Drop in traffic at start of December 2014
-
Hello!
I've noticed a drop in organic Google traffic to our ecommerce site. The drop started on the 1st December 2014. The difference compared with last year is around -25%.
I've taken a look at landing pages for the organic Google traffic:
Homepage: -40%
Product pages: -31%
Category pages: -7%
Blog pages: -7%On the 1st December our site was down for a few hours in the early morning for some scheduled maintenance. I got a couple of emails from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that there was an "Increase in server errors" and "Googlebot can't access your site". Once the site maintenance was complete there haven't been any further emails from Google about this. I doubt the site being down is the cause of the drop in traffic.
I suspect it may have been caused by the latest Penguin updates around the end of November 2014. Can anyone advise if this sounds like it is the cause, and why the homepage and products pages have been hit so severely?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
-
Many thanks Dirk, looks like you've found the problem! Much appreciated!
-
Dave,
While checking your site, it seems that the tracking code is not always loaded - so probably it's more a technical glitch after the maintenance. Not clear what is causing it - when you install the tag assistant plugin you will see yourself. Seems to happen on first visit.
When it's not loaded your source (homepage) looks like this:
Dirk
-
Hi Dave,
How is overall traffic - did you see the same traffic drop. Sometimes Google traffic is reported as referrer traffic (for one of the sites I manage which is largely dependant on image search almost all google traffic is reported as referrer rather than search traffic)
I noticed that you're using a (very) old version of the GA tracker - consider updating to the last version (universal). If I check the page with the Tag Assistant plugin I get 3 warnings (sync version / code outside head / depreciated method get_tracker)
Dirk
-
Thanks for the replies everyone! I've had a closer look at our backlinks and there a few low quality ones in there, but the vast majority seem okay to me.
One thing I have noticed while digging about in more depth in WMT is that there is not a noticeable decline in clicks or impressions within the "Search Queries" section. Does this suggest there is an issue with how our GA is recording the visits from organic?
The domain name is www.edinburghbicycle.com.
-
Dave,
I doubt that the downtime (especially because it has been only a few hours) has anything to do with the drop in traffic. In my experience, even an unscheduled downtime of 24hr doesn't have any impact on SEO traffic.
If you are hit by Penguin, check your low quality links in Google Webmastertools, and try to contact the sites to eliminate the links to your site (if the link quality is very low, almost impossible to get these links removed). For the ones that do not answer, disavow the links.
Do the same for low quality links you can find using other tools: ahrefs.com, majesticseo.com, opensiteexplorer.com.
Check the profile of Marie Haynes - she has quite some experience on link removal and unnatural links & has written some interesting stuff about it http://moz.com/community/users/308135 - check the posts at the bottom of her profile.
Dirk
-
Are you able to share the domain name? This can at least give us some more insight as to what may have occurred.
-
Hi Laura,
It was indeed the timing that made me suspect Penguin! Our backlink profile could be better. Is there a good way of remedying this sort of backlink issue?
The maintenance was just an update to the web server hardware and OS, and I'm not aware of any new competitors, so I suspect it is Penguin that is causing the drop in traffic.
-
Is timing the only thing that makes you suspect Penguin is the cause of the drop in traffic? What does your backlink profile look like? Are there tons of spammy links to your site? If so, then you may be right about Penguin.
It's impossible to say what caused the drop based solely on the information you've provided. I highly doubt that a few hours of downtime had anything to do with your drop in traffic.
Other questions to consider:
- Have you made any significant changes to your website within the last three months? (What kind of maintenance was actually performed on the site?)
- Are there any new competitors pushing you out of the SERPs?
-
Could it also be part of the "penguin double take" or "roll back" as seen here- http://algoroo.com/ ?
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
-
What would cause a major drop in ranking for (images) on both desk top and mobile? Web rankings are holding OK?
Sometime between Nov 8th and Nov 11th are rankings on Google for images dropped substantially. Our web rankings are holding OK. any idea!
Technical SEO | | OCFurniture0 -
Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products. The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content. Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
Ranking dropped after domain change
Dear Moz Community, first of all excuse my bad english, i am from europe and my english is not the best 😉
Technical SEO | | domiji
I use Moz Analytics for several days and try to figure out why our "main keyword" totally dropped after our domain change. We started this year with a new company name and a new domain. Our old domain was dp-hochzeitsfotograf.de and the main keyword we try to rank for was "hochzeitsfotograf" which means "wedding photographer" here in Germany. Last summer we reached position 1 and short before our domain change we still ranked on position 6. We register the domain change in google webmaster tools and redirect all urls via 301 redirect to the new domain. Our new domain name is yourheyday.de and all rankings adopted pretty good except our main keyword (now position 62) which could break our neck the next few month. I would be so so happy and really appreciate if anyone of you have an advise for us. Thanks and many greetings from europe
Dominik0 -
June 7th, 2013 Structured Data Drop
On June 7th, 2013 our structured data (as reported in GWT) dropped from ~61M items on ~7M pages to ~13.5M items on ~1.5M pages. Since that time those numbers have continued to fall. We made no code changes during this time. I've searched around the web and found a few people pointing to a similar June 7th, 2013 drop in reported structured data. Can anyone offer any insight beyond speculation? Outside of the June 7th date, what can cause such a dramatic drop in structured data? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Sudden drop in rank and OSE index
I had improved the rank of chairmats.net from page 3 to top of page 2 in Google over the course of a few weeks using on-page, content building, and "low-hanging fruit" link building. All the sudden in the last 2 weeks, we have dropped to 22nd, have dropped out of the OSE index (chairmats.net doesn't show up, but some old links to www.chairmats.net show up), and PA is now 1. DA wasn't high before but also dropped a point. I don't know why the sudden shun (I read about an exact keyword match for low quality websites update with Google recently, but this site has been around for awhile, and is a large supplier of chair mats.) I'm working on getting quality links, it seems a little tougher for a supplier company like this. Any suggestions on recovering?
Technical SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Severe Drops in Google UK rankings
Hi Guys, I'm Chris - SEO Noob & appointed website man @ www.customdesignedcable.co.uk I signed up to SEO moz at the end of February and i have slowly but surely been trying to implement the on-page optimisation suggestions with my selected keywords against the appropriate pages. Since i have done this, our pages are still ranking but no where near what they were at before. Out of 70 keywords, we've gone from at least 60+ pages on the first page down to 20+ and the number in the top three has dropped from 55 to 33. Obviously i'm no seo guru far far from it but all of the changes that have been suggested i have adhered to and the result is the exact opposite of what i was hoping for and expecting. I'm after some advice as to how to use seomoz to target my keywords to google primarily to get these page rankings back. Should i just upload backup copies of the site? How would you suggest that i move forward to try and achieve at least similar rankings to what i had previously? Any help is much appreciated as most of our enquiries come from the internet and it has almost completely dried up these last couple of months. Thanks Guys! Chris. P.S. Would redesigning the site look, layout and feel with the same content negatively affect seo? Also, as a completely separate question, how come sites with content that is a lot worse than ours rank higher for the same keywords as ours? Thanks Again
Technical SEO | | Chris_CDC0 -
Switching to another CMS with different permalink structure, how not to lose organic traffic and Google rankings? Urgent Please!
One of my customers is in online jewellery sales business and they are going to change their CMS; the problem is there is no co-relation between URL permalink structure of the current CMS and the new one. What should we do so that we don’t lose our current organic traffic (also Google rankings) coming from indexed URLs in Google due to permalink structure change ? Typical example: Current URL: http://www.abc.com/pirlanta-nedir,AR-3.html The new URL is going to look like this: http://www.abc.com/tek-tas-pirlanta-ar-4.html
Technical SEO | | merkal20050