Traffic Drop with no real explaination?
-
Hello Everyone,
On one of my sites PokerOnaMac we experienced a 75% drop in traffic in about a week (since September 3rd). I took a look at GA and the penalties have been applied sitewide. I also checked my Google Webmaster Tools, and there are no messages regarding "unhealthy link structures." We have had other sites penalized by Penguin & Manual Removals, but they are recovering now. What is my best bet to find what is wrong?
Thanks
-
It's sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what happened. The reason that Google is not emailing you in the GWMT interface to keep from giving away too much of their recipe.
It sounds like you are already thinking about the links you contracted. I would review the work you have done (or had done) on this site and review if it was the best practice and how easy the footprint would be for Google or another search engine to hone in on.
If you are not completely sure what was done or what got indexed you might want to review a tool like:
http://ahrefs.com/ or the link analysis on top pages vs yours with the SEOMOZ link tool.
Good Luck
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
-
When my new website went live I saw a huge spike in traffic for 3 weeks but then it halved again. Why would this happen?
My new website went live on 13th April and the organic traffic levels increased by 110%, staying at that level for 3 weeks. Then exactly 3 weeks later the organic traffic halved again, going back to the same level as the old site. Has anyone seen this happen before or worked out why?! Thanks Viki P2R76O9
Reporting & Analytics | | TWB0 -
What does 'Safari (in-app)' mean in Google Analytics browser traffic?
Hi, can anyone explain what 'Safari (in-app)' refers to in my browser sources? Also, it has a very high bounce rate - any ideas why?
Reporting & Analytics | | b4cab1 -
Gets traffic on both domain.dk and domain.dk/default.asp
Hi. Im runnning a couple of sites. And in my analytics/webmastertool I get both traffic on domain.dk and domain.dk/default.asp which are both essentially the same page. I'm pretty sure it would be better, if I somehow could make the default.asp "redirect" to "/". I dont wanna loose the linkjuice thou. Any smart suggestions for an easy fix? /Kasper
Reporting & Analytics | | KasperGJ0 -
Is there an automated way to determine which pages of your website are getting 0 traffic?
I'm doing a content audit on my company website and want to identify pages with zero traffic. I can use GA for low traffic, but not zero traffic. I can do this manually, but it would take a long time. Are there any tools to help me determine these pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | Ksink0 -
Organic traffic vs. GWT data
Hi, how are you? I'm having a question becasue of an inconsistency between the data GWT gives and the one GA gives me. When I see the ammount of clics GWT tells me in february, it says 32850. When I go to Channels --> Organic Search, it says 51014. The difference is really big! Do you happen to know why this huge gap between data?
Reporting & Analytics | | arielbortz0 -
Large Drop in Direct Traffic
We recently experienced a large drop in direct traffic. Search and referral traffic remained steady but direct traffic dropped by over half. I'm having trouble pinpointing what would have caused this drop. Any ideas or suggestions for investigating the cause in a drop of direct traffic?
Reporting & Analytics | | AxlsCloset0 -
Impression Drops Starting from June 2
In Webmaster Tools and the Linked Data in GA, we got huge bumps for some of our keywords this last week and subsequently were dropped from the face of the earth for other words were were tracking but not SEOing for. Basically for anything higher than 3rd page SERP, 30+ we were removed from Google search and we're no longer showing rankings for any of these words. Is this a new change as part of Penguin? I wonder b/c a lot of those words that were in the 60-100 in SERP were, as I mentioned, not focus SEO words but the backlinks were probably specific keywords, as we only have say 6 links and 4 are the same anchor text, this would put those words in the 60% over optimization penalty.
Reporting & Analytics | | Dweber0 -
Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does. In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture. It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL. Has anyone else seen anything like this before? Stats from the recent episode:
Reporting & Analytics | | mcglynn
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers) - these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US) - the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.0