I had a massive ogranic traffic drop in the past 72 hours (80%). What should I do? I
-
I am very very worried as my organic traffic suddenly came to pretty much a halt last Friday. We have been working very hard on content in the last 2 years and have 0 duplicated content with many thousand travel guides, tips and other travel related info. We are also publishing a successful travel blog which used to get quite a bit off traffic. Everything stalled last Friday and since we are operating in the travel industry which is very competitive, this will be very hard on us. In fact, I fear that we will not survive this drop for more than 2-3 months.
How do we find out about what happened and what can we do to get our SERPs back?
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the reply Peter. By reviewing your site I can share the following:
-
your site is still indexed by Google.
-
you could open a Reconsideration Request with Google to determine if your site has received a manual penalty: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration
-
you need to analyze your traffic using Google Analytics. EXACTLY where is the traffic drop? You need to analyze specific sources such as Google organic search traffic for specific keywords.
-
I tried a longtail keyword search for your site based on the first blog article I located "top 5 reasons to visit honduras". You ranked #7 for the phrase. It's not surprising as the page has a PR of 1.
-
have you noticed any ranking drop for a specific keyword or page?
The only way to troubleshoot this issue is to dig into your analytics data.
-
-
Thank you so much for all the questions.
I am trying to keep it short, so here are the clarifications:
- we have not done anything specific in the past 6 weeks or 3 months that could have caused this
- no Malware is found via Webmastertools
- We use Analytics
- The drop is broad and sudden, we lost some 90% of our organic traffic
- The site is this one http://bit.ly/8CsakX
- No special inbound or oubtbound links were found that would have caused this
- the drop is broad across all pages and all keywords
Attached is an image... our SEO was ok... slowly increasing, interestingly our blog which fresh content that we write ourselves every day also got the hit and dropped 80% as well.
please help. Thanks
-
All the previous responses are great. I would look into Google Webmasters and check to see who's linking to you. Once you figure it out and 'if' you are being penalized, contact google through Google Webmasters and ask for a reconsideration.
-
The owner of the website is the person who is best able to diagnose a traffic decline. Anyone else is guessing.
The thing that you need to do is to check the analytics and determine.....
--- did you lose traffic for specific keywords?
--- did you lose traffic to specific pages?
--- did you lose traffic from specific sources?
Information like the above is the only way to diagnose a traffic loss.
Get into your analytics and see what happened. Then an action plan can be developed.
-
Hi Peter.
Itrogers asked some good questions. A few additional questions I would ask:
-
What tool are you using to measure your traffic?
-
What is your site's web address?
-
Which pages of your site normally receive the highest amount of traffic?
-
Is there any search term for which you had the #1 or 2 rankings in Google?
-
Are there any ad campaigns or other traffic sources which recently began? I realize you are asking about organic traffic but your ads may compete with the organic traffic.
-
What changes to your site have been made in the past 6 weeks? Any chance pages could have been blocked with robots.txt or noindexed?
Basically we need to understand exactly what traffic it was you previously received that is no longer present. Then we can begin to diagnose why that traffic is missing.
-
-
Have you purchased or obtained any spammy links to your content?
Have you checked Google webmaster tools for any malware warnings?
Did the traffic just stop completely? Make sure that you didn't remove your analytics code from your header. This will make it obviously look like you have 0 traffic when you actually might be. Sometimes technical changes (especially with a CMS) can cause some parts of the site to stop working together.
What did you do recently that might be of question to Google?
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
-
Need joomla help. site rankings dropped since upgrade
Hi, really having problems here with www.in2town.co.uk our site was always in the top ten for a large number of important keywords and since our upgrade from joomla 1.5 a month ago to joomla 3.0 we have vanished out of a lot of the search engines for important keywords I am concerned that we could be doing something wrong. two of our important keywords is lifestyle magazine and also gastric band hypnotherapy, but we are nowhere to be seen for these keywords. I must be doing something wrong. The site is an old site, we have been around for many years and have always ranked well up until now. We use K2 and i am just wondering if we have set up things wrong. for example under this article it comes under the category of trip advisor http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor/t ... -term-stay now when you delete the article name and just keep the trip advisor you get a list of the articles and i am wondering if this is damaging my site. http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor any help in helping me to understand why my site has dropped in rankings would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Traffic stats disaster
Hi, We have recently moved a few old websites to an existing one and redesigned the existing website too. The visits in Analytics have fallen though the roof in the last few days. I would expect the traffic to have gone up because visitors from the old websites should now be on the redesigned one. Not sure what the problem is entirely. GA code is on the site but not before the closing head where I asked for it to be put. It's just before closing body tag. Does it make a difference? (It's a CMS site). GA code must be working because visits are being recorded (tens rather than the expected hundreds). Redirects have not been done properly - not sure what IT have done there. Would the lack of proper redirects be the sole reason for the drop? I am still hassling for 301's to be sorted. Thanks all
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
One of my websites has dropped ranking dramatically.
Hi Everyone. I have a website which is: http://goo.gl/0CZjG This used to be on page 1 of google for the main keyword which is "Wedding Favours". but I cannot see the reason why it has really dropped it is on around page 40 now. Can someone maybe point out where I can start to recover this ? Any help or advise is really appreciated.
Technical SEO | | QuattroMedia0 -
How does a search engine bot navigate past a .PDF link?
We have a large number of product pages that contain links to a .pdf of the technical specs for that product. These are all set up to open in a new window when the end user clicks. If these pages are being crawled, and a bot follows the link for the .pdf, is there any way for that bot to continue to crawl the site, or does it get stuck on that dangling page because it doesn't contain any links back to the site (it's a .pdf) and the "back" button doesn't work because the page opened in a new window? If this situation effectively stops the bot in its tracks and it can't crawl any further, what's the best way to fix this? 1. Add a rel="nofollow" attribute 2. Don't open the link in a new window so the back button remains finctional 3. Both 1 and 2 or 4. Create specs on the page instead of relying on a .pdf Here's an example page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/mackie-cfx12-mkii-compact-mixer - The technical spec .pdf is located under the "Downloads" tab [the content is all on one page in the source code - the tabs are just a design element] Thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
My Website Ranking is terribly drop
So sorry I really need your all help 😞 I'm really frustrated and stressed. For my website http://www.cma-academy.edu.sg , it has been ranking on Google 1st page (with the keywords "design course/design courses") for the past over 6 months and the traffic was really good... But it has been almost 2 months since the big drop... my ranking all is gone in just a week and now it's even not on the top 50.. While my competitors websites are stand stil. 😞 I seriously really want to cry because of this.. And I'm sure there is nothing much wrong with my SEO to be abandoned by Google like this and Google still index my webpage, but the crawling rate is so much slow than before.. I really need some help from the expert, especially from seomoz.. Please help me in this, I'm willing to answer any questions as well...
Technical SEO | | AngieDang0 -
301 Re-direct as referral traffic
So we have this site set up in analytics as www.domain.com and then analytics is showing the referral traffic as coming from domain.com and I just wanted to make sure I'm right in the theory that Google is counting the 301 as a different site and showing what is otherwise direct traffic as traffic coming from domain.com. If that's wrong let me know. Otherwise I'll just go through with that theory since no one on any forums that I could find had an answer to it.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
How to Resolve Rankings Drop from a DDOS Attack?
Our rankings just plummeted on Tuesday across the board. There was a DDOS attack on Tuesday and since then the rankings went down and have stayed down, even though the DDOS attack has been resolved. Also, this is the 3rd or 4th attack they've encountered this year. How long could this last? How can we deal with this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710