Organic Search dropped 50% Wednesday and has not recovered
-
I've included two charts below. 1. Our organic search results for the last year and, 2. Results for the last 6 weeks.
We were up to about 350 visits per day in June 2011. In late june we added affiliate links to our site and took a hit down to about 120 a day.
At the end of august we moved the affiliate links behind a login. Only registered users saw them. And we started moving back up.
Last week January 8-14 we were averaging about 550 per day.
Then this Wednesday we dropped to 287. Thursday 268. And today is under 100.
We have not updated our website at all. No changes.
Does anyone have any idea what might have caused this plunge. Has anyone else seen their traffic drop in half.
Thanks for your help.
-
Looks a bit like panda too, that sharp drop. How is your content? thin, duplicated, templated, non-unique?
edit: you didnt do anything but you did move affiliate links behind logins? Better go double check you didnt screw something else up unintentionally when doing that
What does you IIS/Xenu crawl say?
S
-
I bet its becuase you have ads above the fold.
Quite a few websites got hit becuase of this, and I setup two websites a few months back one with ads below content and one with above. the one above the fold got stuck down!
-
I agree with Kieran. Don't panic over one day change, but do check your bandwidth usage, in case there was a problem at your ISP you are not aware of. Also, check your analytics or logs. There may be a deadspot due to connectivity. Did you update any software? add or change a plugin? Do you have ads or other external javascript from other sites that may have hung your pages and stopped visitors coming?
-
Hi James
A big drop in a few days indeed but it might just be a temporary thing. I would give it a few more days and see if ti continues then send on a link and maybe we can help you dig. have your rankings dropped as significantly?
-
Do you have a lot of ads above the fold? Google released a new update yesterday and you may be in the 1%.
-
Hi James,
Couple of questions which might help us..
What does your backlink profile look like?
You mentioned you havent updated your website. When was the last website update? And how often do you add new content?
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
-
What do You Think the Biggest Search Trends will Be in 2020?
Just interested to hear everyone's thoughts. Personally I think that, even though voice search is already pretty big - it's about to get much, much larger and this may even entirely change the infrastructure of the web. What are your thoughts for changes in search 2020?
Algorithm Updates | | effectdigital2 -
In how much time will my search visibility increase?
Hey I really wanna know how much time will take to my search visibility increase!! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | THOMAZDANDREA10 -
Lots of dublicate titles and pages on search page
I own a paiting website with a lot of searchable paintings. The "search paintings" feature creates tons of dublicate pages and titles. See here:
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
http://www.maleribasen.dk/soegmaleri.asp I guess the problem is, that the URL can actually be different and still return the same content. First time you click the "Search paintings" the URL will shown as above. But as soon as users
begin to definere they search to the left and use the "Search button" the top URL changes. So, depending on how the top URL looks different results are shown. This is pretty standard in searches. But it returns tons of dublicate pages and titles. How, do you guys cope with that? Is there a clever way to use ref="cannonical" or some other smart way to avoid this? /Kasper0 -
Does articles for SEO purposes have a minimal and maximum word count in ordered to be crawled/indexed by Google and other search engines?
Does articles for SEO purposes have a minimal and maximum word count in ordered to be crawled/indexed by Google and other search engines?
Algorithm Updates | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Impressions and search queries help
Hello, In the past month alone, my website www.shiftins.com has had a significant drop, about 50%, in my overall impressions and search queries (info from Google WMT). Now my target keywords have maintained their rankings but it looks like my site has dropped off the map for every other search term. I have not received any unnatural link warnings or anything of that sort so I don't think I have been penalized. Does anyone have an idea of what might have caused the decline and is there a solution to restore my prior status?
Algorithm Updates | | raph39880 -
How to add search box to the snippet?
Hi All, Ho to add search box o the snippet, like in Openoffice.org snippet? http://goo.gl/TCv4I
Algorithm Updates | | bubliki0 -
If you rank first organically for a keyword, will you rank first for variations?
Hi everyone, Hoping that someone will be able to answer this question for us. If we rank first organically for a keyword, are we safe to assume that we'll rank first (or close to it) for variations of that keyword as well? E.g. If we rank first easily for "Hamilton Island", can we safely assume that we will rank well organically for close variations of that keyword such as "Hamilton Islands", "Hamiltonisland", "Hamilton Island Hotel" due to the fact that "Hamilton Island" is in those keywords? We're deciding which keywords to monitor in SEOmoz and we don't want to waste keywords on very similar terms if we don't have to. Really appreciate any responses! Cheers.
Algorithm Updates | | HamiltonIsland0 -
New visitors by search engines nowadays in USA and Germany
Hello, anyone have current data, how many new visitors in average drive nowadays search engines? My source of Peter Kent´s book SEO for Dummies from 2006, says around about 50% in the USA. I guess nowadays the percentage is much less, because of the social media? Have anyone data to split this in organic and paid search driven visits also? Do you know also how many new visitors in average drive nowadays social media like Facebook, Twitter & Co ? Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | Braumueller0