Search Traffic Drops Before It Improves?
-
I'm working on a site with tons of great, useful content....the owners of the site implemented a new site layout and design (complete overhaul) and they were lacking basics such as meta descriptions, 301 redirects, and, shockingly, they had the same Title tag for every single page on a site with thousands of unique how-to articles.
Unsurprisingly their traffic dropped by about 300%.
They generate most of their traffic from people learning how to build stairs, how to install crown molding, and other related matters.
Beginning last Thursday I've been performing basic on-site SEO, things like having unique titles for each page and similar tasks. The week from Thursday when I began until yesterday (Wednesday), Google traffic dropped -29.73% - 17,715 vs 25,210
I believe this is a normal part of the "Google Shuffle" -- does anyone have a Matt Cutts link or similar proof that this is a normal part of the process?
-
This has always been common for me over the past five years. It's definitely nothing new. I've never seen anyone from Google acknowledge this phenomenon or explain why it happens.
It's likely something technical with the algorithm that won't get explained. Perhaps the next time there is a QA session with Cutts one of us can ask him for a simple explanation
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
-
Strange - Search Console page indexing "../Detected" as 404
Anyone seen this lately? All of a sudden Google Search Console is insisting in Page indexing that there is a 404 for a page that has never existed on our client's site: https://........com.au/Detected We've noticed this across a number of sites, precisely in this way with a capitalised "/Detected" To me it looks like something spammy is being submitted to the SERPs (somehow) and Google is trying to index that and then getting a 404. Naturally MOZ isn't picking it up, cause the page simply never existed - it's just happening in Search Console 2afc7e35-71e4-4e25-80a3-690bf10776a7.png It comes and it goes in the 404 alerts in Console and is really annoying. I reckon it started happening late 2022.
Reporting & Analytics | | DanielDL0 -
Help! Need to Get Traffic Back Up in Saturated Market
I was looking in one of my client's Google Analytics profiles, and noticed that they had two major drops in traffic before we started working with them—and they've never really recovered. The first, and most significant drop was around January 2015. And then the again, but not as drastic of a drop, was around September 2015. They are a heating and cooling company, but they are located out west so this shouldn't be a seasonality thing. Here is a link to what the BIG drop is traffic looks like in January 2015: http://imgur.com/a/Y1s8U To get a clearer picture, here are the numbers for the overall website traffic:
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueCorona
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2015: 30,923 sessions
September 1, 2015 - September 30, 2016: 13,768 sessions Year over year traffic to the website dropped by 55%. Here is a link to what year over year looks like in Google Analytics: http://imgur.com/a/TPdJQ Like I said, we weren't working with them at the time so I don't know specifics about what might have caused this, but their numbers have never even come close to reaching what they used to be prior to the noticeable drop after September 2015. Does anyone have any insights into why this might be? Was there an algorithm change back then that could still be impacting them? Any ideas how to get them back to where they once were? Any input is greatly appreciated! Thanks.1 -
Huge Traffic Drop after 301, Keyword and Schema.org Fixes
Hello there, I'm first gonna explain what I did to my website: I was using a 302 redirect to send from http to https, fixed it to a 301. My url has a keyword and I was using many pages with keywords as well. ex) www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-the-best , www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-easiest-on-keyword-market Changed it to : www.keywordhaha.com/app , www.keywordhaha.com/games, etc... I was not using any crawler tools, so I added Schema.org, Json-LD and rdfa-node, which are all working properly. Synced my page with our Google+ page, which was recognised by Google Added a proper logo and fb:admins, and was recognised by facebook. After I did all this optimisations, I experienced an immediate traffic drop (10%) and my impressions/clicks according to the webmaster tools dropped 75%, in a 2 day period. Any ideas where there could have been a mistake? mPdhFdG.png
Reporting & Analytics | | jancpc0 -
Organic Traffic Spike
I've been chipping away at the SEO for a client's site for about 6 weeks and a few days ago noticed a huge spike in organic traffic for about a dozen keywords. See attached. Previously traffic was around 20-30 unique new visitors a day. On the 17 it went up to 500+ for 1 day, now it's come back down again. This spike was not for 1 keyword but for about a dozen. I've never seen this before and wondered if anyone had experienced similar. The site is about 3 months old. ebix3rl
Reporting & Analytics | | deployseo0 -
Difference between site: search and Total Indexed in Google Webmaster Tools.
This morning I did a search on Google for my site using the site: operator. I noticed that the number of results returned was significantly different than the "Total indexed" in Google Webmaster Tools. What is the difference and is it normal to have two very different numbers here?
Reporting & Analytics | | Gordian0 -
Google Webmaster Dropped Traffic
Hi Guys, I've recently implemented a new site design with a new url architecture etc.. I set up Google Webmaster tools in early March and went live with the new site on 2nd April. Since the 6th April (4 days after going live) I've notice a drop in impressions from 15,000 - 28,000 per day to 3,500 - 5,500 per day. Now I'm kind of new to this, so after I cleaned up after my initial panic, I checked impressions vs. clicks. Impression are down 44% and clicks 31%. Not bad I thought but then again what if I dropped so far off the radar I never made an impression. 1. So first question: Are the number of impressions of a keyword independant of ranking. So if I rank #3,445,234th will I still see impressions listed but avg. position reflect #3,445,234? So while I was thinking of asking these questions I checked Google Analytics for which I have just over 3 years of metrics. Compared to the past; overall traffic and organic traffic are the same if not 10-20% better. 2. So second: Am I missing something? Its a resort website so easter just ended and you would expect the traffic to match and drop, but such a sudden and dramitic drop in Webmaster Tools impressions does not match Google Analytics. Infact Organic traffic climbed slightly. Can anyone offer any insight? Thanks, Adam
Reporting & Analytics | | NaescentAdam0 -
Google Analytics - Referral Traffic Question
How Google Analytics determine that some particular web site referred traffic if there is no back link on that site?
Reporting & Analytics | | DiamondJewelryEmpire1 -
How to measure number of visits from Google News coming from Google Universal Search (NOT referral coming directly coming from news.google.com) with google analyitcs
I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias0