Help. Recently my organic traffic has dropped 40%. Any advice / ideas?
-
Lately my organic traffic has dropped significantly as well as my adsense revenue. The moz report says, for example, my traffic is down 40%, but I a still #1 for that keyword.
Also, in the last week, suddenly my number of indexed pages doubled. We had done some page rewriting and maybe messed that up. We've fixed that though. Webmaster tools is still picking up all of our old pages and the new ones.
Background:
- We recently launched our new responsive website in March.
- March income was about the same as February.
- April dropped off suddenly (maybe late march - no sure)
- When we changed site, we did do 301's for all the old pages to the new ones
Any ideas or advice as to why my traffic and revenue has dropped off so sharply? Never submitted questions before - not sure if I am supposed to put urls here so if you just google Home Spelling Words - that's my website. Thanks everyone!!!
-
Kimberly
Here's a little more background straight from Google on "duplicate content" - http://www.thesempost.com/duplicate-content-penalty-exception/
-
Kimberly
You're welcome. To clarify, there is no duplicate content penalty for this. It just means Google can't crawl your site as efficiently and also might not pass link value (page authority) to all the pages as strongly as they might otherwise.
This article is pretty advanced, but explains the idea of crawl optimization really well.
-
I think this is the problem! I checked and found that Google thinks I have double the pages now. Maybe they are thinking I have duplicate content. I will fix this asap. THANK YOU!!!
"Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links,"
-
I agree, Easter weekend was quiet for us as well. Starting to pick up again now though.
-
Hi Kimberly
I don't think Google did anything to purposely hurt the site. The AdWords and Organic search depts are really huge in themselves, and I don't think there is much cross-conversation there. What sort of quality scores are you getting from AdWords for your pages? Are they good?
Bounce rate is a weird metric. A lower bounce rate could be bad too, because users are maybe not easily finding what they want on the landing page and are forced to click around.
Definitely play with the ads. Keep specific notes about what you change and when. And keep in mind, it may take some time (weeks) to reflect in any ranking change.
You should also make a proper 404 page in the template/design of your site - it's just the default server message. These sort of things help show Google you are a responsible site owner
Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links
-
Thanks. That's good information. I have to say, I really dislike the huge ad on the right. I kept getting emails from Google saying that I don't have enough ads and that they should be bigger. So, I gave in and put bigger ads and three per page as they suggested.
I did actually move the main ad down a bit below copy, which it used to be right up top before any copy. I also removed an anchored ad in mobile that sat at the bottom of the page no matter what.
Is it possible that Google asked me to do something (more and bigger ads) and then punished me for it?
My bounce rate is lower than it has ever been so I don't think users are put off. I'm sure some of my problem is ad blockers and lower click through on mobile ads as mobile traffic increases - but that is not my immediate problem - that's a long slow decline of income.
I think I will play with the ads and also see about the new information on adsense about how much ad is visible as I am sure that will have an impact on future revenue too.
-
I agree. I checked and found that I got much less traffic than last year though. Thanks for answering! My traffic really dies on holidays.
-
My initial thought is "ads above the fold". It's hard to tell in Archive.org's archive of your old design, but it looks like ad space increased a lot on the new site? You have the block on the left which kind of interferes with the content, as well as the banner ad on the right which is pretty large (but doesn't distract from the content much).
Plus these ads are not just on the homepage, they are on the inner content pages as well.
They way Matt Cutts explained "ads above the fold" - it's not so much you need to cut down the pixel size of ads, but make sure not ALL your pages have too many ads - so only make a %% of pages on your site have ads, and some not.
I would play with how ads are appearing on the site to begin with.
Your issue does not sound like a migration error, because that is usually immediate. This sounds like something Google takes a little longer to process (page layout / design, user metrics, ads etc).
-
I work for a UK company, and by the looks of things the school holidays and easter played a part in the slight traffic drop for us.
-
I guess that would at least make me feel better in that it's not something I did wrong. Thanks for responding. I feel like my site became invisible. I hope traffic comes back!
-
Thanks for your help. My url is www.HomeSpellingWords.com. I've been tracking my ranks in Moz and it seems like my site is getting a little better every week. However, my page views are steadily dropping, while my rank remains the same or better. The CTR for ads has not changed much. It's almost like I'm ranked but invisible? Anyway, I rank fairly well for many good keywords like spelling words, 1st grade spelling words, 2nd grade...etc and so forth. I've never done any kind of strange link building - was too busy and maybe too lazy.
When I think about this problem, it seems like I'm there (ranked) but invisible???
I need to get an imgur account - will upload images if I can find some that make sense.
-
Interestingly, our site traffic is down ~ 25% in the past 3 weeks as well, with no loss in keyword rankings. We are presently assuming that it has something to do with Google's removal of the separators from between paid ads and organic search results.
