Organic search traffic has dropped by 35% since 18 September, we don't know why.

[imaterus]

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.

[imaterus]

thanks Donna, much appreciated.

We're having a meeting about it on Wednesday with developers and marketing. We know the site is slow, we're working on a new back end to the site that will increase speed significantly, but it's still 6 months away. I think it will need to be brought up in the Wednesday meeting.

The one caveat is that the site as always been slow (even slower!). Maybe google have lost patience.

[DonnaDuncan]

As far as I know, only comparing before and after page traffic using Google Analytics.

All those pages that are canonicalized to https://www.scottscastles.com/property/unavailable/ and https://www.scottscastles.com/property/enquire/ are eventually going to get noindexed. There are 335 of them.

Your site is slow. Google's bots might not be allocating enough time to index the entire site.

[imaterus]

Thanks Donna

To your question about whether the dropped pages have healthy link profiles, do you know how to identify the pages that were indexed that are no longer indexed?

[DonnaDuncan]

Were significant changes made to the site around that time? You seem to have a mix of non-html, html, http, https, 301 and 302 (temporary) redirects.

Do Google and Bing have your most up-to-date sitemap?

Have you orphaned any pages?

Have you checked messages in Google Search Console?

Do the dropped pages have healthy link profiles?

Do you have a large amount of duplicate content that has not been accounted for in canonicals?

Pages with 5xx and 4xx errors won't get indexed.

Hosting problems (inaccessible or slow responding host) can prevent pages from being indexed.

[imaterus]

Thanks very much for your feedback Donna.

We've identified a strong correlation between a sharp drop in indexed pages around 18 September and our drop in organic search traffic. We're stumped as to why google sharply reduced the number of indexed pages. There was a similar drop around the end of April but this had little influence on our organic search traffic.

Does anyone know why this would occur for a reason other than removing the pages or no-indexing pages?

[LindsayE]

I've also seen a decent drop in our organic traffic the last two weeks, it started November 15th. Our longer tail keywords for our FAQs started to creep back up but our root high volume keywords show almost a 5% average position drop over the past 30 days. Our competitors did not experience this drop from my analysis and OSE tools. Nor am I able to find anything that we may have done to cause this. I'm assuming it's an algorithm update, just keeping my fingers crossed that our root high volume keywords start going back up sooner than later.

[DonnaDuncan]

Look at your landing page report comparing the before and after time period for organic traffic. Is it specific landing pages that have lost traffic or is the 35% drop roughly consistent across the board?

You have a bunch of pages (787) ending in html that are timing out with a 504 Gateway error.

Here are a few examples.

https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/baronial-castle-54.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-historic-mansion-31.html
https://www.scottscastles.com/book/enquire/beautiful-holiday-house-23.html

I sampled a few with a site: command. Many are still indexed so that could be the problem. A few are tagged as no-index, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Many are canonicalized to https://www.scottscastles.com/property/enquire/ or https://www.scottscastles.com/property/unavailable/ but none are redirected.

I'd start there.

[EGOL]

The something that "happened" might have been a Google algo change.  Or it could have been Google giving one of your competitors a promotion.  If a website has made significant improvment, many pages on the site could be promoted at the same time.

If you want to know when "something happens" in Google check here.

https://www.mariehaynes.com/algo-changes-and-more/

[imaterus]

Thanks for your response. It hasn't been a gradual drop off of organic search traffic. It can be pinpointed to 18 September. That's why I was wondering if anything happened around that time to cause the sudden drop.

[EGOL]

Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic?

Many things could cause a drop in traffic.  Here are the things you should check where data is available or consider if you don't have the data.

• Google is showing more Adwords ads above the fold
• Google is showing more Shopping ads above the fold
• Google is showing more "people also ask" units
• Google is showing more features in the SERPs like news, images, video, etc.
• Google is showing more knowledge boxes and featured snippets

Lots of people have lost traffic to the above in the past year - even if their organic rankings are HIGHER

Maybe competitors are hammering away at your traffic..  Amazon and WalMart and Ebay are working really hard and spending billions to dominate the SERPs - and there are millions of third-party sellers listing items on all of these websites.   Lots of dirtbag sites are stealing images, rewriting and spinning the content of other websites.  Your competitors are working every day to take positions from you.  If you are not working     every    single    day     they are doing that to take your positions.  They are hungry and working hard.

A person or a small team or even a huge company can be working like mad and not be able to stand up to all of the above.  For as long as there has been competition on the web, these things and more have been killing business almost as fast as they arrive.  There are only ten organic positions (or less) on the first page of google and everybody wants them and Google is now using up to 50% or more of the real estate on the first page of the SERPs for their own stuff.

All of the above assumes that you have a great website with worthy content.  If you website is anything less then Google's quality filters might hit you.   If you are not compliant with Google's guidelines then other filters might hit you.

This is the way of the web and all of the above are accelerating and not slowing down.