Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?

[AdamThompson]

Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present.

I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions?

• Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects)
• They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed.
• The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages.
• The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language.
• Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop
• I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues.
• Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt
• Canonical URLs are good
• Site has about 20K pages indexed
• They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped.
• I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences.
• It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site.
• Page load speed is good

I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Adam,

Not to point out something that is likely well taken-care of, but did the GA / Analytics code populate across the site?

Also, is there any heavy JavaScript on the site, especially above analytics code, that might prevent analytics code from loading properly. We had this happen with a client a few years ago. We built custom analytics for this client (they did not want to run GA). Client placed our code in the footer. Client placed slow-loading CRO code in the header. CRO code took so long to load that people had often clicked away from the page they landed on before our code had had a chance to record their visit, as JavaScript generally loads in the same order as it's placed on the page. We had them move our little piece of code up to the top of the page. Problem was solved (in the mean time, we were recording a 20,000 visit loss each week!).

I'm just wondering if this is a tracking issue since all search traffic, not just Google has been affected. It would be quite rare to find an issue that has the same effect at the same time to both Bing and Google's algos. They're similar, but they're not identical and Bing generally tends to take longer to respond to change than Google as well.

Any chance you have raw server logs to compare analytics stats to?

[AdamThompson]

I don't see anything that I would think would trigger that. Let me PM you the URL.

[MichaelC-15022]

Did the layout of the header area change significantly?  If, for instance, the header area went from 1/10th of the "above the fold" area to 1/3rd, that might run the entire site afoul of the "topheavy" part of Panda.

[AdamThompson]

Thanks for the suggestions!

1. The homepage, category, and product pages have all lost traffic.

2. So far, I haven't found any noteworthy changes in content.

3. I've been wondering if this might be part of the issue.

4. I've reviewed Majestic link data, and only see a few deleted backlinks, so I'm thinking it's not a backlink issue.

[AdamThompson]

Thanks for the suggestion. So far the only significant difference in optimization I've found has been that they added Schema.org markup.

[MichaelC-15022]

Possibilities:

1. The layout of the product pages for the new shopping cart is pissing off Panda.  If that's the case, the traffic to the home page shouldn't have changed much, but the product pages will have dropped.
2. Panda now sees the pages in general as having less content than before, perhaps images aren't getting loaded in the pages in such a way that Google sees them whereas they were before, something like that....and Panda now thinks the entire site is less rich in content.
3. It often seems to take Google a month or so to "settle out" all of the link juice flows when you do a bunch of redirects, have new URLs, etc. I would expect that the link juice calculation is iterative, and that would be why it would take a number of iterations of the PageRank calculation in order for entirely new URLs to "get" all the link juice they should have.
4. Their backlinks were moderately dependent upon a set of link networks, and those link networks have shut down all their sites (so that neither Google nor Bing still see the links from them).

Those are the ideas that come to mind so far.

[EGOL]

Did the new cart generate product pages that were differently optimized than the old cart?  (if cart-generated product pages were used)