Drop in Organic Traffic for Homepage and Branded terms but Steady in Rankings and According to WMT.
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I am stumped. I have been researching for over two days now. Our homepage organic traffic YoY is down approx. 25%. However, rank has not changed according to Conductor, Bing and Google WMT. Impressions have gone up according to both search engines and we rank now for more keywords in top 3 than we did last year.
Both WMTs' present a pretty healthy picture. No insignificant indexing issues, Error URLs & blocked resources are down, daily page crawls are higher than ever, etc.
I drilled into Google Analytics from a few different view points. The closest I got to an answer was I saw huge out-liars YoY in browsers and browser versions. We saw significant differences in organic traffic YoY from IE 11, 9 ,10, 8 and 7. Android Browser 31, 32 and Safari 6 and 7. I tested our homepage and search results in all of these, and found no issues. Yet, GA reports 50K+ differences YoY.
My only thought is it is perhaps a GA attribution error? And/or browsers defaulting organic traffic to direct or other? Yet, our direct traffic is up but does not correlate with as much as we are down. Any tips on where to look next would be extremely helpful!
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Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the response! After performing several crawls for tracking code, we did find numerous duplicate URLs existing with tracking codes. As of September, they started showing up in GA with low traffic, but by end of October, it was evident that they were splitting organic traffic from root url.
We are in process now of cleaning up. We are hoping this will resolve it. However, we think the damage might have been slightly done and we may have to kiss some panda butt to get back into good favor. We are just now starting to see drops in page rank due to this.
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Hi Tim! Sounds like Dirk and Martijn need a bit more information. Help them out?
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Additional idea that I couldn't phrase the right way yesterday, would you happen to still have data on the CTRs for last year versus this year to make sure that this is also still the same. What I'm thinking is that your position is still the same but that for example the number of ads went up.
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Comparing YoY & drilling down to browser version doesn't really make much sense - example IE 8 had a marketshare of 4.96% in Sept. 2014 - and had a share of 2.19% in Sept. 2015. Same for Safari - current version is 9.0 - and updates are semi-automatic so 7 & 8 became almost extinct.
Use Screaming Frog to check if the tracking code is still present on all pages - and use the Chrome Analytics plugin to check if the tag is sending data.
The fact that your ranking is equal doesn't say much - it could be that for your main keyword Google is showing a special format (check the possibilities in this post from dr. Pete). If this is the case - even when keeping your position, your click rate and traffic will drop dramatically.
If you take a shorter time frame - did you saw a specific drop in the past weeks? Or is the drop only when comparing YoY?
Dirk
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Hi Tim,
How is the rest of your traffic looking for organic, is it declining for other pages or sub folders as well? I've never seen Google Analytics not attributing the right traffic to the right pages so I doubt that could be the case.
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