Traffic drop after Facebook push
-
Hi all,
We experienced a strange phenonema after a Facebook push, it appears the Google organic traffic was all but dead for five days after. Totally not sure why!
It has since returned to about 80% of previous levels.
-
Hi,
When you say that referral traffic was unaffected - did you see the burst of traffic in Analytics or not?
In webmaster tools - do you see that clicks go down to zero during this timeframe. Was there an increased number of crawl errors during this period?
Was your site able to handle the traffic or did it go down - sometimes when sites are unstable or frequently offline Google temporary removes them from the SERP's until the situation has normalised.
Without additional info it's difficult to judge what exactly could be the cause. I never heard that a sudden peak of traffic from one source had an impact (in the negative sense) on search traffic - normally more visits from other sources are rather positive for your rankings.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Okay all, I'm going to mark this as solved. After digging deeper in the cPanel stats, it looks more like the whole site went offline for a couple days! Yikes.
| 12 Apr 2015 | 46 | 201 | 1,016 | 28.07 MB |
| 13 Apr 2015 | 356 | 752 | 9,115 | 239.04 MB |
| 14 Apr 2015 | 1,823 | 3,897 | 50,698 | 1.15 GB |
| 15 Apr 2015 | 289 | 602 | 6,375 | 175.32 MB |
| 16 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 17 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 18 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 19 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 20 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 21 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 22 Apr 2015 | 28 | 51 | 603 | 13.89 MB |
| 23 Apr 2015 | 73 | 1,302 | 2,514 | 36.23 MB |
| 24 Apr 2015 | 65 | 167 | 1,111 | 28.60 MB |
| 25 Apr 2015 | 59 | 142 | 1,115 | 27.35 MB |
| 26 Apr 2015 | 56 | 101 | 1,134 | 27.36 MB |
| 27 Apr 2015 | 74 | 192 | 1,353 | 31.16 MB | -
Hi Dirk,
Nothing was changed during that time and it appears all the direct/social traffic was unaffected. It was as if the sudden rush of a thousand plus people over social caused an issue. I've never seen Google traffic zero out like that, in fact, it appears as if it was zero until WordPress automatically upgraded (that should have occurred on or around the 22nd).
-
Did you seem a similar drop in Webmaster tools?
When I see such a sudden drop & fast recovery my first guess would be that something went wrong with your analytics tag. How was you overall traffic during this period? Did you see the Facebook traffic appearing in referrals?
Apart from the Facebook push - did you do technical changes to your site in the same timeframe?
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Short description about our search results drop + forum moving to subdomain question.
Hello, here is our story. Our niche is mental health (psychology, psychotherapy e.t.c). Our portal has thousand of genuine articles, news section about mental health, researches, job findings for specialists, a specialized bookstore only with psychology books, the best forum in country, we thousands of active members and selfhelp topics etc. In our country (non english), our portal has been established in 2003. Since then, for more than 15 years, we were no 1 in our country, meaning that we had the best brand name, hundreds of external authors writing unique content for our portal and hundreds of no1 keywords in google search results. Actually, we had according to webmaster tools, more than 1.000 keywords, in 1 and 2 position. (we were ranking no1 in all the best keywords). Before 2 years, we purchased the best domain in our niche. I ll use the below example (of course, domains are not the real ones):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dodoni
We had: e-pizza.com and now we have: pizza.com
We did the appropriate redirects but from day one, we had around 20-30% drop in search engines. After 6 months -which is something that google officialy mentions, we lost all "credits from the old domain.. .and at that point, we had another 20-30% drop in search results. Further more, in any google core update, we were keep dropping. Especially in last May (coronovirus update), we had another huge drop. We do follow seo guides, we have a dedicated server, good load speed, well structured data, amp, a great presence in social media, with more than 130.000 followers, etc. According to our investigation, we came to one only conclusion: that our forum, kills our seo (of course, noone in our team can guarantee that this is the actual reason of the uge drop in may-in coronovirus google core update). We believe that the forum kills our seo, because it produces low quality posts by members. For example, psychopharmacology in a very active sections and we believe, google is very "sensitive" in these kind of posts and information. So here is the question: although the forum is very very active, with thousands of new topics and posts every month, we are thinking of moving it to a subdomain, from the subfolder that now is.
