Search traffic steady, Landing pages receiving traffic had massive drop
-
Following the week of Google's major algorithm update in January, we saw this graph in our Moz dashboard. (green bars are # of landing pages receiving traffic from search, blue line is traffic from search)
Traffic from SEO grew slightly, but number of landing pages receiving traffic fell by more than 50%. We didn't make any changes to sitemap, rel=canonical, number of pages being published, etc. Traffic from top keywords held consistent. Number of pages/images google crawled and indexed grew per webmaster tools. Big spike in Nov/Dec is because we are in retail, seasonal not technical issues.
Is anyone else experience the same thing? An algo change? Or something more specific to our site?
Quality traffic is what we care about, so number of pages traffic is going to could be a positive thing (easier to optimize). But jury is out.
-
Thanks - excellent analysis. Exactly what I was looking for and hadn't considered this possibility. Will dig in!
-
We don't have much useful data (i.e. we have a lot of data, but can't see any clear patterns) around the January core algo updates, other than knowing that they occurred. It's hard to pin down from the graph, and I'm not sure what the scope of your traffic and page count is, but my first guess would be that you lost ranking on some long-tail pages that weren't contributing much in the way of traffic.
It's possible these were low-value pages or even some pages that shouldn't have been indexed (like duplicates), in which case this could be fine. It's also possible that these pages had quality issues that knocked them out of ranking contention, which wouldn't be so good.
It's not an easy problem to solve, but the first step I'd take is to try to pin down: (a) what those pages were, and (b) if they have any relationship. If you lost traffic to 500 completely different pages, that's going to be tough to interpret. More likely, though, there's a pattern. Maybe these are mostly product pages, or blog posts, or internal search results, etc. If you can find their commonality, that's your best chance of knowing what went wrong.
-
Same here - normal traffic till mid Dec. Then drop for Xmas and NY. And this is normal for holidays. Then up in beginning of Jan, from 24-25 drop little bit (back to normal traffic).
So there is also change called "core update":
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/google-algorithm-change
http://mozcast.com/
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
-
How to know exactly which page links to a 404 page on my website?
Hi Moz users, Sometimes I get 404 crawl errors using Moz Pro and when my website has a few dozen pages it is hard for me to find the original page that links to a 404 page. Is there a way to find this automatically using Moz or do I have to look for it manually? I just need to find the original link and delete it to fix my 404 issue. Please let me know thank you for you help. -Marc
Moz Pro | | marcandre0 -
Duplicate Page Title error for an eCommerce store !!
I currently launched my eCommerce startup hosted in Shopify and linked with MOZ. From my first Crawl Report I am getting 580 Duplicate Page Title i.e. all my Collection page have the same title. I have googled and have been checking the MOZ community but cannot find a fix to it. Some of the URL's are - http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=10 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=100 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=101 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=102 http://www.onlypetstore.com/collections/all?page=103 I am new to SEO and any suggestions will be a great help to me.
Moz Pro | | OnlyPetStore2 -
Why did I not get on page analysis
I signed up last Friday for a 30 day trial and was hoping to get the on page analysis so I could get cracking on it. Moz said the crawl was done but I have no info for on page analysis which I find really useful when I have used this before. Any ideas and are any of the MOZ moderators able to get the system to perform one so I can make changes tonight for the MOZ crawl again tomorrow? Thanks Paul
Moz Pro | | ptrobson0 -
Why does SEOMoz only crawl 1 page of my site?
My site is: www.thetravelingdutchman.com. It has quite a few pages, but for some reason SEOMoz only crawls one. Please advise. Thanks, Jasper
Moz Pro | | Japking0 -
What's with measuring search rank?
Okay, here 6 different ways to measure search rank on Google U.S. and I get 6 different answers: Looking for search term "Lunch Bags" for the site Zappos (just a random example - no connection to me). SEOMOZ RankTracker - #49 SEOCentro - #36 http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html ZendProxy.com - #21 (an anonymizer proxy) anonymouse.org - no rank (another anonymizer) Mikes Marketing Tools - no rank http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ RankingCheck.com - #38 Can you duplicate a similar variation? What gives? Which if any of these would you rely on? Thanks... Darcy
Moz Pro | | 945010 -
Page Penalization
Hiya, Looking for some advice, i have a page which the on page optimization tool shows as an A grade and Google has indexed it. I have checked vie site: however is not being found in search results even for an exact match on the page title which is very specific. I believe the page may be being penlized for over optimisation? any advice would be great! URL is www.tots-away.com/child-friendly-holidays-spain/
Moz Pro | | iprosoftware0 -
This Rookie needs help! Duplicate content pages dropped significantly.
So I am pretty new to SEO Moz. I have an e-commerce site and recently did a website redesign. However, not without several mistakes and issues. That said, when SEO Moz did a crawl of my site, the results showed A LOT of Duplicate Content Pages on my site due to my having one item in many variations. It was almost over whelming and because the number of pages was so high, I have been trying to research ways to correct it quickly. The latest crawl from yesterday shows a drastic drop in the number of duplicate content pages and a slight increase in pages with too long page titles (which is fixable). I am embarrassed to give the number of duplicate pages that were showing but, just know, it's been reduced to a third of the amount. I am just wondering if I missed something and should I be happy or concerned? Has there been a change that could have caused this? Thanks for helping this rookie out!
Moz Pro | | AvenueSeo0 -
Wild fluctuation in number of pages crawled
I am seeing huge fluctuations in the number of pages discovered the crawl each week. Some weeks the crawl discovers > 10,000 pages and other weeks I am seeing 4-500. So, this week for example I was hoping to see some changes reflected for warnings from last weeks report (which discovered > 10,000 pages). However, the entire crawl this week was 448 pages. The number of pages discovered each week seems to go back and forth between these two extremes. The more accurate count would be nearer the 10,000 mark than the 400 range. Thanks. Mark
Moz Pro | | MarkWill0