What penalty would cause this traffic drop (Google Analytic Screenshot)
-
This ecommerce site was hit (mostly) slowly by updates but there is nothing in GWT.
Below is the graph. Keep in mind that most of our traffic is return customers, so the drops don't look dramatic, but they are. "New Visitors" doesn't show the drop.
This is a "Daily" Google Analytics setting.
The drop I've circled is May 23-May 24, 2013. It was a huge hit in non-return customers. This graph is "Unique Visitors" I don't know why the "New Visitors" graph is not showing the dip
Although we had some big drops, a lot of the drop was gradual. Any help in identifying what could be causing the problem is appreciated.
-
Frankly...the reason for the slip is irrelevant. Probably Penguin / Penguin 2.0 but you really have 2 choices:
Get rid of the paid links and start being smarter about your SEO, you'll probably lose some more traffic in the short term if you're not currently getting an algorithmic spanking from the links in question already.
Don't get rid of them and watch your traffic continue to fall as your paid links slowly get devalued.
The net result is the same. Get rid of the paid links and start again now rather than dragging it out ad having to start again later.
-
Thanks Marie,
I just opened another question with a more specific graph. I supposed I could have pasted it here. Thanks for your help.
-
Yes, I agree that that's the most likely culprit. May 22 was a known Penguin refresh. There are always other possibilities but if you've been engaged in link building then this is the most likely culprit.
-
It's Penguin 2.0, which was put out on May 22, 2013.
-
Hi Bob,
Hope this tool will be of great help if you want to check whether the drop is because of Panda or Penguin or any other updates from Google:
http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Please use it and post back the findings so that we can take it from there.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?
I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrisZigurs0 -
My site just dropped significant!
Just noticed that my website onlinecasting.co.za just dropped 50+ places on basically all the keywords I'm following.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KasperGJ
I can also see, that today there almost havent been any new sign-ups so something happened.
I didnt change anything. On issue, which might have something to do with it, is that I own several "copies" of the same site, just in different countries (domains). I host the websites myself, and they are all on the same server. The text and design in the same in some of the countries except that "jobs" are unique for the country. I also have:
onlinecasting.ae (english)
onlinecasting.sg (english)
onlinecasting.mx
and more coming So, could that be the reason, that google somehow now decided, that it wont accept the "allmost same site"?0 -
Submitting a page to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools with nofollow tags
Hello, I was hoping someone could help me understand if there is any point to submit a domain or subdomain to Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and Bing Webmaster Tools if the pages (on the subdomain for example) all have nofollow/noindex tags ... or the pages are being blocked by the robots.txt file). There are some pages on a data feed onto a subdomain which I manage that have these above characteristics ... which I cannot change ... but I am wondering if it is better to simply exclude from submitting those from GWT and BWT (above) thereby eliminating generating errors or warnings ... or is it better to tell Google and Bing about them anyway then perhaps there is a chance those nofollow pages may be indexed/contextualised in some way, making it worth the effort? Many thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uworlds
Mark0 -
Analytics Spammer Can Haz Humors: Who Else?
Yeah... the traffic is annoying. But seeing this (attached image) in my GA was pretty funny. Obviously it was only a couple hits. I thought it was pretty cute in comparison to the other actions. 1WnZK0p
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Travis_Bailey2 -
My site www.sriindustries.com dropped to back page penguin 2.1
My website penguin 2.1 dropped back to page 5 and beyond, can you help me to come out from this ? My head is breaking, also I would like to know how to be on top for local business search (maps)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | synchronyinfo0 -
Massive drop in Google traffic after upping pagecount 8-fold.
I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petestein1
Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉0 -
Penalised by Google - Should I Redirect to a new domain?
Last month my rankings dropped a couple of pages on Google and am no longer receiving as many visits from Google as I used to. It's coming up to summer which is the time my business naturally picks up yet I can't fix this problem. I have a crazy idea of redirecting my established site onto a new domain in hopes that the penalty would be removed. I have tried removing any manipulative links yet my ranking are not coming back. Anyone had success in redirecting to a new domain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | penn730 -
Redirecting doesn't rank on google
We are redirecting our artist's official website to copenhagenbeta.dk. We have two artists (Nik & Jay and Burhan G) that top ranks on Google (first on page 1), but one of them (Lukas Graham) doesn't rank at all. We use the same procedure with all artists. http://copenhagenbeta.dk/index.php?option=com_artistdetail&task=biography&type=overview&id=49 Doesn't rank but the old artist page still does. Is it the old page that tricks Google to think that this is the active page for the artist?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Morten_Hjort0