This will help our domain authority to increase from 38 that is stuck 2 years now, to larger scales. We believe that althougth this forum gave a great boost to the portal, in the past 10-15 years, it somehow makes a negative impact now. If I could give more spesific details, I d say this: in all seo tools we run, the best kewwords bringing visitors to us, arent anymore, psychology and psychotherapy and mental health and this kind of top-keywords, but are mostly the ones from the forum, like: I want to proceed with a suicide, I m taking efexor or xanax and they have side effects, why i gain wieght with the antidepressants I get etc. 1. Moving our forum to subdomain, will be some kind of pain, since it is a large community, with thousands of backlinks that we somehow must handle in a proper way, also with a mobile application, things that will have to change and probably have some kind of negative impact. Would that be according to your knowledge a correct move and our E-A-T will benefit for google, or since google will know that the subdomain is still part of the same website/portal, it will handle it somehow, the same way as it does now? I have read hundreds of articles about forum in subdomains or in subfolders, but none of them covers a case stydy like ours, since most articles are talking about new forums and what is the best way to handle them and where is the best place to create them (in subfolder of subdomain) when from scratch. Looking forward to your answers.0 -
Huge organic drop following new site go live
Hi Guys, I am currently working on a site that's organic traffic suffered ( and is still suffering ) a huge drop in organic traffic. From a consistent 3-400 organic visits a day to almost zero. This happened as soon as the new site went live. I am now digging to find out why. 301s were put in place ( over 2, 500 over them ) and there are still over 1,100 outstanding after review search console this morning. Having looked at the redirect file that was put in place when the new site went live, it all look OK, apart from the redirects look like this... http://www.physiotherapystore.com/ to http://physiotherapystore.com/ Where the new URL is missing www. - I am concerned this is causing a large duplicate issue as both www. and non www. work fine. I am right to have concern or is this something not to worry about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr0 -
What will happen if we 302 a page that is ranking #1 in google for a high traffic term?
We're planning to test something and we want to 302 a page to another page for a period of time. The question is, the original page is ranking #1 for a high traffic term. I want to know what will happen if we do this? Will we lose our rank? Will the traffic remain the same? Ultimately I do not want to lose traffic and I do not want to 301 until it has been properly tested.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxcdn0 -
Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?
I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors. 99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US. But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account. I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others. But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this. I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly. However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site? Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches. At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Massive decreases in traffic
Hi i've been looking at the affects of googles algorithmic updates over the last couple years and the impact on sites/competitors i have been monitoring in the space. Two sites which surprised me, in having a dramatic decline in search traffic were: kriskris.com (over 200k visitors to around 10k) only-cookware.com (from 40k visitors at its peak to only around 1000k) (semrush traffic data attached) Both sites have great quality content and social signals. The only thing i can think of is a over-optimization of anchor text, and types of links. dnrm0Oa.png cuaLzrI.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Massive 40-50 page drop for primary keyphrase, no apparent reason, + map listing weirdness
Hi. I manage the site http://physiowinnipeg.com, which has had some interesting yo-yo effects lately, culminating in a 40-50 page drop as of last Friday. The phrase in question: physiotherapy winnipeg Background: The site has ranked on the first page for this keyphrase since about May There was the occasional blip where the homepage would disappear from rankings altogether for a day or two, and then return back to its regular listing This would coincide with a sudden increase in organic places listings (our site would hit the top of the local map listings, but the homepage would vanish) Other pages would still appear for the target phrase, just not the homepage About a month ago, the organic places listing settled, and the homepage permanently vanished Other pages still ranked high, and we commanded many of the listings on the first 10 pages of Google, first page included The homepage would still appear for some other searches We had been affected by the Google Places --> Google+ Local transition, so I was of the opinion that we needed to wait it out a bit to see if it, like the other issues related to the transition, would work itself out This time around, it worked itself out again, just today -- but we are now ranked slightly lower on the first page and our Google local listing has disappeared (again) Our other pages are still (currently) absent from the first few pages, for this keyphrase The main differences I noticed here, aside from the much longer timeframe of our drop, was that other pages disappeared as well, and that the homepage was actually found, between page 38 and 50, depending on the day According to SEO Moz and other tools, the site is doing pretty much everything right. I should note, however, that there is a service we use for educational content called Patientsites that loads in the subdomain http://education.physiowinnipeg.com -- and this site has pulled many warnings in SEO Moz (around 10,000, actually, mostly long URL related), as well as a few errors. I'm not sure if this is a part of the problem, but I am considering having the content of the subdomain blocked via robots.txt and Webmaster Tools. Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or have any insight? This weirdness has gone on too long. Thanks! Bobby
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinnacleWpg0 -
Is traffic and content really important for an e-commerce site???
Hi All, I'm maintaining an e-commerce website and I've encountered some related keywords that I know will not convert to sales but are related to the subject and might help becoming an "authority". I'll give an example... If a car dealership wrote an amazing article about cleaning a car.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Obviously it is related but the chances of someone looking to clean his car will go ahead and buy one now are quite low. Also, he will probably bounce out of this page after reading the piece. To conclude, Would such an article do GOOD (helping to become an authority and having more visitors) or BAD (low conversion rate and high bounce rate)? Thanks0 -
Should we always avoid drop-down menus?
In Google's SEO Guide, they say avoid the use of drop-down menus, page 12: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf But, is this always true? What if you create the drop down purely using HTML & CSS? Is it fine to use a bit of javascript to create the drop-down menu, or should it only be HTML & CSS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0