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
-
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 -
Drop in Organic Traffic for Homepage and Branded terms but Steady in Rankings and According to WMT.
I am stumped. I have been researching for over two days now. Our homepage organic traffic YoY is down approx. 25%. However, rank has not changed according to Conductor, Bing and Google WMT. Impressions have gone up according to both search engines and we rank now for more keywords in top 3 than we did last year. Both WMTs' present a pretty healthy picture. No insignificant indexing issues, Error URLs & blocked resources are down, daily page crawls are higher than ever, etc. I drilled into Google Analytics from a few different view points. The closest I got to an answer was I saw huge out-liars YoY in browsers and browser versions. We saw significant differences in organic traffic YoY from IE 11, 9 ,10, 8 and 7. Android Browser 31, 32 and Safari 6 and 7. I tested our homepage and search results in all of these, and found no issues. Yet, GA reports 50K+ differences YoY. My only thought is it is perhaps a GA attribution error? And/or browsers defaulting organic traffic to direct or other? Yet, our direct traffic is up but does not correlate with as much as we are down. Any tips on where to look next would be extremely helpful!
Algorithm Updates | | lunavista-comm0 -
Added the Review rich snippet and rankings have dropped?
Hi Mozzers, I am really surprised what happened here. I conducted a small campaign by adding reviews rich snippet to 10 different microsites(covering different locations). Today I was checking if the snippets were showing up correctly in the SERPs and noticed that most of these locations with review snippet dropped in the rankings? How weird is that? Can anyone explain what happened here? Has anyone experienced this? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Sudden Page Rank Drop for Weight Loss Camp
My site BalanceME.com has been performing really well and continually climbs more and more but in the last 7 days we have had a drop this last week. We went from #2 for weight loss camp to #6, and even further on other terms. It is mid May and I cannot find any other explanation for the sudden drop. I am hoping someone could give me some sort if idea what could possibly be the answer. Recently we have had two press releases go out, target for keywords, and also installed images that navigate to new pages on the site. There have been few additions to the site, and nothing can explain the drop. Other companies in our group have not had issues with recent drops, and we use the same practices with the other organizations. Thank you for your time
Algorithm Updates | | FVdBeuken0 -
Traffic drop :(
Hello MOzzers, hope you are all well. Here is my question. Site : http://www.gunshotdigital.com Issue: Traffic In the past 3 days we have close to 300 Unique visitors, but today we just have 5. Totally confused as to why this might be. I know Matt Cutts hinted at algo change in 2 months. Our rankings are still steady. So could anyone help? 🙂 Thank you Mozzers, we love you and are flattered to be part of this formidable community. Vijay
Algorithm Updates | | vijayvasu0 -
Sub-Links of Organic SERP
I would like to know if you can modify (or suggest) the sub-links under an organic listing. For Example: Main Link/Title = COMPANY NAME - What We Do.... Sub-Links (popular pages within site) currently include links like: Locations / Catalog Request / Bestsellers Is it possible to suggest other pages as sub-links or do the search engines determine these? Please advise, and thanks in advance....
Algorithm Updates | | WhiteCap0 -
How do you get the Mini-Embed-Link-Thingies in search results?
Rand Fishkin touched on the tiny links that can appear for your search result - not the 6 pack of links that show the structure of your site, but the 2-4 links that show up on one line below your meta description. Any idea how to earn or influence these? He mentioned them in the "New Opportunities in Google's Search Results" webinar from May 2011 on Slide 19 if that helps. An example would be if you search "seo guide" in Google search, the SEOmoz link has those mini links below the meta description. Are they random or can they be influenced?
Algorithm Updates | | Hakkasan0 -
Decrease in Organic Traffic Due to Google Places
Hello there, we are national junk removal company and have franchises in most major cities in the US. We wanted to check to see if anyone else has seen a drop in organic traffic with the changes that Google has done with the amalgamation of Google Places with the organic rankings. All our places pages are ranking quite well and we are ranking higher organically but it appears that people go to the Google Places page and then either leaving or picking up the phone and calling our 1800 number to book a job instead of going to our website to make the booking. The interesting thing is that although Google started these changes back in October 2010 we have seen the drop in organic traffic mostly starting in April, even though we have seen a steady increase in organic ranking across the board. Has any other franchise based company seen this happen as well? Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | imspecialistgotjunk0