Website organic traffic unchanged, impressions took a 98% drop in the last week.
-
Hi all,
I have a very curious predicament and I'd be grateful if someone could shed some light on the situation.
As mentioned in the title, organic traffic to our website has remained unchanged, but organic impressions have taken a 98% drop in the last week. This happened suddenly over one day; on October 22, impressions were 700, on October 23, they were 500, and on October 24 they drastically dropped to 50. The next two days they were at 22 and then up to 35.
Organic traffic, however, showed the normal "weekend drop" as of October 24, and is still showing normal level (even increased a bit) continuing into this week.
These are organic impressions according to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools.
We did perform a complete site redesign a month ago. Could this be an effect from the redesign?
We also noticed drop in Domain Authority, but our competitors suffered a similar (if not greater) drop as well, so we wondered if it could be due in part to the algorithm update.
If anyone could shed some light on the situation I would be so appreciative!
Thanks!
-
Nope, This seems kind of normal. Organic traffic can be coming from Bing and Yahoo also. I think you are fine.
I noticed a jump in rankings also. That is why you want to make sure you don't drop below your lowest average, if you do then you might see a dramatic decrease in your rankings when everything settles down.
-
Thanks for the response!
In response to your questions, the really confounding part is that we are actually ranking higher for our keywords and all seems normal in terms of landing pages (so says Google Analytics and MOZ).
I don't understand how we could have an increase in organic traffic yet a decrease in organic impressions! Am I missing something?
-
The Panda/Penguin updates have shaken up the rankings quite consistently over the past couple of weeks. I noticed that my company, and my competitors have dropped a couple of points as well. I don't think that drop in DA is something to freak out about right now. If you have not received any notices from Google, it could just be that things are still trying settle down after the topsy turvy couple of weeks the engines have seen.
As far as search impressions go, there are a few things that could be happening. If you changed your URLs when you redesigned your website then you can start to see reduced impressions as your new pages become indexed and start moving up in the searches. Something to be careful of is if you see your impressions dip below your lowest average before the Penguin update. I have a few SEO friends who saw huge surges in impressions as Penguin was rolling out, and then a decline that they haven't been able to recover from. As long as you are staying above that lowest day of impressions you should be fine.
It could also just be a lack of searches on those days. It is something to keep an eye on, but probably too soon to start worrying about. After updates, you kind of have to wait and see for a couple of weeks. The results are all messed up and usually don't start to even out for awhile. As far as I know, the Penguin update still isn't complete, so that could still cause some trouble for your impressions.
Have you checked your landing pages report to see where your organic searches are coming from? How about your keyword rankings? Have you noticed any changes out of the ordinary?
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
-
Website removed from Bing and Yahoo index
Hi, are website servicemanualrepairs.com was removed from Bing and Yahoo index, I emailed Bing via Webmaster tools they first said it was Backlinks I did look via at the inbound links tool to analyze the site's Backlinks I did find 20 links and used the Disavow tool, they said "I'm afraid but after careful and thorough investigation, your site still did not meet the Bing and Microsoft guidelines You may also refer to the things to avoid section of the Webmaster Guidelines for additional information. As an effect, the site is still blocked and it cannot be lifted" the website was in Bing and Yahoo index for 3 Years and only after the 20 Backlinks were added to the site it was de-index any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | vista5211 -
New website and new domain
Hi, We have a domain with current e-commerce site on, about 5 years old. We have a new website being built with a different company and a new domain name. We are transferring our old domain over to new provider and 301'ing the domain to new domain. However, we can not take the current website with us, so we lose all our links/pages etc.. How important would it be to take a wrap of our current website to keep all the pages alive? Is there anything we can do so oldurl.com/brand/tshirt/ doesnt lose its rank? Can we 301 individual pages if we dont have the actual website? Just the domain name. Any help be great. Thanks
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
Live website is an addon domain - Need site old development url inaccessable from live domain
Hi everyone, I have a website which is built in Joomla 2.5. The development site is located at www,abc.com/subdomain/. We have set the site live using an addon domain which is www.xyz.com. The problem is, www.abc.com/subdomain/ is still accessible and being crawled by Google. How is the best way to make the development url inaccessible? Any help would be appreciated!
Web Design | | DougHosmer0 -
Redesigning a really old Website with old-fashioned permalinks
Hey SEO-Pros, I'm currently redesigning a quite old website, with the following URL structure: TLD/category/category.php?interview_id=819 The new Version will be a little more SEO-friendly: TLD/interviews/name-of-interview/ I know I have to do a 301-Redirect for all the old URLs to the new ones in order to keep the (until now pretty good) Google Ranking. If the rankings drop after the redesign has been done, I'll surely get killed 😉 So, Is there any easy way of creating these 301-Redirects (must be thousands of URLs...)? Best Regards guys and thanks for your help!
Web Design | | dominator0 -
Has anyone had luck doing SEO with a wordpress website built with Parallax?
Has anyone worked with Parallax before? Is it possible and worth it to do SEO on a wordpress site that uses Parallax? I have a friend that is asking. Currently when you navigate their site there is only one URL (home page) and one title tag.
Web Design | | webestate0 -
Sudden dramatic drops in SERPs along with no snippet and no cached page?
We are a very stable, time tested domain (over 15 yrs old) with thousands of stable, time tested inbound links. We are a large catalog/e commerce business and our web team has over a decade's experience with coding, seo etc. We do not engage in link exchanges, buying links etc and adhere strictly to best white hat seo practices. Our SERPs have generally been very stable for years and years. We continually update content, leverage user generated content etc, and stay abreast of important algorithm and policy changes on Google's end. On Wednesday Jan 18th, we noticed dramatic, disturbing changes to our SERPs. Our formerly very stable positions for thousands of core keywords dropped. In addition, there is no snippet in the SERPs and no cached page for these results. Webmaster tools shows our sitemap most recently successfully downloaded by Google on Jan 14th. Over the weekend and monday the 16th, our cloud hosted site experienced some downtime here and there. I suspect that the sudden issues we are seeing are being caused by one of three possibilities: 1. Google came to crawl when the site was unavailable.
Web Design | | jamestown
However, there are no messages in the account or crawl issues otherwise noted to indicate this. 2. There is a malicious link spam or other attack on our site. 3. The last week of December 2011, we went live with Schema.org rich tagging on product level pages. The testing tool validates all but the breadcrumb, which it says is not supported by Schema. Could Google be hating our Schema.org microtagging and penalizing us? I sort of doubt bc category/subcategory pages that have no such tags are among those suffering. Whats odd is that ever since we went live with Schema.org, Google has started preferring very thin content pages like video pages and articles over our product pages. This never happened in the past. the site is: www.jamestowndistributors.com Any help or ideas are greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank You DMG0 -
Recommended Website Monitoring Tools
Hi, I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!). I need something that will:
Web Design | | James77
1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
2/. Do header status checking
3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
4/. Multiple alert possibilities. We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case. Thanks0 -
Drop Down Menus & SEO?
Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO? I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider? Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these? There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.
Web Design | | MichaelWeisbaum0