Huge Traffic Drop without any change on website

[jancpc]

Hello there,

I've experienced a huge website traffic drop and I can't find a reason. I redesigned and updated the SEO strategy in early December and the traffic was increasing, that's why I have no idea why that is happening.

I have a video on home page and the views/day dropped a lot as well, but not as much as website visits!

Any inputs?

Best regards,

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[DirkC]

I have send my email in private message. Let me know if you got it.

[jancpc]

Hello Dirk,

I was trying to collect as mush information as possible before answering. I couldn't private message you tho, I don't know why. I can PM any other user except you, could you please check your preferences?

The Webmaster Tools is closer to 2k, actually smaller. I always suspected the abrupt Direct access our website received and the huge number of mobile devices, now it's mainly desktop as it should be imo for our business.

Any alternative for me to send you our URL?

Best regards,

[DirkC]

Hi Guilherme,

It seems highly unlikely that your traffic if it was 100k/day that it would consist only of robot visits. Are you absolutely sure that all the sections of your site are still measured by Analytics? I would suspect that you are currently only measuring one section of your site (based on session duration and number of pages I would almost guess that it would be something like a forum).

You say you did not see a difference in Webmaster tools. I don't know how much traffic you get from Google, but is the traffic you're getting in Webmaster tools closer to 2K clicks /day or to 100K clicks/day?

Did you check your statistics the day the drop occurred (set view to "hour") - was the drop very sudden (in one hour), or did it just disappear during the day?

Without more info it's difficult to help - could you sent your url in a private message so I could check if your analytics is ok?

rgds,

Dirk

[jancpc]

Hello Dirk,

Thanks for the detailed answer. I waited until today to get the results from webmaster tool and there was not a drop in organic traffic. Also the number of users/registration to the website remain normal. The drop was from 100k/day to 2k/day, so have developed a theory.

Is it possible that most of my traffic was coming from searchbots/crawlers?

I noticed that some funny numbers:

page/session went from 1.68 to 4.56,

Session duration from 2:30 to 7:45

Bounce rate from 73% to 34%

Any insights about what these numbers mean?

Best regards,

[MonicaOConnor]

I would just like to add that this could just be seasonality of your site, or events going on that generally affect search volume, like holidays or huge sporting events. Sometimes it isn't an issue with your site, but a general decrease in search volume.

[DirkC]

Hi,

Sudden traffic drops could have 3 principal causes:

• you're being hit by an algorithm update - when I check http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change I don't really see a change on the date your problem starts. You could check in analytics if the traffic drop in mainly coming from organic traffic, or if the drop is for all traffic sources. Check your webmastertools - see if search queries dropped drastically (with the 2 day delay in Webmastertools it's probably to soon to do that). Do you see a manual action in your webmastertools? Check google - use the queries where you used to get the traffic from - does your ranking still looks ok - or did your site disappear from the results? If not - check the next point:

• there is a problem with your analytics tag - install the Analytics plugin in Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh) and check your most important pages - see if the Analytics tag is measuring data. Go to Analytics - take the day where the traffic drop started & compare with the previous day - take the view on an hourly basis. If the drop appears on a very specific timepoint - than probably there has been some modification on your site which had an impact on your measurements.

• last - check if your robots.txt is not blocking access to your site - take your main pages and check if they can be fetched by Google (there is a tool in Webmastertools)

Hope this helps. In my experience, a very sharp drop on a very specific moment (change occurs in 1 hour) is mostly caused by a problem with the analytics tag.

rgds,

Dirk