Our direct traffic dropped 50% in October. Is anyone else seeing a drop in direct traffic in October in G4? It hasn't shifted to another source or unassigned it's just gone. Has anyone else experienced this and what might be the reasons?

@AmritDubey thanks! it's definitely not a google rank issue. When we turn cookie banner on ...50% or higher drop in traffic. When it's off back to normal. So my question is what would the cookie opt out banner be doing to cause this? We only had about 10% opt out of cookies

@webduh can you explain?

We've had 50% drop in Google and Direct traffic post June Google update. Why would direct suddenly plummet as well? Could it be something with Google tag manager or our new cookie policy and cookie management system? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am a disabled person and trying to figure out what is going on with our site

I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO?

The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content

This might not be exactly what you are looking for but here is what I've done to get noticed. At my company we aren't trying to do get guest blogging opportunities but have high quality people guest blog for us. For us we are are a ninche specialized market and the people who are experts and influence don't blog and told us no no no when we approached them to guest blog.

But when we asked for an interview..it changed everything. So we asked to do an interview over email. A simple INTERVIEW REQUEST in subject line did wonders. But remember if you are asking for an interview never send form email. It must be personal and show you know subject.

I completely agree and as a general rule I only focus alot of energy and time on meta description if a keyword ranking has shown a significant increase in ranking but has hit a wall. Say you have gone from 45-19 in Google but the extra links and social media don't seem to be helping. Then it's time to really focus on Title Tag and Meta description because the click through rate is going to really help you get that last mile to get on page one

I see your point, Back Burner.

I honestly think my response is constructive.   I stated my opinion and followed it up with my recommendations.  It's not like I called the guy names and didn't offer help.

sigh

First, short-term changes aren't something to worry about.  Google could be reevaluating your site, topic, and niche to see where you should fit in.  It does this with high ranking pages.   It happens. Relax.

Second, deleting pages that Google doesn't know about isn't going to affect your rankings.  Especially if they were relatively useless pages. You might want to block these pages in robots.txt or with a htaccess password so it definitely isn't an issue in the future.

Third, why did you buy a URL to simply forward it over to a specific internal page?  That looks suspicious. It's obvious you purchased the URL in order to boost your rankings for that keyword.  If Google isn't on to you already, it will be soon.  A better solution would be using the URL to build a small micro site (10-12 pages) about the topic, make the micro site rank, then link out from the micro site (1-4 links) to the specific pages on your main site.

This might not be exactly what you are looking for but here is what I've done to get noticed. At my company we aren't trying to do get guest blogging opportunities but have high quality people guest blog for us. For us we are are a ninche specialized market and the people who are experts and influence don't blog and told us no no no when we approached them to guest blog.

But when we asked for an interview..it changed everything. So we asked to do an interview over email. A simple INTERVIEW REQUEST in subject line did wonders. But remember if you are asking for an interview never send form email. It must be personal and show you know subject.

sigh

First, short-term changes aren't something to worry about.  Google could be reevaluating your site, topic, and niche to see where you should fit in.  It does this with high ranking pages.   It happens. Relax.

Second, deleting pages that Google doesn't know about isn't going to affect your rankings.  Especially if they were relatively useless pages. You might want to block these pages in robots.txt or with a htaccess password so it definitely isn't an issue in the future.

Third, why did you buy a URL to simply forward it over to a specific internal page?  That looks suspicious. It's obvious you purchased the URL in order to boost your rankings for that keyword.  If Google isn't on to you already, it will be soon.  A better solution would be using the URL to build a small micro site (10-12 pages) about the topic, make the micro site rank, then link out from the micro site (1-4 links) to the specific pages on your main site.

Absolutely a bad idea.  You should be using that h1 tag to promote the current page only, not the same keywords over and over.

Our direct traffic dropped 50% in October. Is anyone else seeing a drop in direct traffic in October in G4? It hasn't shifted to another source or unassigned it's just gone. Has anyone else experienced this and what might be the reasons?

I can't tell you what the best approach is for you.  For me, I look for domination of a niche when it comes to local search.  The above posting is how I do it, but it might not be the best method for you.  I haven't had success with simply redirecting a domain name.  I have had great success with the method I've mentioned above - linking from the keyword domain to a page on my main site with the exact keyword phrase after the keyword domain has been established in Google.  In fact, what I often see is the #1 ranking for the keyword domain (exact match keyword) and a #2 or #3 ranking for the page I link to from the keyword domain on my main site.

Hope that makes sense. lol.

Jim, this just goes to show that there's no sense in freaking out over a change in rankings based on 3 days' time.  I can't even count the number of times I've seen a site drop after link building - only to come back to the same place or a higher placement a week later.  This is typical and almost expected when I'm doing SEO.   As long as you're not doing anything blackhat your site will be just fine.  There's no way Google is going to single your tiny site out among billions of others.

In the future, give your site a minimum of 2 weeks.  I think of it like this:

I do solid SEO. No blackhat. No crap.  Because I do solid work I should be rewarded by Google and never penalized.  With that in mind, if my site starts moving around in Google I know its a GOOD thing because it means Google is reevaluating my site.  I also know that because I only do good work a reevaluation by Google is always going to show me in a favorable light.  I want to see fluctuations in my rankings. It can only mean good things for me.

I completely agree and as a general rule I only focus alot of energy and time on meta description if a keyword ranking has shown a significant increase in ranking but has hit a wall. Say you have gone from 45-19 in Google but the extra links and social media don't seem to be helping. Then it's time to really focus on Title Tag and Meta description because the click through rate is going to really help you get that last mile to get on page one

I honestly think my response is constructive.   I stated my opinion and followed it up with my recommendations.  It's not like I called the guy names and didn't offer help.