Major drop in visitor numbers?
-
Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service . We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress. What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits? Would appreciate feedback.
-
Dana is correct - you need to ride the wave a little while Google looks at all of the changes and then recalculates where you should be.
Something else, how have you been dealing with the duplicated content? If a change in content on landing pages has happened, it could be worth using CrazyEgg and looking at a heatmap of those pages to see where people are the most active. Can be a real eye-opener!
Really need to know more about how the changes were made before we can look at other possible reasons.
Andy
-
i checked your domain authority which is very less. you might have to do make some quality links to our site again to get back the trust of Google and increase domain authority.
-
Hi Dana,
We thought it was our analytics configuration however we did the SEOMoz crawl and that highlighted the same issues. Thanks for the other comments though it is worth checking those basics too.
-
My first inclination is to say "be patient" and ride out the dip. I have never seen a complete site overhaul that didn't experience a dip in traffic. Next, I would say "Are your ducks in a row?"
What I mean by that is:
- Have you set up appropriate 301 redirects if any of your URLs were re-written?
- Are those 301 working properly (did you test them)?
- If no 301 redirects, did you implement canonical tags?
- Are you actively monitoring Google Webmaster Tools? Are you acting on those reports?
- Have you created and resubmitted a new sitemap to Google?
- Did you reinstall analytics or are you using different analytics? It could be that your analytics have changed more than your traffic (This is a big one....really consider this carefully).
If the answer is yes to all of the above. Be patient. I know it's hard, but don't freak out and sit tight. You should be fine after a little time.
Dana
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
-
Another company is coming up in search results when I type in my phone number
If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541, another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up. We do not come up at all for this search. However, if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not. Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Sudden jump in the number of 302 redirects on my Squarespace Site
My Squarespace site www.thephysiocompany.com has seen a sudden jump in 302 redirects in the past 30 days. Gone from 0-302 (ironically). They are not detectable using generic link redirect testing sites and Squarespace have not explanation. Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Jcoley0 -
Google dropping pages from SERPs even though indexed and cached. (Shift over to https suspected.)
Anybody know why pages that have previously been indexed - and that are still present in Google's cache - are now not appearing in Google SERPs? All the usual suspects - noindex, robots, duplication filter, 301s - have been ruled out. We shifted our site over from http to https last week and it appears to have started then, although we have also been playing around with our navigation structure a bit too. Here are a few examples... Example 1: Live URL: https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149002-memory-drawings-there-is-no-perfect-place Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149002-memory-drawings-there-is-no-perfect-place SERP (1): https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=memory+drawings+there+is+no+perfect+place SERP (2): https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=memory+drawings+there+is+no+perfect+place+site%3Awww.normanrecords.com Example 2: SERP: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=deaf+center+recount+site%3Awww.normanrecords.com Live URL: https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149001-deaf-center-recount- Cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.normanrecords.com/records/149001-deaf-center-recount- These are pages that have been linked to from our homepage (Moz PA of 68) prominently for days, are present and correct in our sitemap (https://www.normanrecords.com/catalogue_sitemap.xml), have unique content, have decent on-page optimisation, etc. etc. We moved over to https on 11 Aug. There were some initial wobbles (e.g. 301s from normanrecords.com to www.normanrecords.com got caught up in a nasty loop due to the conflicting 301 from http to https) but these were quickly sorted (i.e. spotted and resolved within minutes). There have been some other changes made to the structure of the site (e.g. a reduction in the navigation options) but nothing I know of that would cause pages to drop like this. For the first example (Memory Drawings) we were ranking on the first page right up until this morning and have been receiving Google traffic for it ever since it was added to the site on 4 Aug. Any help very much appreciated! At the very end of my tether / understanding here... Cheers, Nathon
Technical SEO | | nathonraine0 -
Phone number in Meta Description - Is it a good idea?
Is it a best practice to place your company's phone number in the meta description for a page? Are there any rules as to what is acceptable for meta tags? One of our competitors recently started doing this but for some reason I think it might be against Google's guidelines. They (competitor) is also engaging in web spam, plagiarizing our content, and other black hat techniques so I'm leery of anything they do.
Technical SEO | | mathamatix0 -
Site dropped after I removed spammy KW-stuffed section from homepage
An SEO newbie. I took a sabbatical from my site for 10 months for personal reasons & I'm now coming back to it for the first time and facing a number of issues that I'd appreciate some advice on. 1) In the past week, my rankings for my main keywords have suddenly plummeted from ~#7 - #8 to about #25. The only thing I've done in that time is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and clean up a spammy-looking keyword-stuffed section at the foot of my homepage. (It read: Red keyword | blue keyword | green keyword | yellow keyword ... 20 times). I've kept the links (to internal pages of my site) but removed keywords. I've no social presence whatsoever. No Twitter, Facebook, Digg, G+, Google Places, nothing -- but I can't imagine this is behind the sudden drop. 2) Last year my rankings start to fall in late April. But for the first two months or so the drop was only from #1 to #2 - #3. I put it down to Penguin as my backlink profile is not ideal. About 5 years ago some SEO got me a mass of sitewide blog footer links with exact-match anchors -- some of which still remain. (Some domains have 750-plus links pointing back to my site). I've a sitewide banner (2,500 pages) on a site with a related theme to mine. I've loads of links from article directory sites (from when I knew no better). * Question: In Google Webmaster Tools I have not (yet?) received an unnatural links warning. Should I still clean up the links with the Link Disavow tool?
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Google Impressions Drop Due to Expired SSL
Recently I noticed a huge drop in our clients Google Impressions via GWMT from 900 impressions to 70 overnight on October 30, 2012 and has remained this way for the entire month of November 2012. The SSL Cert had expired in mid October due to the notification message for renewal going to the SPAM folder and being missed. Is it possible for an SSL expiry to be related to this massive drop in daily impressions which in-turn has also effected traffic? I also can't see any evidence of duplicate pages (ie. https and http) being indexed but to be honest I'm not the one doing the SEO therefore haven't been tracking this. Thanks for your help! Chris
Technical SEO | | MeMediaSEO0 -
Sudden drop in Google with our top performing keywords
Hi, I'm writing about the sudden drop in our keyword rankings from our site www.activitybreaks.com. Our keywords that have significantly seen a drop have been activity holidays was 8th now 16th Adventure holidays was 15th now 71st We have been listed on the first page for a number of keywords but these has suddenly dropped in the last couple of days. We did receive a notice on the 19th May from Google stating that they detected unnatural links. So we spent a couple of weeks getting the links removed and have re-submitted the site on 11th June. When I go into Google webmaster there is no reply from Google as yet and the links are still showing even though we know they have been removed. We also noticed in the last couple of days that we had a duplicate home page but this has now since been removed. Should we re-submit our site to Google for reconsideration or wait to they get back to us. Is there anything else we can be doing to fix this situation. Let me know if you have any ideas! Anything is appreciated, thanks. Naomi
Technical SEO | | activitybreaks50 -
Is the number at the top of google wrong
If I search a term, any term, Google states at the top 922,000 results (as an example). However, if you click the "O" in google at the bottom you can get the 2nd and 3rd and 4th page of results. Those numbers don't match. The result of my searches would show anywhere from 120-140 results, but the number at the top is in the tens of thousands if not millions. Am I missing something here? Shouldn't these numbers be the same?
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports0