Traffic Down for Most Referrers - not just Google
-
Our traffic has taken a severe hit, over the past 3 weeks - down about 60%, which I had assumed was caused by the Penguin update.
However on closer inspection of our analytics, our traffic is is down by between 30 and 50% for nearly all our referrers - including Bing and other search engines, referring sites, and even direct traffic!
Google provides the vast majority of our traffic, so in terms of the absolute visitor count, the drop in Google traffic has the biggest effect - by some distance. But the fact that traffic is down by similar percentages suggest that Penguin isn't the cause of our troubles at all.
We sell garden products in the UK, and it's just coming into peak season. Last year, May was one of our top months, External conditions - such as the very wet weather over the past month, economic gloom and doom - don't begin to explain this sudden and dramatic drop in traffic.
We are very perplexed. If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd be interested to hear them.
Ben
-
Hi Phil Thanks for you reply, and sorry for my late response. It's is definitely being index. I've been using Google Websmaster Tools and Screaming Frog on an almost daily basis - which is good because I've cleaned up a few technical issues, 404', looping redirects etc. I've generated and uploaded a fresh sitemap.xml which has been indexed. I've also reviewed my robots.txt, which is all OK. In answer to the rankings question. Some have gone down drastically, some haven't changed at all or have gone up. And some have gone down e.g from #1 to #15, and then back up to #9. I need to take a closer look at our analytics, as you suggest, as well as take a look at Google trends. Thanks for you help. Ben
-
-
Hi Ben,
Here are thoughts off the top of my head. Hope they help :).
- Make sure your site is still being crawled/indexed. I know it seems random, but a "noindex, nofollow" tag could have accidentally been added to your site which would cause major problems. Also, there's always the chance that a change happened to your robots.txt file and you're now blocking all engines. After checking those things, be sure to do a Google search for "site:{your website}" to make sure everything is still in the index.
- Do a TON of manual searches. Search for your popular keywords and look at what's happening. Sure, this will give you a very limited view, but often times it's all you need. Did you used to rank #1 and now you're #3? Or, did you used to rank #1 and now you're completely gone? Or, have your rankings not changed at all? Is there a new competitor in the space? A horrible review about you online? Etc. Dig into all of these things with 30 minutes of Google searches.
- Dig deep into your analytics. Is most of your drop in traffic from a few keywords? Did a few specific landing pages just stop getting traffic all of a sudden? Did everyone stop tweeting about you all of a sudden? These are just some ideas, there are a million things you could look into.
- Lastly, check out Google.com/trends. It's always a possibility that the overall search volume for your keywords has declined (but this does seem a bit unlikely).
Alright, I hope this helps Ben. If you have any questions then just let me know.
Phil
-
Whats the URL Ben?
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
-
Track buttons in Google Tag Manager
Hi! First question: I am wondering if it's possible to track two buttons with the same code in Google Tag Manager without changing the code? There are different page URL's.. Second one: My tags are displayed in Google Analytics as 'events'. When I put the events in 'goals', the number of times it fired differs from my events. Someone who can help me with this issue?
Reporting & Analytics | | conversal0 -
Amazon referral on analytics
In the past month, I've received referrals from tt.amazon.com, coming from both Ireland and Germany - it made me a bit suspicious as I haven't seen tt.amazon before and I can't find much online about it. I'm a little reluctant to click through to the website in case it is suspicious... Does anyone know anything about this and should I be concerned? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RayflexGroup0 -
Query on Google Experiment?
Hello All, I am doing A/B testing via google analytic experiment now my query is for my ecommerce site homepage i am trying to add newsletter in 3 different way so it will be variation A, Variation B and Variation C. So my query is what should be then original page? Currently there is no newsletter form on homepage. Do I consider original page as Variation A? i.e. abcd.com?variation-A as original page? Then google will decide winner between original page i.e. variation A and Variation B & C Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dsouzac0 -
Referral Data Q's
1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure. I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data? My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through? 2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again? I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Filter the Spam traffic
Hello everyone, We have to filter traffic from spam website like webcrawler.com semalt.com social-button.com etc. So we created custom filter with Filter field: referral Filter Pattern: Webcrawler.com|semalt.com|in-g61.mail.yahoo.com|d47c5f40.linkbucks.com|buttons-for-website.com|semalt.semalt.com|forum.topic34157145.darodar.com|social-buttons.com While verification of filter there is error displaying i.e. This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small. Please help in resolving issue..
Reporting & Analytics | | Obbserv0 -
How long does Google Analytics store data?
Hello All, How long analytics keep the data for one website? at least two years at least 25 months other I guess that they guarantee at least 25 months, but it might be more.
Reporting & Analytics | | CommercePundit
Anyone has any other suggestion? Thanks,0 -
Google Analytics - Keywords (not set) or ( not provided) WHY???
In Analytics, most of my visitors are landing on my home page, but when trying to see wich keywords they use, most of them are: (not set) or ( not provided) See screencast: http://screencast.com/t/AKwPW76qLVsN Can you tell why? What is going on? Is there a way to solve this? Thank you, BigBlaze
Reporting & Analytics | | BigBlaze2050 -
Transferring Google analytics accounts
Hi, Does anyone know if you can transfer an Google Analytics account. We are looking to take over a new clients existing website and the analytics account is registered to their current web designers. Is it possible to transfer it to the client so that their existing web company no longer has access and they keep all their historical data, or do we have to start from scratch. Thanks Fraser
Reporting & Analytics | | fraserhannah0