Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
-
Hi,
I'm unsure if I've been hit by penguin/panda. I've attached screenshots below. The first one is April 1st to today. The second is all of April and the 3rd is 1st June to today. The site was offline at the beginning of July which explains no traffic. My traffic took a dip though on April 6th which as I understand it wasn't a panda/penguin roll out? I then got hardly any traffic for May to mid June. Then the site was offline due to a server problem but when it came back on traffic was the highest it has ever been. Today however I am getting zero search engine traffic?
I can't figure out what's going on. Can anyone shed any light on the issue?
-
The directory /feed/ is for your RSS, this wont cause site wide drops in traffic so that isn't the problem.
If you have an RSS go to { http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/ }
-
In webmaster tools I have 5 access denied to urls that end in /feed/
-
As long as it is in the header.php and that header appears on every page of your site your ok.
-
I am using Wordpress and have analytics code installed in the header. Is that right?
-
Have you checked the source of traffic in your analytics report? That should be able to explain a lot.
Are you tracking SERPs (rank positions) for your site?
-
Thanks for your reply. I suppose it could possible be the 3rd April update. However that wouldn't explain how the traffic returns even stronger in July.
The site was offline for about 10 days. I do see search terms related to the click and have been receiving enquiries which leads me to believe the traffic sent is genuine.
All the pages are indexed in google but as of this morning I am getting no traffic whatsoever. As you can see apart from the site downtime I have always got a few clicks every day from long tail keywords. (just to confirm the site is up and working fine today but no traffic).
-
This looks like it could be a code issue, have you made sure that the analytic code is inserted correctly in either your header or footer. If you are 100% happy that you have it inserted correctly can you check through another source to see if you are getting traffic from them Bing or yahoo will do.
If Bing and Yahoo are producing traffic this might suggest that there is an issue with Google accessing your site, check your robots.txt to make sure that it isn't blocking Google accessing certain content.
Also check your keywords and indexed pages to see if they have dropped with your traffic.
-
Hiya,
Please look at the following link to find out the chronology of updates made by Google:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
I see an update that happened on 3rd April; this could possibly explain the dip in your site traffic in the 1st week of April.
Coming to your 2nd question, how long was your site offline? Do you see any indexed items of your website in Google?
Finally, for the spiked traffic in July, do you see any organic traffic details such as the keywords etc.? It could very well be malicious code or script that could be generating false views/hits on your site.
Thanks,
Rajesh Dhawan
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
-
Slow growth in organic traffic
Hi, Recently our website after 5 months of launch started seeing more organic traffic, thanks to the seo effort being put. However, off late the growth is quite slow and we don't see much increase in organic traffic any more. Any idea on what could have happened to cause this or is it normal. Here is the link to the website to check and if you can recommend anything - https://www.keyhub.com Thanks, Search-Console-Search-Analytics-https-www-keyhub-com-1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | kh-priyam1 -
Alternative tools for Keyword Traffic
Hi There, Wondering if anyone has any other tools they would recommend using for finding out keyword traffic on websites. Currently (and I'm sure like most), my website is connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. My biggest frustration becomes the "(not set)" variable that appears when I go to review the keywords section. It's always such a large number and I have no way of finding out what people might be typing in and coming across my website. Of course, I understand the privacy factor as to why Google must do this but it's certainly difficult to analyze what's working and what's not. Any tips, tricks or suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks, Lindsay
Reporting & Analytics | | MainstreamMktg0 -
How do I track specific referral traffics journey through a website?
Hello, A client has asked us to track the journey each separate referral traffic visitor takes through out the website. I have had a look through analytics and am not sure how to ensure I can do this for all referral traffic visitors? Can anyone help? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | mblsolutions0 -
How to Configure Custom Alerts for Real Time Traffic etc from Google Analytic API?
Hi All, I know how to set alert from google analytic but i want alerts for real time visitors so i think it is possible via Google Analytic API, so can anyone share with me the process or relevant blog post? Regards, Mit
Reporting & Analytics | | mit0 -
Why Pre roll Youtube video ads are being recorded into Organic Traffic?
Hi Mozzers, Last month, one of our clients(appliance and kitchen design) has started a video ad campaign on Youtube for a specific Appliance brand, since then I have noticed Organic traffic has been inflated. I was able to figure it out thanks to some keywords that we never ranked for. How is this possible? Google Analytics should at least be able to segment that into a Youtube Referral traffic.
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Recent large spike in traffic from same location?
Since May 21st our site is showing via Google Analytics a large spike in traffic to our home page. The traffic increase is 4-5 times our average. I was able to track the source to the same town we are headquartered. We have lost 4 spots for our top keyword. We went from 7 to 11 in Google in this time period. I understand it could be related to Penguin. But I also suspect this issue is negatively effecting ranking by increasing bounce rate and decreasing pages per visit and time on site. Before/After May 21st Returning Visitors: 52% / 23% New Visitors: 48% / 77% Pages per Visit: 12.4 / 5.44 Duration of visit Avg: 10.23 / 4.22 I would greatly appreciate any ideas on the cause of this issue. Also any input on the above metrics and sudden lost in a couple spots in SERP. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | devonkrusich0 -
Glitch or Penguin?
Hi all, Our queries in GA have bombed, strangely since Penguin. We've gone from 12,000 impressions to none. Traffic is ok, we've not seen a decline. IS this a GA glitch or should we panic? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | brightonseorob0 -
If a page bounces in the woods, can Google Panda hear it?
I have read that after the Panda update a site's bounce rate is an important ranking metric. However, can anyone confirm whether all pages count equally? For instance, my home page gets 5000% more traffic than Deep Page X. If Deep Page X has a poor bounce rate, does it matter as much as if my Homepage has a bad bounce rate? I am guessing not, but wanted to open it up for discussion. If not, it has me wondering on what to do for some of my database driven content. I have some dynamically created pages that have higher bounce rates and minimal unique content. They aren't pure spam or junk, but are likely only about 1% unique from one another. Sounds like a no brainer change post-Panda, right? Well, what if I was the only one targeting the keywords for these pages? The pages pull from info I stored on the U.S. government stimulus program (related to my industry). It then has just about every city, state and county combo in the country for my product. For instance, a page <title>might be "Flemington, NJ Widgets - Somerset County". Something that no one else is targeting and drives minimal traffic.</p> <p> </p> <p>Do I take this content down? I didn't have any affects, positive or negative from Panda, so I am hesitant to take down thousands of Google cached pages.</p></title>
Reporting & Analytics | | TheDude0