Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering.

Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it.

There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered.

I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it.

The clues I'm seeing include:

• Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem.

• GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors.

• On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely.

I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty?

Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Hi guys, thanks for picking that up. Don't know why I missed it! GA code was in the header.php of the old theme and was lost when I switched themes. I've added it back now so I'll see what happens.

I can see how that would have impacted the search traffic graph on Moz Pro, but I'm still not sure if it would have affected how Moz reports my keyword rankings. Did I really suffer big drops in the SERPs as Moz reported? Or was it just a side-effect of Moz not being able to see traffic in my GA account?

Tony

[TheeDigital]

As L Slversen said, your Google Analytics tracking code is missing so you wouldn't be recording traffic. This probably happened with your theme changed and likely the traffic you are still seeing on the site is not legitimate, more than likely ghost referral spam traffic.

[LSIversen]

I would start out by making sure you put back the analytics tracking code, since that's not there right now (checked both with Google Tag Assistant & in the source code). So it makes sense you can't see any traffic from search, since there is no tracking. That probably explains a lot of it.

[KyleEaves]

I searched for the keyword "asian travel tips" and you were on the 3rd page of Google. I clicked and went to your website, so you should see at least one organic visit. Your site seemed to load pretty quickly, so that is good. Check the stats for today and let me know if the visit shows up. If you don't see it, there must be something wrong with your analytics tracking, which I feel must be the case because your visits dropped to zero. It just doesn't seem right that you wouldn't have at least a couple visits show up.

Have you been tracking some of your keywords daily with the rank tracker tool? That is a better way to get an update more often on your site's ranking for specific keywords since you can run it every day and see how the keywords have tracked over time rather than waiting for the weekly update.

I ran a site:www.travelnasia.com query and it looks like you've got 806 pages indexed in Google. Does that seem about right?

I scanned your site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It's a pretty nice tool, check it out if you haven't yet. It definitely helps with locating and fixing broken links. The tool also gives you access to tons of information about your site. Here are some sample reports from your site:
Crawl Overview: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/crawl_overview.xls
404 Errors: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/client_error_%284xx%29_inlinks.xls
No Response Links: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74533600/no_response_inlinks.xls

Hopefully you're able to get this figured out quickly. I'll let you know if I think of anything else. Best of luck!

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Hi Kyle, thanks for taking a look. No, my keyword rankings took a hit (48 up, 149 down) over the past week but I am still ranking for lots of keywords. About half of my #1-3 keywords dropped back to #4-10. If this keeps up I expect my keywords will take a much bigger hit. In fact I am already seeing evidence of that. My URL http://www.travelnasia.com/thailand/wararot-chiang-mai-day-market/ shows in Moz as still ranking #1 for "Wararot Chiang Mai day market" on Friday but in fact I now don't even list on the first 3 pages of results.

When you say I have a lot of 404s on my site, where are you getting that info? As of Friday, Moz shows 37 404 errors on the site and many of those are leftovers from dropping my premium theme (e.g. placecategory instead of category). But I should fix them, I agree.

And yes, none of that really points to why Google would stop sending me any search traffic, and yet that seems to be what's happened.

I've added some screenshots below which may be helpful.  I am still getting traffic, but not from organic search.

132b5cfdfc27ef5792f83a81e5ac739c 95ccf8387df343022b3a7aad2e17c8e1 95ccf8387df343022b3a7aad2e17c8e1

[KyleEaves]

Have you checked your keyword rankings yet? Have they completely dropped off too? Hard to believe Google would completely drop your site overnight. Maybe there is an issue with your analytics tracking code being removed when you switched your website's theme. Are you seeing other traffic in GA?

Regardless, it looks like you've got a decent amount of broken links & 404 errors on your site. I doubt Google would kill your traffic over that, but it wouldn't hurt to fix these items so that once you're back online the Google Bot is not tripping over broken links.