Leaking organic traffic - how to debug?

[erangalp]

Hi all,

We've been running an eCommerce marketplace for more than 2.5 years now. Most of our traffic and revenue have been from organic traffic, which have been growing steadily with our inventory and brand, peaking at March this year. From there, we started losing organic traffic (and revenue) each month, at a rate of about 15-20% - for no reason we can understand. In addition, some of our older pages no longer appear in search results (unless we add the name of the site to the search query).

We launched a redesign on the end of May, which seemed to initially improve engagement, but didn't affect this trend of lower organic traffic.

Our webmaster tools doesn't show anything special - if anything, we made an effort to clean-up every 404 that appears there and other small issues.

We did make the following changes very recently, but it did not seem to have a positive effect (so far):

• We have deep pagination for some categories of the site, and we just added rel=prev,next in the head of every paginated series on the site.
• We started generating a dynamic sitemap and submitted it to google. For some reason only about a fourth of the pages on the sitemap are indexed.

In addition, the "index status" as reported by webmaster tools shows some weird numbers. First, the number there is way bigger than the amount of pages we have - possibly all the combinations of our listing categories and pagination. That number was constant for a while, before taking a deep earlier this year, rising back up and declining again for the last couple of months. Screenshot of the graph

What would be the first steps you'd take to understand the core of the problem? we're really at a loss here.

[erangalp]

Awesome Dan, many of the points you raise are things we are looking at and the video was spot on. Many thanks for the effort and wisdom!

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Adam

The best place to start is really diagnose where and when the exact organic traffic loss is happening.

Is there an exact date in analytics you dropped off for organic traffic? Or is it gradual? If it's an exact date, you can match it up to the algo history and determine if it's panda or penguin related.

Then secondly I would look at your average position report in webmaster tools under queries to see if your rankings have dropped. Sometimes traffic loss can occur without ranking drop, so you'd want to see if that's in fact what it is. Or maybe you're tracking rankings.

If it is lost ranking then you may want to start segmenting organic traffic in analytics. Is the loss across all keywords? Can you pinpoint a few high volume keywords that were hit? Or were certain pages hit?

Let's walk through the site a little on video;

http://www.screenr.com/PDgH

(the first few seconds is a little jumpy, sorry!)

First time trying this in the Moz Q&A. Let me know what you think - helpful?

Lastly - your question about the crazy numbers for indexation in WMT. I see this a lot too. This tells me Google is not sure what pages on your site are important or not. There's probably a lot of extra pages which are not important being crawled. I would mitigate this with a great XML sitemap as well as noindexing of things like subpages and pages that present the same content but just filtered and/or sorted differently.

Hope that helps!

-Dan