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
-
Is the meta referrer tag still used
Is the meta meta referrer tag still used and is it affective. I have an issue with traffic going from one of my sites to a client site and our referral is going into their direct traffic (in Googel Analytics) instead of being seen as a referral from our site. I saw that people were using the meta referral tag, but I can't find any MOZ info about it other than a blog article from 2015.
Reporting & Analytics | | dpsoftware1 -
Drop of traffic after massive technical issue
Hello,
Reporting & Analytics | | SharonEKG
since August i am working on a customers website on WordPress who has a costume made theme, back in October after updating some plugins we had a massive breakdown and the website went up and down and had technical issues for over a month and traffic was completely gone for a while, since we have dropped to about 40% of the monthly traffic the website was getting prior, i was waiting to see if the website will recover since we were getting some traffic and are ranking but that did not happen, is there a way to tell if there are any code issues or anything that can cause that drop? moz crawler only indicates normal meta description errors but nothing in the code, changing the theme would probably be best solution as a popular premade theme would give a definite answer but that is not possible.0 -
Pandora in Google Analytics
Hi Mozers, in Google Analytics our ads are registering a 10 second page duration and a 90% bounce rate, which is pretty atrocious. My questions are: Organic page duration is 3:15 minutes, and Social + Referral are similar. Yet Pandora is bringing the average time on site way down, to less than a minute. Will those paid ad metrics be factored to the User Behavior and therefore negative affect our overall rankings? In other words does Google now see our page duration as less than a minute? The Pandora rep says that Google Analytics and Pandora have "systemic issues" such that GA is very inaccurate with Pandora metrics. I find that difficult to believe. Any insights here? Thanks all! Jane
Reporting & Analytics | | CalamityJane770 -
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 -
How does Google measure page position in Webmasters?
Does anyone know exactly how Google measures page position in Webmaster Tools? For example: In Google Webmaster Tools, we had a product which on the 22/12/15 was at position 7, and then dropped to position 112 on the 30/12/15. It then rose back up to position 7 on the 6/01/16 and then down to position 25 on the 16/01/16. What does this mean and why?
Reporting & Analytics | | CostumeD0 -
Direct traffic spam on Google Analytics: how can you identify and filter it?
One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month. The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate. I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics. However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam. Are there recommendations for filtering this out? Can I identify spam IP addresses?
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Loss of Google referral traffic after server move / CMS move
I have a client that changed from MoveableType to Wordpress. He also changed from a dedicated server to WP Engine. He may have blocked search engines for a week or two, so his organic traffic is down but only by 25%. He's 301 redirecting all of the old pages. The mystery is that his referral traffic from Google is down 90%. It's a popular blog, so that's thousands. It's been going on a month now. Anyone seen this before?
Reporting & Analytics | | Hyper-Dog0 -
Implications of Google discontinuing Website Optimizer
Hi Guys, As most of you probably know, Google is discontinuing Website Optimizer and introducing Experiments within Google Analytics. However, doesn't this mean that now, every site you want to run an experiment for has to be using Google Analytics? This is possibly one of the motivations for them making the change I guess? I also find it inconvenient that every 'experiment' now has to be based on improving a pre-defined goal in Google Analytics. This means that for a lot of situations we'll be creating goals just for the experiment and the clients actual goal conversions will appear quite inflated. I guess we'll just have to filter the new 'goals' out from the actual goals.
Reporting & Analytics | | David_ODonnell1