Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
-
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?
-
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?
-
I don't see anything that I would think would trigger that. Let me PM you the URL.
-
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.
-
Thanks for the suggestions!
-
The homepage, category, and product pages have all lost traffic.
-
So far, I haven't found any noteworthy changes in content.
-
I've been wondering if this might be part of the issue.
-
I've reviewed Majestic link data, and only see a few deleted backlinks, so I'm thinking it's not a backlink issue.
-
-
Thanks for the suggestion. So far the only significant difference in optimization I've found has been that they added Schema.org markup.
-
Possibilities:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
-
Did the new cart generate product pages that were differently optimized than the old cart? (if cart-generated product pages were used)
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
-
Big problems with site traffic
Hello! I have big problems with website promotion. It's been 7 months and the attendance on the site is 1-5 people a day. I do not understand the reason. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? Site: www.azartlist.com Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bobic1 -
Organic search traffic is dropping since September
We own a large wiki site which allows people to make articles about their business and other things that Wikipedia would prohibit. To make our site more rich and expand the pages people can link to on their pages, we scraped between 1-2 million pages from the english wikipedia, pages such as “Los Angeles, CA” and “United States” etc. We’ve been getting a steady supply of organic backlinks from users who create their own pages and cite their wikis on their website, in news etc. However, starting 2 months ago our organic traffic has started slowly decaying as if we have received some kind of algorithmic penalty. What could it be? Could it be dupe content from the wikipedia pages we imported and indexed? Could it be some kind of algo from the Penguin update? We are just very confused why our organic search traffic would begin to drop at all since every day we have organic users making quality pages, some of whom organically backlink their articles on their own website and these obviously add up over time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teddef1 -
Is this organic search sketchiness worth unwinding?
Started working on a site and learned that the person before me had done a fairly sketchy maneuver and am wondering if it's a net gain to fix it. The site has pages that it wanted to get third party links linking to. Thing is, the pages are not easy to naturally link to boost them in search. So, the woman before me started a new blog site in the same general topic area as the first/main site. The idea was to build up even the smallest bit of authority for the new blog, without tipping Google off to shared ownership. So, the new blog has a different owner/address/registrar/host and no Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools account to share access to. Then, as one method of adding links to the new blog, she took some links that originally pointed to the main site and re-directed them to the blog site. And voila! ...Totally controllable blog site with a bit of authority linking to select pages on the main site! At this point, I could un-redirect those links that give the blog site some of its authority. I could delete the links to the main site on the blog pages. However, on some level it may have actually helped the pages linked to on the main site. The whole thing is so sketchy I wonder if I should reverse it. I could also just leave it alone and not risk hurting the pages that the blog currently links to. What do you think? Is there a serious risk to the main site in this existing set up? The main site has hundreds of other links pointing to it, a Moz domain authority of 43, thousands of pages of content, 8 years old and Open Site Explorer Spam Score of 1. So, not a trainwreck of sketchiness besides this issue. To me, the weird connection for Google is that third party sites have links that (on-page-code-wise) still point to the main site, but that resolve via the main site's redirects to the blog site. BTW, the blog site points to other established sites besides the main site. So, it's not the exclusive slave to the main site. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Finding Ranking for search term and increasing ranking
Hi. The company that I'm working with would like to rank highly in google for certain generic search terms (dentist, dentists, etc.). Certain websites the company has used to rank highly in google for generic keywords, but has not for years now since google has revised their algorithm so many times. Moz lists that the company websites are not found in the top 51+ results in google. My first question is: **Is there a way, apart from manually searching the results, to find the ranking position of the website in google? **Ideally, I would like to find a program that will do this. Second, I've been reading a lot of the great articles and comments on Moz, and I've been learning a lot more about SEO. My focus has shifted to spending more attention on User Experience and Social Media instead of placing the exact keywords in the pages / tags of the website. What area(s) should I be focusing on to best increase the ranking of the company website for certain generic terms? Ideally, I'd like to create good quality content, so that users will not instantly click away. I appreciate any thoughts or comments. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | americasmiles0 -
Traffic from organic grew significantly. But why?
Hello, In our e-commerce business we saw significant growth in organic traffic during the summer months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ETonnard
This is a period we sell a lot of custom made photobooks. The weird thing is that we didn't do any changes to our photobook pages since 2013, where we didn't have these peaks.
So this is good news, but... What would be a good way to start investigating the reason of this increase?
I have a hard time answering the 'why' question. Thank you very much for your help! With kind regards, Yannick TiWWKX9.png0 -
Google search results
I have been doing some searches on google to see where my new site shows up, I started using the search words "graphic design firm st. louis" as a gauge, because my title is St. Louis Missouri Graphic Design Firm. I showed up on about page 5 to start , if I include the word "firm" and a few pages further back if I just search "graphic design st. louis", without the word firm. It seemed i was slowly moving up pages with both searches and then a few days ago I jumped to page 1 for search "graphic design firm st. louis" the thing is it doesnt show up at all now if i search "graphic design st. louis" without the word firm. what would cause the one search to jump so high while the other one dissapeared completely?? and what can i do? my keyword density is same for both , any ideas.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric69660 -
GEO IP Redirects affecting Organic Rankings
Not sure if anyone has ever had this problem. We have a client who is a UK based retailer with a large retail presence in Canada and a U.S site as well. For the past year while keeping track of their rankings, they steadily ranked #1 for their brand term on Google.CA. At the end of June we implemented a GEO IP redirect for U.S visitors to be redirected to the U.S site if they clicked on the .CA listing. Over the next two weeks the ranking for the single branded keyword went from #1 to completely off the top 50. Could this have possibly happened due to the GEO IP redirect? The .CO.UK site has always been top 3 in the organic listing and is still #1 but in Google.ca the Canadian site has dropped off completely after consistently ranking #1.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | demacmedia0 -
Zip Code Blocks the Search Engines!
I have a site where when you visit the product pages, it asks for your zip code. This is obviously blocking the bots from crawling the site. I know you can basically tell the bots how to ignore the zip code feature but I am not exactly sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhawk0