Image Search / sudden drop in traffic
-
One of our sites in Germany had a very sudden drop in traffic (starting Oct. 7th). The site gets most of it's organic traffic from Image Search. Checking in Search Console revealed that
- search volume for keywords increased in that period
- our average position is stable
- our click rate dropped dramatically
(we double checked - searching the keyword in "anonymous mode" still showed our results for main keywords in top image positions (first 2 rows)).
As an example (see attached screencopy) - keyword had clickrate of 1% (average) - dan dropped to 0.06% while the position remained stable.
Germany is still using the "old" version of image search (unlike the rest of the world) - which gives the site preview rather than just the image slider when you click on a result in image search. Our first thought that this was changed - but it seems that it didn't change.
Ideas what might cause this dramatic drop in click%?
There have been no major technical modifications on the site for the last 2 months.
thanks,
Dirk
-
Thanks everybody for your help.
We are still figuring out why the click rate in WMT has dropped but we discovered the main reason of our traffic drop. Our external advertising company had added a Analytics tracker in an external script which was interfering with the normal measurements.
When I checked the codes last week with the Chrome plugin everything was fine but I was visiting the site with my Ad blocker activated (so the external script wasn't called). When I visited the site today with Ad block de-activated it indicated that our tag wasn't measuring. The external tracking code was removed & traffic went back to previous levels (it's a bit scary to realise that about 50% of our visits have the ad blocker activated)
Dirk
-
Hi John,
URL: goo.gl/gPC9FY - we rank high for all keywords containing the words "malvorlage" or "ausmalbild" + keyword - like "malvorlage stern"
Titles - no changes on titles recently - as most images were labeled with Malvorlage & we noticed that Ausmalbild became more popular - the new images we added were using "Ausmalbild" as title rather than "malvorlage"
Layout - that was one of the first things I considered - given the fact that the image search in Germany is still on the old presentation (preview of site rather than slider). We checked this and it seems that it's still the old version which is used.
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk -
Very interesting case going on here. A few more questions (the URL would be helpful if you are keen to share it as well):
- Anything change around your titles of images? Or those of your competitors?
- Do you track rankings on these other than what Search Console has? "Average rank" is pretty unhelpful sometimes, I'm afraid.
- Did Google maybe change the layout of the SERPs where you had images showing up, so that the images are getting less exposure in the search results?
John
-
Hi Egol,
Know exactly what you mean - we had this on our Spanish site after a less successful (to put it mildly) site migration - our images remained in the search results however the site was no longer ours but from someone else (that was also the moment we discovered all our images were spread all over the web...). Multiple complaints (and months) later the site started gaining traffic again.
It doesn't seem the case here - I did manually check key images - and the site behind is always ours. I also used the "search by image" to see how many times it was copied - and although copies existed - it were mainly smaller sizes on non concurrential sites (like schools).
Positions remain good to excellent. Even more amazing is that for some keywords the position improved more or less at the same time as the drop in CTR
Can't understand why the click rate decreased that dramatically.
Dirk
-
I have the same problem. The graphs look the same. What's happening is that infringers grab my images and replace my site in the image search results. Then my images on their sites replace my images on my site part of the time in the search results. The result is a loss of traffic. The result is no change in my average rankings and a loss of impressions.
A casual check of the search results shows my images, but when I look closer they are often on other domain and those other domains are getting my traffic.
Google is not doing a good job of attributing images to their creator - even if they have a copyright mark on them. Pop-up infringers can grab them and get good results in the image results almost instantly.
I fight this by filing DMCA complaints every week. Over time I have filed hundreds of DMCA complaints. Dozens of DMCA complaints have been filed for some of my images, for the same search queries on dozens of different sites. If you scroll down to the bottom of the image search you will see Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint,....... for all of the complaints that I have filed.
Lots of this infringement is hosted on blogspot sites. Most of the infringers are monetize by Adsense.
Doing a few image queries and filing DMCA complaints is now part of our routine weekly duties. Plus we often drop what we are doing at other times because we see a drop in traffic on important pages, and damn that is coming from weasels stealing our images.
-
Hi Rob
forgot to mention that - analytics was the first thing I checked and is working fine. That's why I checked search console.
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
I know you said there have been no serious technical changes in the last couple months, but is it possible the UA Tracking Code (GA) has been removed? We had a client that underwent a similar decrease in traffic without any noticeable ranking changes, and it turns out their web developer had removed the tracking code.
Have the metrics been in consistent freefall (or plateaued out) since you noticed the decrease?
Let me know,
Rob
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
-
Confused about repeated occurences of URL/essayorg/topic/ showing up as 404 errors in our site logs
Working on a Wordpress website, https://thedoctorwithin.comScanning the site’s 404 errors, I’m seeing a lot of searches for URL/essayorg/topic, coming from Bingbot, as well as other spiders (Google, OpensiteExlorer). We get at least 200 of these irrelevant requests per week. Seems like each topic that follows /essayorg/ is unique. Some include typos: /dissitation/Haven't done a verification to make sure the spiders are who they say they are, yet.Almost seems like there are many links ‘in the wild’ intended for Essay.Org that are being directed towards the site I’m working on.I've considered redirecting any requests for URL/essayorg/ to our sitemap… figuring that might encourage further spidering of actual site content. Is redirection to our sitemap xml file a good idea, or might doing so have unintended consequences? Interested in suggestions about why this might be occurring. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | linkjuiced0 -
Images on sub domain fed from CDN
I have a client that uses a CDN to fill images, from a sub domain ( images.domain.com). We've made sure that the sub domain itself is not blocked. We've added a robots.txt file, we're creating an image sitemap file & we've verified ownership of the domain within GWT. Yet, any crawler that I use only see's the first page of the sub domain (which is .html) but none of the subsequent URL's which are all .jpeg. Is there something simple I'm missing here?
Technical SEO | | TammyWood0 -
Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?
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.
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson1 -
Subdomain/subfolder question
Hi community, Let's say I have a men's/women's clothing website. Would it be better to do clothing.com/mens and clothing.com/womens OR mens.clothing.com and womens.clothing.com? I understand Moz's stance on blogs that it should be clothing.com/blog, but wanted to ask for this different circumstance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Moving from www.domain.com/nameofblog to www.domain.com/blog
Describe your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer I have had my blog located at www.legacytravel.com/ramblings for a while. I now believe that, from an SEO perspective, it would be preferable to move it to www.legacytravel.com/blog. So, I want to be able to not lose any links (few though they may be) with the move. I believe I would need to do a 301 redirect in the htaccess file of www.legacytravel.com that will tell anyone who comes knocking on the door of www.legacytravel.com/ramblings/blah blah blah that now what they want is at www.legacytravel.com/blog/blah blah blah Is that correct? What would the entry look like in the htaccess? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | cathibanks0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Huge drop in ranking, but only for a single search term
Hello All, We've just noticed a huge drop in ranking for one of our key search terms. On January 9th we dropped from page 1 (Google UK) to page 7 - out of the top 50 completely! Nothing has changed on the page for a number of months, and rankings for other search terms seem unaffected. Has anyone else been affected recently in a similar manor? Sorry if this sounds a little vague - but we're struggling to understand how this might have happened. It seems very odd that only this particular search term would be affected so dramatically. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Safelincs0 -
Duplicate Homepage: www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/default.aspx
Hi, I have a question regarding our client's site, http://www.outsolve-hr.com/ on ASP.net. Google has indexed both www.outsolve-hr.com/ and www.outsolve-hr.com/default.aspx creating a duplicate content issue. We have added
Technical SEO | | flarson
to the default.aspx page. Now, because www.outsolve-hr.com/ and www.outsolve-hr.com/default.aspx are the same page on the actual backend the code is on the http://www.outsolve-hr.com/ when I view the code from the page loaded in a brower. Is this a problem? Will Google penalize the site for having the rel=canonical on the actual homepage...the canonical url. We cannot do a 301 redirect from www.outsolve-hr.com/default.aspx to www.outsolve-hr.com/ because this causes an infinite loop because on the backend they are the same page. So my question is two-fold: Will Google penalize the site for having the rel=canonical on the actual homepage...the canonical url. Is the rel="canonical" the best solution to fix the duplicate homepage issue on ASP. And lastly, if Google has not indexed duplicate pages, such as https://www.outsolve-hr.com/DEFAULT.aspx, is it a problem that they exist? Thanks in advance for your knowledge and assistance. Amy0