Organic search traffic down 60% since 8/1/18\. What now?
-
I have a small health & fitness blog, and my Google search traffic suddenly dropped 60% around August 1 (I've attempted to link an image). My rank has dropped for 86 keywords. I have no manual penalty, so I'm guessing I was affected by the algorithm change.
My technical skills are VERY limited. I've tried to find answers on my own, but every time I try to "fix" something, I only seem to make it worse. I do seem to have some structural/performance issues with my site (e.g., lots of 404 errors from uninstalled plugins and unwanted permalinks). I asked my server for assistance (I used managed Wordpress hosting), and they said they couldn't help.
As you can imagine, this is quite devastating, and I have no clue where to go from here. I don't know if I'm allowed to link to my site here, but it's mommyrunsit dot com. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Sharon
-
how to check spamming backlinks for website light motion APK
-
If your organic traffic substantially decreases, this could be because of an algorithm update or because the business is possibly incurring a manual or an algorithm penalty?
-
Yes, same happened to my websites https://www.healthpaper.org and https://www.scienceworld.in. these site are in Hindi language. I need to know how to recover and grow web traffic.
-
Unfortunately, I think the "not a penalty" line is sometimes a bit of a cop-out on Google's part -- anything that moves a bunch of sites up, is naturally going to move a bunch of other sites down. Even if those sites have technically done nothing wrong, it sure feels like to them like they're being penalized. I also don't like that Google claims they're rewarding good behavior, but then won't really tell us what that good behavior is. If it's genuinely good behavior, give us some guidelines (we're not asking for chunks of code from the algorithm).
I'm comparing a case right now where there are two sites in the same industry, both seem decent, but one got a huge boost on 8/1 and one took a big hit. Hoping to glean some insights, but there's just a ton of speculation at the moment.
-
Dr. Meyers,
Thank you so much for your response. It is tremendously helpful, and I appreciate the actionable items that I can address right away. I am trying not to freak out, but honestly a 60% drop in organic traffic is devastating to a small site like mine,
You may find this helpful as you collect data: I've been studying my ranking for various search terms.. One post in particular has been on page 1 of Google for 3.5 years, and it dropped down to around #10+ overnight. Some of the posts that have replaced mine in the top spots were written by bloggers who I know, all of whom are comparable to me in style and reach, and none of whom are either more or less authoritative than me. Their posts have been there all along but just ranked lower than mine.
I've heard the theory that Google is not necessarily penalizing content, but rather they are giving a boost to deserving content that has previously been unrecognized. This makes sense, but it also kind of stinks.
Thanks again for your help. I'll keep my eye out for new info about the algo update.
Sharon
-
I've studied the August 1st update as much or more than most, and let me first be brutally honest and say that we're still at a pretty early stage of speculation. Until we have clear recovery cases, we're all just trying to tell a story from the anecdotal data. There are a lot of plausible theories, but we can't give you clear answers other than to confirm that the update was large and the health and fitness vertical definitely seemed to be disproportionately impacted.
The E-A-T theory is plausible, from what I've seen, but it leaves a lot left to be explained. We don't know what signals Google uses for Expertise/Authority/Trust -- are they on-page signals, link-based signals, citation-based signals... ? Probably a combination, and some of those are a lot easier to control than others.
Looking briefly at your site, here's what I might try if I were you. Again, this is educated guesswork at best:
(1) Your author name links go to pages that show all articles by that author. I know this is a common practice, but I would consider linking those to a full bio page for each author, with credentials. The on-page E-A-T signals probably aren't the whole picture Google uses, but they're the easiest to control. Currently, these pages also lead to more, similar pages (page 2, 3, etc.), which could look thin, but your rel=prev/next tags seem to be properly formatted. I'm more concerned that Google isn't seeing any information about the authors on those immediately linked author pages (other than a very short blurb).
(2) I know this can be a dicey issue online (especially if you're trying to protect anonymity to some degree), but I'd strongly recommend using your full name, properly capitalized. The use of just "sharon," "victor," etc. could make it harder for Google to connect you to third-party mentions and citations, unless those sites link directly to your bio pages. I strongly suspect Gogole is using some link/citation signals to establish E-A-T. it's a bit like having a consistent business name and address in local search -- you need to make it easy for Google to connect your name to mentions of you.
You do have some odd links to your site that almost look like they're tied to a link network, but I'm having trouble finding some of them manually (they're coming up in Link Explorer reports). If you've got any link profile problems, I'd consider cleaning those up ASAP. If Google is pushing hard and require more proof of expertise in your link profile, that's going to be a lot harder battle. There's no easy fix for that, other than continuing to try to build credibility. Again, I think the full-name issue might help here, but it's only one small piece of the puzzle.
Sorry you've been affected by this -- we're seeing a lot of small health/fitness blogs getting hit, and many seem to be decent quality, independent blogs by well-meaning people.
