Why would my Bounce Rate drop from 40% to 2% over 3 days without making any major changes to my site www.hiltonhead.com?
-
Our Wordpress site has had an historical bounce rate of 40% for the last 3 years but last Thursday it dropped to 17%, Friday to 7% and now is running at 2%. The pageviews per visit have also increased from 3 to almost 6.
Thanks
-
Serge and Keri,
thanks for your response, after getting your replies i checked and indeed there was an additional google_analytics_auto.js file that was installed. Turns out that Hostgator's cpanel has a google analytics integration program that was activated on the 9th (when everything started getting weird) and it modified my .htaccess file to load the additional .js file ... hopefully that was the problem ,will keep you updated.
Thank you!
-
I'm looking at the source, and I see /google_analytics_auto.js as well as Yoast's wordpress script. You might want to ask about that and see if someone just installed one of those and if that's causing the problem.
-
I'm thinking the same way Serge is. I've seen that happen when you get two analytics scripts firing at once, especially if one is a plugin and one is custom-coded.
-
have you installed any new js scripts? analytics + commerce?
any new plugins?
any suspicious traffic?
-
umm that's a loaded question. I'd start by segmenting your traffic - that is search, direct and referral - compare the different timeframes. If there is a dramatic difference work out why? If nothing starts out just compare everything in your analytics account, could be a new ranking, referral. Also you could have lost a ranking or a link so actually your bounce rate has gone down because your overall traffic has gone down.
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
-
With MFI, should we delete our mobile version of our site?
I'll start by stating that a brand new responsive site is under development and will be launching early 2019. Until then, with Mobile First Indexing, we're curious if we should remove our mobile site altogether. Looking at Google guidelines, it looks like we have Dynamic serving content, so when a mobile device is used, a VERY TRIMMED down version of our site content is presented. I read that if a mobile version doesn't exist, google will use the MFI indexing on the desktop version still, since that is what is rendered on a mobile device. If Google starts using our mobile site for its indexing, we're not going to be looking good. At this point, are there negative affects to removing our mobile site and having the desktop version render on all devices?
Search Behavior | | Technical_Contact0 -
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
Why are Google ranking changes so drastic?
Hi SEOmoz community I'm sure this question has been asked numerous times before. At the same time there must be plenty of people out there wondering about the same thing: Why are Google ranking changes so drastic? It's like the diva of search engines. When checking the SEOmoz ranking reports, sometimes lots of keywords improve, the next week it's vice versa. Mind though that the ranking changes are not in proportion. While improving keywords climb up by approx. 1 - 10 positions, declining keywords always get a smack with a 15 - 25 position drop, even though these very same keywords are being targeted onsite through new content. It seems to make no difference after all 😉 Is it possible, that keyword fluctuations are stronger for younger sites? The site I am talking about is about a year old. Is it possible that more competitive keywords see more drastic fluctuations? Would be interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks!!
Search Behavior | | Hermski0 -
Two sites with different URLs
I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword) Thank you for your input!
Search Behavior | | Winoman0 -
How to test a site for usability with hundreds users and get genuine feedback?
My question is twofold; firstly is there a recommended company that I could use to get feedback on my site usability. Ideally I would like this company to arrange a focus group of a couple hundred people that fit into the right demographic and organise a report on the opinions of the group and the issues faced. Secondly an in-house understanding of usability Now I would like to think that when I review a site for usability I am not biased in any way. But I believe that if I look at the page that I have created or even collaborated on that I will always miss usability issues as I frankly think my/our creation is amazing. I'm interested to know how people rank and check their site usability and what factors rank highest in their assessments i.e. the tools you use and how you use them.
Search Behavior | | Stefan-Thorpe0 -
Is there a site intelligence product that offers data on subdirectories of a competitor site?
Services like Compete and Quantcast provide information on competitive sites, but as far as I can tell only at the aggregated domain level. Is there a similar service (paid or free) that provides this type of data - especially demographics - for a subdirectory? For example, if my competitor has widely different product categories and I suspect that the audience for Product B is very different from his site as a whole (which is mostly focused around his major product, Product A) is there any way to get info on that without actually owning the site and having access to Analytics/Facebook OpenGraph etc.?
Search Behavior | | jliu.blitz0 -
What would make a MozRank jump from a 5 to a 9 in a span of two weeks?
Guten tag SEOMozians! I'm looking for your opinions and thoughts regarding MozRank. I recently noticed a website of mine going from a modest MozRank of 5 to an out of the park 9 in the span of two weeks. Any thoughts on where I might look to see what may have caused such a spike? Cheers, Jonathan
Search Behavior | | creativedepartment0 -
Why is our site jumping all over the place?
Hi there, We've been having some issues with our site recently where it seems to be jumping very erratically around the google rankings. The site used to be pretty consistent on page 1/2 of google for certain term, but then in late April(ish) it took a dive down the rankings and flicked about between positions 30-70(ish). Late last month, it re-appeared suddenly on page 1 in position 10 and stayed there up until yesterday (6th July) and it now appears to have dived to position 287th or there abouts! At the same time a deep link page has appeared at position 54, which seems a bit strange to me. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks
Search Behavior | | PeterAlexLeigh0