords daily with the rank tracker tool? That is a better way to get an update more often on your site's ranking for specific keywords since you can run it every day and see how the keywords have tracked over time rather than waiting for the weekly update.

              I ran a site:www.travelnasia.com query and it looks like you've got 806 pages indexed in Google. Does that seem about right?

              I scanned your site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It's a pretty nice tool, check it out if you haven't yet. It definitely helps with locating and fixing broken links. The tool also gives you access to tons of information about your site. Here are some sample reports from your site:
              Crawl Overview: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/crawl_overview.xls
              404 Errors: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/client_error_%284xx%29_inlinks.xls
              No Response Links: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/no_response_inlinks.xls

              Hopefully you're able to get this figured out quickly. I'll let you know if I think of anything else. Best of luck!

              Kyle Eaves
              SEO Specialist
              KyleEaves.com

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Gavin.Atkinson
                Gavin.Atkinson last edited by

                Hi Kyle, thanks for taking a look. No, my keyword rankings took a hit (48 up, 149 down) over the past week but I am still ranking for lots of keywords. About half of my #1-3 keywords dropped back to #4-10. If this keeps up I expect my keywords will take a much bigger hit. In fact I am already seeing evidence of that. My URL http://www.travelnasia.com/thailand/wararot-chiang-mai-day-market/ shows in Moz as still ranking #1 for "Wararot Chiang Mai day market" on Friday but in fact I now don't even list on the first 3 pages of results.

                When you say I have a lot of 404s on my site, where are you getting that info? As of Friday, Moz shows 37 404 errors on the site and many of those are leftovers from dropping my premium theme (e.g. placecategory instead of category). But I should fix them, I agree.

                And yes, none of that really points to why Google would stop sending me any search traffic, and yet that seems to be what's happened.

                I've added some screenshots below which may be helpful.  I am still getting traffic, but not from organic search.

                132b5cfdfc27ef5792f83a81e5ac739c 95ccf8387df343022b3a7aad2e17c8e1 95ccf8387df343022b3a7aad2e17c8e1

                KyleEaves 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • KyleEaves
                  Kyle Eaves last edited by

                  Have you checked your keyword rankings yet? Have they completely dropped off too? Hard to believe Google would completely drop your site overnight. Maybe there is an issue with your analytics tracking code being removed when you switched your website's theme. Are you seeing other traffic in GA?

                  Regardless, it looks like you've got a decent amount of broken links & 404 errors on your site. I doubt Google would kill your traffic over that, but it wouldn't hurt to fix these items so that once you're back online the Google Bot is not tripping over broken links.

                  Kyle Eaves
                  SEO Specialist
                  KyleEaves.com

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • H.M.N.

                    Huge drop in rankins, traffic and impressions after changing to CloudFlare

                    Hi there, In October, one of our customer's programmer made a change on their website to optimize its loading speed. Since then, the all the SEO's metrics has dropped. Apparently, the change was to move to CloudFlare and to add Gzip compression. I was talking with the programmer and he told me he had no idea why that happened. Now comes 5 months later and the SEO metrics havn't come back yet. What seems so wierd is that two keywords in particular had the most massive drop. Those two keywords were the top keywords (more than 1k of impressions a month) and now its like there is no impressions or clics at all. Did anyone had the same event occur to them? Do you have any idea what could help this case?

                    Technical SEO | | H.M.N.
                    0
                  • cckapow

                    Organic Traffic Decrease WOW and YOY sitewide

                    My site is experiencing a decrease in organic traffic WOW for the last two weeks and for the first time all year is showing a decrease compared to last year's traffic for the same weeks. At first I thought this was a seasonal pattern due to spring break (we are mostly b to b), but the dip has sustained for another week. The only changes made during this time period were a few on-page updates and some title tag updates to a specific group of pages. However, the decrease is sitewide including branded clicks and impressions. I haven't noticed any changes in rankings. Impressions and clicks are down per Search Console, but CTR and Avg Rank haven't changed. Is it possible that we've been penalized or hit by an algo shift? What's the best way to know for sure? VLGLUTt

                    Technical SEO | | cckapow
                    0
                  • Devicelock

                    HELP: Wrong domain showing up in Google Search

                    So i have this domain (1)devicelock.com and i also had this other domain (2)ntutility.com, the 2nd domain was an old domain and it is not in use anymore. But when i search for devicelock on Google, the homepage devicelock.com does not exist. Only ntutility.com comes up. I asked one of the developer how the redirect is happening from the old domain to the new one and he told me its through a DNS forward. And there is no way to have an .htacess file to set up a 301 instead. Please help!

                    Technical SEO | | Devicelock
                    0
                  • WEB-IRS

                    No Search Results Found - Should this return status code 404?

                    A question came up today on how to correctly serve the right status code on pages where no search results are found. I did a couple searches on some major eccomerce and news sites and they were ALL serving status code 200 for No Search Results Found http://www.zappos.com/dsfasdgasdgadsg http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sdafasdklgjasdklgjsjdjkl http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=dfjakljgdkslagklasd&_sacat=0 http://www.cnn.com/search/?query=sdgadgdsagas&x=0&y=0&primaryType=mixed&sortBy=date&intl=false http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sdagasdgasdgasg I thought I read somewhere were it was recommended to serve a status code 404 on these types of pages.  Based on what I found above, all sites were serving a 200, so it appears this may not be the best practice. Any thoughts?

                    Technical SEO | | WEB-IRS
                    0
                  • ClaireH-184886

                    Does anyone use buzzfeed to creat links traffic and increase brand

                    Hi i would like to know if anyone uses http://www.buzzfeed.com to create links, gain traffic and increase brand awareness. I have signed up for an account but cannot get it to work and would like some help. I can get my content on there but cannot manage to get the links to work I signed up for this account a while back and a friend shown me how to use it but i have forgotten. here is my page http://www.buzzfeed.com/lifestylemagazine some links work and some links do not. what i am trying to do is to publish stories from my site as well as other sites and have the link included where you press the title and it goes to the site any help would be great

                    Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
                    0
                  • JohannCR

                    Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt

                    Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I  know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million

                    Technical SEO | | JohannCR
                    0
                  • LMDNYC

                    How should I structure a site with multiple addresses to optimize for local search??

                    Here's the setup: We have a website, www.laptopmd.com, and we're ranking quite well in our geographic target area. The site is chock-full of local keywords, has the address properly marked up, html5 and schema.org compliant, near the top of the page, etc. It's all working quite well, but we're looking to expand to two more locations, and we're terrified that adding more addresses and playing with our current set-up will wreak havoc with our local search results, which we quite frankly currently rock. My question is 1)when it comes time to doing sub-pages for the new locations, should we strip the location information from the main site and put up local pages for each location in subfolders? 1a) should we use subdomains instead of subfolders to keep Google from becoming confused? Should we consider simply starting identically branded pages for the individual locations and hope that exact-match location-based urls will make up for the hit for duplicate content and will overcome the difficulty of building a brand from multiple pages? I've tried to look for examples of businesses that have tried to do what we're doing, but all the advice has been about organic search, which i already have the answer to. I haven't been able to really find a good example of a small business with multiple locations AND good rankings for each location. Should this serve as a warning to me?

                    Technical SEO | | LMDNYC
                    0
                  • Techboy

                    Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?

                    I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.

                    Technical SEO | | Techboy
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.