-
Thanks, GR. I'm trying not to despair, but ugh. I'll read those posts - thanks so much.
Sharon
-
Hi Roni,
sorry to hear that you were hit by this god damn update.Im writing to send you good wishes and hope. Also to sum up and add two other studies about the algorithm. Read them full and try to understand what's the issue in your site:
Analysis and Findings From The August 1, 2018 Google Algorithm Update – A Massive Core Ranking Update - GSQi
Google's August 1st Core Update: Week 1 - Moz Blog
Google’s August algorithm update strengthens as roll-out continues - Sistrix
The August 1, 2018 Google Update strongly affected YMYL sites - Marie HaynesBest luck!
GR -
Thank you so much. I'll read those articles and see if I can figure anything out.
I would appreciate any suggestions. My site is https://www.mommyrunsit.com/
Sharon
-
Hello, Sharon,
I'm so sorry to hear your blog was strongly affected by the August 1st update. From what I've read, health/fitness is one of the categories which has been most obviously impacted.
We are still in the early days of speculating about which signals Google is focusing on.
Here is Dr. Pete's post detailing what Moz has seen happen with this update:
https://moz.com/blog/googles-august-1st-core-update-week-1
Marie Haynes also wrote a blog post offering a theory that Google's focus may be E-A-T signals (expertise, authoritativeness, and trust), which I recommend that you read if you haven't already, bearing in mind, of course, that this is only a theory: https://www.mariehaynes.com/the-august-1-2018-google-update-strongly-affected-ymyl-sites/ She offers some suggestions for things you might analyze and attempt for your website.
I hope these at least offer some information, and if you wish to share your domain name here, perhaps our community can make some specific suggestions even though no one but some folks at Google can be totally sure what was targeted and how a site can attempt to recover.
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
-
Does anyone have a good resource for seeing SERP feature/presentation change Year-Over-Year?
Moz only tracks general SERP feature changes for the last 30 days.
Reporting & Analytics | | homedepot0 -
Tracked Event for Button Now I would I like to know that Customer reached to thank you page?
Hello Expert, For my ecommerce site I am tracking "Retrieve My Basket" button as event tracking. Now I want to know after retrieving basket did my customer reached to thank you page? So how should I track such goal? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dsouzac0 -
Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
Hi everyone, Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended. For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration. At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving. Some possible causes include; Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it? Thank you very much for your input in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
20% Dip in Traffic. What could be happening?
Hello Dear Community Yesterday I had a sudden drop in visits - screenshot attached. It shows how yesterday Friday 17/10 has had a dip in visits vs Friday 10/10 (1 week ago). I have an authority blog in Italy with over 90k monthly visits. I do now black-hat SEO stuff, and my content is rich. Organic traffic grew 85% y-o-y and I was actually on a nice, slow growth trend, but now, 20% dip. The things I did before all this happened, and which could have had an impact (but I'm not sure about) are: Configured Max CDN and W3 Total Cache (before I was just using SiteGround's Super Cacher plugin and that's it). So now my site is faster by a lot although I'm having issues like I mention in point 2. I had to clear the cache at least a hundred times as I was configuring Optin Monster for lead generation I changed my Google Analytics code from the old version to the new version (universal) Besides this I check my best keywords in RankTracker and it looks like nothing happened to my rankings. Yet a few of my most popular posts which gets roughly the same amount of visits everyday for the past few months, had a dip of 30% more or less. I also added a screenshot of my Webmaster tool dashboard. Everything is ok and there are no messages. Also yesterday was not a national holiday in my country (Italy) so everything should have been normal. Please share with me your thoughts about this. What else should I check to get an idea? What do you think it could be? Thank you! Andrea 2vII81q yXn6zBD
Reporting & Analytics | | Andrew_IT0 -
Organic impression limit. Has anyone seen this before or could give some insight?
Hey, I've been trying to grow my sites organic traffic but its like I've hit an organic cap on impressions. The site is about 4 months old and this period that I hit its limit I did not do any social shares or upload any new content. But is this normal? The site did get a Facebook like on the 26th of August. 3tzF2Cp
Reporting & Analytics | | onlinegusto0 -
Google Analytics - Organic Search Traffic & Queries -What caused the huge difference?
Our website traffic dropped a little bit during the last month, but it's getting better now, almost the same with previous period. But our conversion rate dropped by 50% for the last three weeks. What could cause this huge drop in conversion rate? In Google Analytics, I compared the Organic Search Traffic with previous period, the result is similar. But the Search Engine Optimization ->Queries shows that the clicks for last month is almost zero. What could be the cause of this huge differnce? e9sJNwD.png k4M8Fa5.png
Reporting & Analytics | | joony0 -
Finding organic keywords driving traffic
Is there any way to know which organic keywords are driving traffic to my landing pages in Google analytics ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050 -
Abnormal Spike in Traffic- Ddos or what?
We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?
Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh590