Drop of traffic after massive technical issue
-
Hello,
since August i am working on a customers website on WordPress who has a costume made theme, back in October after updating some plugins we had a massive breakdown and the website went up and down and had technical issues for over a month and traffic was completely gone for a while, since we have dropped to about 40% of the monthly traffic the website was getting prior, i was waiting to see if the website will recover since we were getting some traffic and are ranking but that did not happen,is there a way to tell if there are any code issues or anything that can cause that drop? moz crawler only indicates normal meta description errors but nothing in the code, changing the theme would probably be best solution as a popular premade theme would give a definite answer but that is not possible.
-
so search in google "site:mydomain.com search"?
i am using google search console for a while and today i fetched as Google and requested to be reindexed, i got 504 404 errors but most of them were fixed or supposed to be fixed for a while now.
no smartphone errors, only for desktop. i did just noticed i got 45 mobile usability errors. and no manual actions.
the mobile website is useable and looks decent but pretty bad to operate, most of our traffic is from mobile....
that might be the problem? -
See what Google thinks with the site:yourdomain.com search. This will give you all the data they have on your site. Look for errors, missing content and duplicate content. I think that would be a good start. Also use Google Search Console to check for index issues, crawl issues and any manual actions. If a site is offline for a while it will be delisted, a big site is delisted after a few minutes, in my experience the traffic returns after 1 or 2 weeks. To make it more complex there seems to have been a few changes to Google results over the past weeks, may be due to the 'mobile first' index.
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
-
Can Segment capture organic traffic? If so is it more reliable than Google Analytics?
Hi mozzers, We just learned that our standard GA hasn't been as reliable as we hoped so and we are trying to find other ways to track organic sessions. Which solution would you consider? Is Segment one of them? If so, is it more reliable than Google Analytics? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ty19861 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
Oh Japanese Character and 404 issue
This one has me stumped, so I really hope someone can help. I am assisting a company who are having 404 errors on certain japanese pages of their site. I have checked in web master tools and analytics, can see the 404, but have no idea where it is coming from. I am starting to think it may be a encoding issue of some sort. Just wondered if anyone has come across this before? Site uses site finity. What is happening is reader is going to page domain.com/ja/blog/article then coming to this page /404?aspxerrorpath=/Sitefinity/WebsiteTemplates/App_themes/"website"/fonts/open sans regular Really odd - as we cannot re-create this 404 I don't know how they are getting to it? Also in Analytics some of the pages that are written in japanese that are giving 404's look like this C3%A3%E2%80%9A%C2%BD%C3%A3%C6%92%C2%AA%C3%A3%C6%92%C2%A5%C3%A3%C6%92%C2%BC%C3%A3%E2%80%9A%C2%B7%C3%A3%C6%92%C2%A7%C3%A3%C6%92%C2%B394.8%C3%A3%C2%81%C2%AE%C3%A5%C2%AF%C2%BE%C3%A8%C2%B1%C2%A1/%C3%A9%C2%A1%C2%A7%C3%A5%C2%AE%C2%A2%C3%A3%E2%80%9A%C2%B0%C3%A3%C6%92%C2%AB%C3%A3%C6%92%C2%BC%C3%A3%C6%92%E2%80%94%C3%A6%C2%AF%C5%BD%C3%A3%C2%81%C2%AE94.8 Any help much appreciated
Reporting & Analytics | | Kelly33300 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Strange Traffic Spike In Google Analytics
Over the last two days I have seen a huge spike in the pageviews to my site www.learnbonds.com. Up to this point my average page views per visit has been less than 2. For the last couple of days it has jumped to 5 but the average time on the site has not increased. Upon further investigation under the browser and OS page of google analytics I found that traffic coming from internet explorer and IE with Chrome Frame is reporting 10+ pageviews per visit. Below is a screenshot. Any insight into what might be causing this and how to fix it that the community can provide would be appreciated. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | davidwaring
DaveZUaQWJd.png?1?21800 -
Sudden dramatic drop in "some but not all" keyphrase rankings for client, 3 weeks ago
I noticed recently that 4 of my keyphrases which ranked on page one, and were climbing 3 weeks ago, have suddenly dropped to > 50. What could have happened? I did find an issue with my sitemap (yoast generated), but why would that suddenly change? And even more importantly, how do I fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | chill9860 -
Having Issue with Site Search in Analytics
Hi Mozzers, We launched a website in October 2012 and have added in the settings(Google analytics) of that profile "Do Track Site Search" since we have a search box on the website. The site search report worked for 10 days and it was over(from end of december till beginning of January 2013). Since then I have been trying to understand this issue. I have added all the query search terms possible, but still not showing any signs of life. At this point I am not sure what to do? Some Help would be appreciated! Search URL= subdomain.example.com**/search/node/**.... Thanks! z93cGUZ.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Direct Traffic Source?
Hi all, Having some trouble figuring out a metric I'm dissecting. We have a large amount of traffic going to deep pages and I'm looking at the traffic source and an alarming amount are coming as Direct traffic. The thing is this can't type in or bookmarked traffic, so what else could it be? We have numbers like 80% and 60% for direct traffic, which judging by our previous efforts, that just can't right. Anyone can figure out what I may be missing out? Deeper pages should usually not get as much Direct traffic, so what can it be?
Reporting & Analytics | | William.Lau0