Just something to think about ...
-
Hi Kimberly, welcome to the forum, and thanks for your question! Yes, a URL would be very helpful, as would any relevant screenshots of analytics.
Christy
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
-
Any idea why pages are not being indexed?
Hi Everyone, One section on our website is not being indexed. The product pages are, but not some of the subcategories. These are very old pages, so thought it was strange. Here is an example one one: https://www.moregems.com/loose-cut-gemstones/prasiolite-loose-gemstones.html If you take a chunk of text, it is not found in Google. No issues in Bing/Yahoo, only Google. You think it takes a submission to Search Console? Jeff
Technical SEO | | vetofunk1 -
Organic search traffic has dropped by 35% since 18 September, we don't know why.
Organic traffic to our website has dropped 35% since 18 September 2017 to date. From 1 January to 18 September 2017 organic traffic was up by just under 1% over all (Google up by 1.32%). Paid search traffic over the same time has remained steady. There is nothing we can think of that we've done that has caused the drop. We had an issue with Google page speed test failing when running a test but we resolved this issue on 20 November and in that time we've seen an even greater drop (44% in the last week). The drop is seen across the 3 main search engines, not just Google, which points toward something we've done, but as mentioned, we can't think of any significant change we made in September that would have such negative effects. There is little difference across devices. Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic? Any help gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
A few pages deindexed from Google .. PLEASE HELP!
My client has a fairly new site and we were agressively building content to the website. It is an ecommerce store and we have got a blog as well. We guest blogged in a few places and wrote 3-5 articles a day. Last few days, i noticed 3-4 pages that we were building links to got deindexed. What could be the reason? We weren't using any bots to build links, only a couple of it around 5-10 links to a page. Google WMT is not showing any messages and no manual action is seen. What could be the reason? I've submitted those URL for reindex and so far nothing seems to work. Any idea? Please help.
Technical SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
301 redirect to WWW on a 2 year old website with good SERPs and organic traffic?
Hi everyone, Recently someone pointed out that my website can be accessed in both ways i.e. by typing www.example.com or example.com. He further added that Google might identify this as duplicate content and penalize my website. So now I'm thinking about 301 redirection from non WWW to WWW using htaccess method. But my website is 2 year old now and I'm getting some decent traffic from Google. Will this redirection have an adverse effect on my rankings? Is there any other way to resolve this issue? I don’t want to lose my current rankings or organic traffic. Any help would be very much appreciated. P.S. Currently Google index my website pages with WWW.
Technical SEO | | nicksharma040 -
Domain Forwarding / Multiple Domain Names / or Rebuild Blogs on them
I am considering forwarding 3 very aged and valuable domain names to my main site. There were once over 100 blog posts on each blog and each one has a page authority of 45 and domain authority of 37. My question is should i put up three blogs on the domains and link them to my site or should i just forward the domains to my main site? Which will provide me with more value. I have the capability to have some one blog on them every day. However, i do not have access to any of the old blog posts. I guess i could scrape it of archive.org. Any advice would be appreciated. Scott
Technical SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
Schema / microdata under Google listing
I was wondering if it was possible to add any schema, or microdata, or anything of that sort, to my website/webpage in order to show the location of the business just underneath the snippet of the website in Google. I have seen this with other businesses and I am not sure if it is only because they have the business listed on Google Places, or if it is because they have schema data on their website and when it is read by Google it shows underneath their snippet in Google search. Also, if there is an ability to make the address, phone, etc show up underneath the Google search listing, can I do this with a plugin or widget for wordpress? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SEOWizards0 -
The best way to organize a gallery for SEO?
I need to redo the following gallery
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
http://goo.gl/PFvjE
because besides the fact that it looks ugly, it's an SEO mess. Since all the pages are comprised of images, and the only text is the navigation, I'm getting duplicate content issues. I tried adding a little paragraph of text on some of the pages, but this thing needs a total revamp. My main question is this: is that menu being repeated on all the pages really a good thing? What good is it to, say, on the fire patches page, to have a menu that includes all these keywords for sports patches? Would it be better to just have a main gallery page that lists the main patch types: applique, motorcycle, Scouting, ect, and then once you get to that page, list all the different sub categories?0 -
I Need advice in redirecting domains
I have tow domains (destination/town - travel websites), www.gansbaai.com, and www.danger-point-peninsula.co.za. The one, gansbaai.com is an old domain I bought under which I will be launching a new website in a couple of months. danger-point-peninsula.co.za, is another domain I acquired also about gansbaai, the area. I will we using the domain gansbaai.cm, but want to get the best link juice out of danger-point-peninsula. How do I merge the domains?
Technical SEO | | DROIDSTERS0