Search traffic steady, Landing pages receiving traffic had massive drop
-
Following the week of Google's major algorithm update in January, we saw this graph in our Moz dashboard. (green bars are # of landing pages receiving traffic from search, blue line is traffic from search)
Traffic from SEO grew slightly, but number of landing pages receiving traffic fell by more than 50%. We didn't make any changes to sitemap, rel=canonical, number of pages being published, etc. Traffic from top keywords held consistent. Number of pages/images google crawled and indexed grew per webmaster tools. Big spike in Nov/Dec is because we are in retail, seasonal not technical issues.
Is anyone else experience the same thing? An algo change? Or something more specific to our site?
Quality traffic is what we care about, so number of pages traffic is going to could be a positive thing (easier to optimize). But jury is out.
-
Thanks - excellent analysis. Exactly what I was looking for and hadn't considered this possibility. Will dig in!
-
We don't have much useful data (i.e. we have a lot of data, but can't see any clear patterns) around the January core algo updates, other than knowing that they occurred. It's hard to pin down from the graph, and I'm not sure what the scope of your traffic and page count is, but my first guess would be that you lost ranking on some long-tail pages that weren't contributing much in the way of traffic.
It's possible these were low-value pages or even some pages that shouldn't have been indexed (like duplicates), in which case this could be fine. It's also possible that these pages had quality issues that knocked them out of ranking contention, which wouldn't be so good.
It's not an easy problem to solve, but the first step I'd take is to try to pin down: (a) what those pages were, and (b) if they have any relationship. If you lost traffic to 500 completely different pages, that's going to be tough to interpret. More likely, though, there's a pattern. Maybe these are mostly product pages, or blog posts, or internal search results, etc. If you can find their commonality, that's your best chance of knowing what went wrong.
-
Same here - normal traffic till mid Dec. Then drop for Xmas and NY. And this is normal for holidays. Then up in beginning of Jan, from 24-25 drop little bit (back to normal traffic).
So there is also change called "core update":
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
http://mozcast.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
-
Why am I ranking high for a keyword that is nowhere on my page?
There is a specific keyword phrase that I am ranking in the top 10 search results for. When I run page optimizer in Moz, my page is given a score of 73 and I'm predictably told I need to include this keyword somewhere on the page. This specific keyword phrase is not included anywhere on the page - not in image files, image alts, anchor text from inbound links (that I can find), text content, meta-titles or descriptions - it's nowhere. Meanwhile, a keyword phrase which Moz' page optimizer tells us we are scored 96 for we aren't even in the first three pages of search results for. What's going on here? On the surface, this seems to be telling me the Moz page optimizer is kinda...broken? Why am I ranking in the top 10 for a keyword phrase nowhere on my page? Thanks in advance for any help.
Moz Pro | | Closetstogo0 -
Lots of 404s listed in Top Pages by Page Authority
Hi guys, I'm slowly getting to grips with all the aspects of using Moz.
Moz Pro | | giddygrafix
Looking at my link analysis, under the tab labelled Top Pages by Page Authority, there's an awful lot of 404 pages listed. Are these pages which are being linked to (either internally or externally), and should I put a 301 redirect on all the pages listed? I've attached a picture... moz-screen-shot.jpg0 -
I'm searching for a Freelancer SEO Professional
Hi guys, I'm searching for a freelancer seo professional to fix my website errors on SEO Moz, I'm from Brazil, I got a supplement webstore and have no time to fix this errors here in SEO Moz Someone here for this job? Thanks
Moz Pro | | megaformasuplementos0 -
My moz only one page was crawled
I recently moved my shopping cart from one provider to another and today moz only crawled one page, could this be because maybe google has not indexed it yet or should i be concerned? I pointed the DNS at the new cart monday night if that helps. I would have expected it to be indexed by now
Moz Pro | | SmartVapes0 -
What's with measuring search rank?
Okay, here 6 different ways to measure search rank on Google U.S. and I get 6 different answers: Looking for search term "Lunch Bags" for the site Zappos (just a random example - no connection to me). SEOMOZ RankTracker - #49 SEOCentro - #36 http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html ZendProxy.com - #21 (an anonymizer proxy) anonymouse.org - no rank (another anonymizer) Mikes Marketing Tools - no rank http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ RankingCheck.com - #38 Can you duplicate a similar variation? What gives? Which if any of these would you rely on? Thanks... Darcy
Moz Pro | | 945010 -
Only 1 page has been crawled. Why?
I set a new profile up a fortnight ago. Last week seomoz crawled the entire site (10k pages), and this week has only crawled 1 page. Nothing's changed on the site that I'm aware of, so what's happened?
Moz Pro | | tompollard0 -
Website traffic data miles behind
Just logged into one of my profiles to review my traffic data and the last traffic is for 9th Jan. Given it is now 22 this is far far from acceptable. Given the high monthly fee charged by this service why is the traffic data so far behind. If other services (cheaper services) can update their traffic data daily or even weekly why should I continue to use SEOMOZ. The rankings, errors etc are all updated for the 21st of Jan so why not the traffic. Your's An unhappy custimer
Moz Pro | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Page Authority vs Domain Authority
I'm hoping this is a quick and simple question. Sometimes when using the open site explorer or the keyword difficulty tool i find that some pages have a higher "page authority" than the "domain authority." That seemed odd to me, is there a correlation between the two? You would think by default as you grow your page authority the domain authority increases as well? So i guess my question would be, what happens on a page to give it a higher page authority than domain authority?
Moz Pro | | kchandler0