Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Finding an Explanation for a Massive Spike in Organic Search Traffic
-
Hi,
I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason. The organic search engine traffic had always been steady, but about two months ago, organic search traffic started rising slowly.
I checked OSE & a few other tools, but couldn't find any massive source of gained links or other explanations - just the usual occasional blog post about the company. I got in touch with my friend to see if maybe they'd gone with a competitor or something else, but he also had no idea (and even if he wasn't being honest with me, we still should've been able to spot links or social metrics or something!)
Then, yesterday, their organic search traffic just tripled. The crazy thing is, it's not from one keyword: Every search term, and (not provided) essentially went up 200-400%. And I have no freaking idea why. No large gain of links. No website editing. The only possible explanation I thought up is maybe one of their competitors got knocked out, but I doubt that would cause such a stratospheric rise.
So figured I'd turn to y'all. Any ideas on what might be causing such wonderful results? Anyone have any good tips on figuring out why a website could all of a sudden be doing incredibly? Analytics chart is below for the curious, and thanks in advance for any ideas / tips!
-
Your traffic seems to have increased around the time of the big Panda update around the 21st August. Looks like (in contrast with your competitors) you were doing something right.
You might like to keep an eye on this chart: http://www.rankranger.com/rank-risk-index which I find gives a nice overview of the serp fluctuations.
-
Maybe in GA, just under where you got that chart from, click "Source" and then plot out the different search engines to validate where that extra traffic is coming from. My assumption if you are seeing all the keywords rise and not sudden traffic from one or a few new keywords is that maybe you just started ranking in one engine across the board? Like maybe all the steady traffic you were seeing before was all from Bing but suddenly Google started blessing the site? I know that doesn't answer your question but at least will eliminate some of the possibilities.
Also, the sources you mention for looking for new backlinks take a while to update (like OSE). So new links wouldn't be showing up in there yet. You might want to look in your traffic sources > referrers report in GA to see if there are some new links in there that you didn't know about before. Or if the total number of unique referrers has increase comparing two time frames? Might be a needle in a haystack but just one more place to look.
Good luck!
-
It's hard to say exactly what the cause is without knowing what the site/keywords are, but I'd recommend checking if these are all New Visits and/or Unique Visitors and where they are geographically located. I've seen huge spikes in traffic by the same group of people/computers in foreign countries before who were hitting my site over and over for some unknown reason. Also, check which search engine is sending the traffic, which landing pages they visited first, etc.
And of course, this spike could be legit, especially if your site ranks for keywords related to a particular topic that happened to get a lot of searches yesterday (breaking news, a controversial report debunking commonly held belief, viral video, etc).
-
I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason.
Try digging a little deeper into the analytics.
If you are looking at his analytics you should be able to see where those visitors were coming from on that day... also pages that they entered and lots more. The answers are just a few clicks away.
-
From those analytics, it almost looks like he started his website in Jan 2013... if that is the case, it can take some time to establish authority and ranking. If your rankings increased, then it makes sense that your traffic would also increase.
For a site that I optimized, we saw some immediate results; however, after 3 months of building up authority, rankings shot up and so did traffic.
It is tough to say exactly what is causing that... looks like you must have done something good : )
Mike
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
-
Google Search Console not loading some resources
When I check an URL with Search Console it cannot load some page resources, even from other domains (like: ssl.google-analytics.com, www.facebook.com and www.google-analytics.com).
Reporting & Analytics | | TottiataHUN
Have any of you experienced this issue?
Steps to reproduce: open Google Search Console check an URL click "View crawled page" link select "More info" tab click "Page resources" {?}/{?} couldn't be loaded When I check the listed resources, all of them can be loaded from a web browser.
So I do not understand why Google cannot load them.
And there is no additional info why the resources could not be loaded.
Any ideas? google-search-console-other-error-1.png google-search-console-other-error-2.png0 -
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 -
How to get multiple pages to appear under main url in search - photo attached
How do you get a site to have an organized site map under the main url when it is searched as in the example photo? SIte-map.png
Reporting & Analytics | | marketingmediamanagement0 -
Referral Traffic from Google
Hello, I have a question about my company's new website. I've worked in SEO and studied Google Analytics results for a few years now but have never really come across something like this. I started in this position in January of this year and when I started breaking down the traffic sources in Google Analytics, I noticed most of the traffic was coming from Google.com as a referral source. I had never seen Google.com as a referral source before so I looked into options for what it could be. It was not a paid ad and our organic traffic was coming through in Analytics, Before I could get any further, our new website was launched (we switched CRM's to WordPress) and the referral traffic from google went from 2,966 in January of 2015 to 22 in February 2015. for more comparison, in February of 2014, the referral traffic from Google was 2,496. I expected a drop when we switched CRM's but we correctly re-directed all pages and created a new sitemap and our organic traffic is up since the switch (not enough to cover drop in referral). I thought at first this had to do with our Google sellers account being de-activated when we made the switch, but I quickly fixed this over a month ago and no change. I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen Google.com come through as a referral source in Google Analytics and if they we're able to figure out what it actually was. This would be a great help! Thank you, Alex
Reporting & Analytics | | RASEO1 -
Find Pages with 0 traffic
Hi, We are trying to consolidate the amount of landing pages on our site, is there any way to find landing pages with a particular URL substring which have had 0 traffic? The minimum which appears in google analytics is 1 visit.
Reporting & Analytics | | driveawayholidays0 -
How to safely exclude search result pages from Google's index?
Hello everyone,
Reporting & Analytics | | llamb
I'm wondering what's the best way to prevent/block search result pages from being indexed by Google. The way search works on my site is that search form generates URLs like:
/index.php?blah-blah-search-results-blah I wanted to block everything of that sort, but how do I do it without blocking /index.php ? Thanks in advance and have a great day everyone!0 -
Senuke and traffic generator program is a good idea?? I think i got some problems now.
First of all thanks for reading, especially if you are the one whose bright ideas will help me out:) I started using senuke xcr about 3 months ago, obviously at the beginning i didnt make much success(not like I do now). Later i bought that inferno thingy and it actually works. First 2 weeks didnt make much difference(although i could see some little but stable uprising) but after 4th week ended, the average impression and queries doubled up, 6th went up again, its like every week or two it jumps up and keeps it there. Also the actual traffic from keywords went up! When about the second week finished, i started using a traffic generator program, first it leveled out the impressions and seemed to help a bit. Lately i think it messed it all up, plus about 2 weeks ago there was 2-3 dayswhen i sent a bit more traffic than usual and around that time the average rising of impressions didnt happened, it might even went down. Now i stopped using traffic g. and everything stayed the same no improvement!! Anyone could help me? I need to get it moving up again! Also im still nowhere near the top as the keywords are competitive well at least for me. What do i do wrong and what should i do? Also what about traffic generator? ps is it safe or/and or allowed to write that? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sugafree0 -
Abnormal Spike in Traffic- Ddos or what?
We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?
Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh590