Organic Traffic Down March-April 2016
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Hello MOZ Community!
I have been scouring the web to try and assess what may be responsible for our sites traffic decline which fell off quite suddenly between March and April of this year. While I have heard of two specific things that may have impacted us:
- The Mobile-Friendly update (April 2016)
- Phantom Update (May 2016)
I would like to share what we have tried to uncover ourselves, and would welcome your thoughts/feedback on what may have happened, thoughts on repairing the rank damage, and in general.
In May we noticed a large cooling off of our organic searches from Google, the largest a >30% occured in June, but on average we're seeing a trend of 23% less visitors from organic search than only months prior. Paired with this was a decrease in overall visibility, like a number of pages were struck from indexing.
- The number of URLs ranked in the Top 100 listings dropped by ~ 32% at the beginning of April
- We review our visibility with SISTRIX's Visibility Index tool, which showed a visibility plummet of almost 50% between mid-March and mid-April
- Traffic, until towards the end of July, early August has remained low and now only really returning to normal levels in the past few days.
All that said, we're puzzled by what would cause such a sharp decline in visibility > organic search. Regarding the known/unknown Google Updates, while our primary site is responsive, we do have a number of old help/support pages that are not responsive – So that is one theory, but I'd appreciate any thoughts or insights you have, or to know if anyone else experienced a drop within the same timeframe.
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It is highly unlikely that responsiveness would impact your search rankings at such a high percentage. Unfortunately, without knowing much more about your site it would be hard to look into it. Feel free to PM me more info and Id be happy to take a look.
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