Drop in traffic at start of December 2014
-
Hello!
I've noticed a drop in organic Google traffic to our ecommerce site. The drop started on the 1st December 2014. The difference compared with last year is around -25%.
I've taken a look at landing pages for the organic Google traffic:
Homepage: -40%
Product pages: -31%
Category pages: -7%
Blog pages: -7%On the 1st December our site was down for a few hours in the early morning for some scheduled maintenance. I got a couple of emails from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that there was an "Increase in server errors" and "Googlebot can't access your site". Once the site maintenance was complete there haven't been any further emails from Google about this. I doubt the site being down is the cause of the drop in traffic.
I suspect it may have been caused by the latest Penguin updates around the end of November 2014. Can anyone advise if this sounds like it is the cause, and why the homepage and products pages have been hit so severely?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
-
Many thanks Dirk, looks like you've found the problem! Much appreciated!
-
Dave,
While checking your site, it seems that the tracking code is not always loaded - so probably it's more a technical glitch after the maintenance. Not clear what is causing it - when you install the tag assistant plugin you will see yourself. Seems to happen on first visit.
When it's not loaded your source (homepage) looks like this:
Dirk
-
Hi Dave,
How is overall traffic - did you see the same traffic drop. Sometimes Google traffic is reported as referrer traffic (for one of the sites I manage which is largely dependant on image search almost all google traffic is reported as referrer rather than search traffic)
I noticed that you're using a (very) old version of the GA tracker - consider updating to the last version (universal). If I check the page with the Tag Assistant plugin I get 3 warnings (sync version / code outside head / depreciated method get_tracker)
Dirk
-
Thanks for the replies everyone! I've had a closer look at our backlinks and there a few low quality ones in there, but the vast majority seem okay to me.
One thing I have noticed while digging about in more depth in WMT is that there is not a noticeable decline in clicks or impressions within the "Search Queries" section. Does this suggest there is an issue with how our GA is recording the visits from organic?
The domain name is www.edinburghbicycle.com.
-
Dave,
I doubt that the downtime (especially because it has been only a few hours) has anything to do with the drop in traffic. In my experience, even an unscheduled downtime of 24hr doesn't have any impact on SEO traffic.
If you are hit by Penguin, check your low quality links in Google Webmastertools, and try to contact the sites to eliminate the links to your site (if the link quality is very low, almost impossible to get these links removed). For the ones that do not answer, disavow the links.
Do the same for low quality links you can find using other tools: ahrefs.com, majesticseo.com, opensiteexplorer.com.
Check the profile of Marie Haynes - she has quite some experience on link removal and unnatural links & has written some interesting stuff about it http://moz.com/community/users/308135 - check the posts at the bottom of her profile.
Dirk
-
Are you able to share the domain name? This can at least give us some more insight as to what may have occurred.
-
Hi Laura,
It was indeed the timing that made me suspect Penguin! Our backlink profile could be better. Is there a good way of remedying this sort of backlink issue?
The maintenance was just an update to the web server hardware and OS, and I'm not aware of any new competitors, so I suspect it is Penguin that is causing the drop in traffic.
-
Is timing the only thing that makes you suspect Penguin is the cause of the drop in traffic? What does your backlink profile look like? Are there tons of spammy links to your site? If so, then you may be right about Penguin.
It's impossible to say what caused the drop based solely on the information you've provided. I highly doubt that a few hours of downtime had anything to do with your drop in traffic.
Other questions to consider:
- Have you made any significant changes to your website within the last three months? (What kind of maintenance was actually performed on the site?)
- Are there any new competitors pushing you out of the SERPs?
-
Could it also be part of the "penguin double take" or "roll back" as seen here- http://algoroo.com/ ?
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 would cause a major drop in ranking for (images) on both desk top and mobile? Web rankings are holding OK?
Sometime between Nov 8th and Nov 11th are rankings on Google for images dropped substantially. Our web rankings are holding OK. any idea!
Technical SEO | | OCFurniture0 -
Sudden drop in rankings over 7 days
Hello fellow SEOs, I am having a few issues with one of the sites I manage. The site in question has dropped for a number of terms in the last 7 days, including: logo design - dropped 2 places, now 19th logo design uk - dropped 2 places, now 8th logo designer - dropped 3 places, now 20th bespoke logo design - dropped 3 places, now 10th I'm worry that the site might drop for more terms if I just leave it alone. I haven't made any changes to the site but I have noticed that our number of inbound links has increased by 58% in the last 7 days. I have put the site through OSE and used the spam analysis tool. There's only one domain linking to my client that has an orange spam flag but this link isn't newly acquired. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | UE-Web0 -
Website dropping in ranking
Hello My website is www.invitationsforless.ie and on google Ireland it was ranking no 6 for the keyword "wedding invitations" and I was doing quite well from this but it has now has moved down along the rankings to no 10 and I have gone from the first page on google to the second page which is very disappointing. I did recently change the blurb on my homepage - would this have effected it. Please help I don't know what to do Thanks Linda
Technical SEO | | invitationsforless0 -
Number of indexed pages dropped dramatically
The number of indexed pages for my site was 1100 yesterday and today is 344 Anybody has any idea what can cause this. Thank you Sina
Technical SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Google Dropping Pages After SEO Clean Up
I have been using SEOmoz to clear errors from a site. There
Technical SEO | | Andy56
were over 10,000 errors to start with. Most of these were duplicate content, duplicate titles and too many links on a page. Most of the duplicate errors have now been
cleared. This has been done in two weeks (down to around 3000 errors now). But instead of improving my rankings, pages that were on the second page of Google have started to drop out of the listings altogether. The pages that are dropping out
are not related to the duplicate problems and get A grades when I run SEOmoz
page reports. Can you clean up too much too quickly or is there likely to be another reason for it?0 -
Why has one of my keywords dropped over 45 places since last week?
Hi one of my keywords is Aquaman Wetsuits and it seems to have dropped over 45 places since the last crawl - how can this be and how can I find out what the problem is? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Fitsensesports0 -
What caused my huge drop in search ranking?
On February 8th, 2012 my site's non-branded search traffic dropped overnight by over 80%. It appears I've been hit by a Google penalty. I submitted a reconsideration request and one of Google's staff replied letting me know it was NOT a manual penalty. So it's clearly a result of an algorithm. What is the cause? I haven't made significant changes to the website in the previous months do to being out of the country and the holidays. I'm extremely careful not to out source SEO so there is no chance of questionable link building strategies, unless my competitor launched an attack on my site. I've considered these possible causes: Duplicate content - My site had some redundancy from a marketing plan before Google Panda launched. Last month, I removed all duplicate content. Unnatural link building - I've been moving slowly my site, page by page, from adbio.com to bioworldusa.com after a brand change. Perhaps the 301 redirects triggered a flag in Google's algorithm. I've since removed all redirects to see if that will fix the issue. Poor User Experience - I recently upgraded my Drupal CMS and had to change themes. Currently my theme is an ugly, grey theme which may cause a higher than usual bounce rate. I've been trying to compensate by making sure the content is high quality. The penalty affected these website: www.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) blog.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) www.adbio.com (2/17/12)
Technical SEO | | bioworld1