Traffic Down for Most Referrers - not just Google
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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
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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
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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
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Whats the URL Ben?
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