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
-
Organic traffic drops a lot
Please check my url that is https://www.drmalpani.com , it was first build up in Joomla and then for security reason, I moved from Joomla to Laravel but in that mean time, I have facing steep fall in organic traffics. It was earlier 10,000 users per day and now I can see only 2500 users per day. I don't know what went wrong, each url are same as it was in Joomla as well I have worked out on all 404 urls too. Looking forward to your guidance on this. Thanks, Bharat
Technical SEO | | DrMalpani0 -
SEO advice on ecommerce url structure where categories contain "/c/"
Hi! We use Hybris as plattform and I would like input on which url to choose. We must keep "/c/" before the actual category. c stands for category. I.e. this current url format will be shortened and cleaned:
Technical SEO | | hampgunn
https://www.granngarden.se/Sortiment/Husdjur/Hund/Hundfoder-%26-Hundmat/c/hundfoder To either: a.
https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/hundfoder/c/hundfoder b.
https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/hundfoder (hundfoder means dogfood) The question is whether we should keep the duplicated category name (hundfoder) before the "/c/" or not. Will there be SEO disadvantages by removing the duplicate "hundfoder" before the "/c/"? I prefer the shorter version ofc, but do not want to jeopardize any SEO rankings or send confusing signals to search engines or customers due to the "/c/" breaking up the url breadcrumb. What do you guys say and prefer from the above alternatives? Thanks /Hampus0 -
When to use mod rewrite / canonical / 301 redirect
Hello, I have taken over the management of a site which has a big problem with duplicate content. The duplicate content is caused by two things: Upper and lower case urls e.g: www.mysite.com/blog and www.mysite.com/Blog The other reason is the use of product filters / pagination which mean you can get to the same 'page' via different filters. The filters generate separate URLs. http://www.mysite.com/casestudy
Technical SEO | | Barques-Design
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?solution=0&page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy?page=1
http://www.cpio.co.uk/casestudy/filter?solution=0" Am I right to assume that for the case sensitive URLs I should use a 301 redirect because I only want the lower page to be shown? For the issue with dynamic URLs should we implement a mod-rewrite and 301 to one page? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Mat0 -
Wiki/Knowledge bases
Hi A client of mine is creating a knowledge base/wiki for their website. There using there suppliers own knowledge base (basically their a reseller). What would be the best practice with regards to duplicate content. Would it be best to make all the pages "no follow"? and block the pages by the robot.txt?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Dropped to 45th spot. How to track ?
Hi.. We specialize in CMS Development and all of our keywords were spotted on 1st page always. Most of them were on #1 only. ON a weekly basis, we only post resourceful blog posts on our website . Since 2-3 months, I have seen quite some drop in traffic and today when I tried the rank status, I see the keywords have dropped to 4th or 5th page. Is there a way, I can track, what went wrong ? Where to start with ? The site always ranked good since 2 years of its start already.
Technical SEO | | mageclub0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
90% traffic loss. Pandalized?
Happened several times during this year. After launch as soon as we reach exactly 100K uniques Google kills 90% of the traffic. Then sudden recovery (pretty much without any action from us) after several weeks not connected to any algo updates/refresh. No warnings. No malware. WMT clean as a baby. Only old good whitehat SEO. Not even close to the edge of wrongdoing:) This time it happens again Aug. 22nd right after Panda 3.9.1. What is different now same exact date Bing traffic went down as well. http://bit.ly/eEu27I Need advice:)
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Help With Joomla Duplicate Content
Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content. Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/ There's only one menu at the top. Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root. The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias. Where is it getting this and how can I stop it? <colgroup><col width="601"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | NoahC0