Can you explain why the site is dropping off Google every other week?

[TimGaunt]

Can anyone offer any insight into why since the Google Panda update www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com has been fluctuating on Google so much? One week it's ranked as it used to be, the next it's nowhere to be seen?

If you take a look at the screenshot of our traffic, this is the traffic after 75% loss (dropped in two stages) you'll see we get traffic for a week and then nothing. This has been happening for months.

Some points that might be involved:

• Around the same time the SEO guys suggested setting the canonical url to www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com (before there wasn't one so traffic was coming from www. and non-www).
• A lot of the original urls have been consolidated and rel="canonical" added throughout
• The "pages" of results all have had a rel="canonical" set to page 1

Could it be that the www is competing with the non-www despite the 301 redirects.

We're doing everything we can to help this client (and have reduced their site errors from the millions to low tens-of-thousands) so it's not filling them with confidence when their site just keeps plumetting!

What's also irritating/odd is that some of their competitors -who used to be ranked lower and have sites which contradict every rulebook still rank high.

Hopefully you can spot something we've missed.

Tim

I8PNL

[TimGaunt]

Hi Keri,

You're right, those graphs are for the entire site and not just Google Organic however it's the same (worse) when you just look at the organic traffic. They don't do any form of other marketing so it's not that sadly (I truly wish it was!).

Here's an overview of just the Google Organic traffic: http://www.thesitedoctor.co.uk/img/201202080932-Google-Analytics.png

Although there is a similar drop in traffic from Bing/Yahoo, there's nothing so cyclical as this.

Nothing in Webmaster Tools other than the usual notices about pages blocked by robots.txt.

We'll dig some more into the individual pages to see if there's anything in there thanks that's a good idea.

Tim

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Tim,

The screenshot makes it look like this is your total traffic for the entire site, not just the traffic from Google (or rather, it's the total traffic for that profile -- I don't know what filters that profile has). First, drill down and look at just the Google Organic traffic, and make sure that it's truly the G organic traffic that's the issue, and not that there's a newsletter being sent out every other week that's generating traffic in spurts.

I'd be looking at the other sections of your Google Analytics (direct traffic, referring, etc) and see if Google Organic is the only thing that's off, or are there other things going on, and do you need to see what other things the marketing team and the developer team are doing. Also look at which pages it is that are getting traffic then dropping, that may help point you in the right direction.

Have you looked in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any notices there?