Massive Drop in Users
-
A client of mine is seeing crazy drops in users. Feb. 2018 was an all-time high in organic users, over 38,000. However, there has been a steep drop off since then. In November 2018, the number of organic users was at a little over 1,000. The client said there have been no major changes to the site.
I have no idea what is happening. Below are things I have done already: - Submitted a disavow file- Fixed URL parameters- Performed an entire site audit. Fixed all site errors and re-wrote new metadata. - Made sure no main pages have been deleted. 301 redirects are in place where necessary. - Started to consolidate low-quality pages. If I had to guess, I would assume this is an E.A.T. related drop. I have no way of knowing though. This is a YMYL site, so we are working to increase E.A.T. However, any insight would be helpful. Rankings are dropping off so quick I'm not sure what else I can do. Please comment if you need more context. PLEASE HELP!!
-
I'm sorry to hear about the trouble. If you can post the URL, that would be helpful in sorting out the issue.
-
Hi there, what's the URL, please? My first thoughts are that you've been penalised, I can't see why else users dropped by 97%. Not without looking at the site that is
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
-
Page drops from index completely
We have a page that is ranking organically at #1 but over the past couple of months the page has twice dropped from a search term entirely. There don't appear to be any issues with the page in Search Console and adding the page on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url seems to fix the issue. The search term we're tracking that drops is in the URL for the page and is the h1 of the page. Here is a screenshot of the ranking over the past few months: https://jmp.sh/akvaKGF What could cause this to happen? There is nothing in search console that shows any problems with the page. The last time this happened the page completely dropped on all search terms and showed up again after submitting the url to google manually. This time it dropped on just one search term and reappeared the next day after manually submitting the page again. akvaKGF
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | russell_ms0 -
Google Algorithm non-manual penalty. How do we fix this (quality?) drop?
Hi, See attached image. We received a non-manual penalty on March 22, 2015. I don't think we ever came out of it. We have moved up due to the Penguin update, but we should (by DA PA) be up on the first page for tons of stuff and most keyword are lower than their true strength. What kind of quality errors could be causing this? I assume it was a quality update. I am working on the errors, but don't see anything that would be so severe as to be penalized. What errors/quality problems am I looking for? We have tons of unique content. Good backlinks. Good design. Good user experience except for some products. Again, what am I looking for? Thanks. non-manual-penalty.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Drop In Rankings Evaluation
My cousin asked me to look at his site, http://www.gaport.com/ and I'm wondering what his main website flaws are? I looked at his backlinks, and while I don't know enough to exclude penguin being the cause, I don't think it is. I think it has more to do with duplicate content and lack of keyword optimization. However, before I tell him that, I wanted to get the opinion of this forum, please. Thanks! Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Does this look like a Penguin drop to you?
Hi Folks, This is my first post here. Psyched to be part of this great community. I have a site that's seen a steady drop in Google organic traffic since September of last year. Slow at first, then picking up speed in late January, then in a free-fall in May. Things are finally flattening out, but I'm left with 30% of my former traffic. See graph. I've been thinking that this was caused by Penguin. Back in 2006-2009, I used free directory submission services, and it looked like I was finally getting penalized for it. However, from the research I've done so far, it looks like websites hit by Penguin see a decrease in traffic over a couple days, not six months. Should I concern myself with disavowing those spammy directory links, or focus my energy elsewhere? There are other plausible explanations for the decline. I haven't posted much content on the site in recent years, and have let my blog go fallow. Obviously, this needs to be fixed. My question is, in addition to my content development and quality linkbuilding efforts, should I be worried about those spammy links? For the record, this is a high-quality informational site with lots of high-quality links mixed in with the spammy ones. Thanks for any insight you can offer. qozm7Rr.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | srmaximo0 -
Sudden Large Traffic and SERP Drop
Hi This site www.militaryplaques.com We have had steady traffic over a number of years with the site both on terms of impressions, click through rates, bounce rates, time on site and most importantly sales. The site has remained fairly static over the last 6 months with no significant changes to content or structuire. However, on July 11 our traffic and impressions crashed by over 90% and remain at this low level. We have never been hit by Panda but this looks like such a case?! Any insight or suggestions as to why the sudden "de-listing" may have happened? R/ John J Morgan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheNorthernOffice790 -
SERP dropped Today ??
Hi, Long story shot. my 2 main keywords 'makeup artist sydney' and
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EdsonGroupMedia
'sydney makeup artist' that have fluctuated in #1 - 4 position for the last year even after panda, have now moved to the 2page as of last night 23 May 13. I have checked webmaster tools and have no messages or error, i have checked Bing and still rank # 3 for the keywords. I am all out of ideas! am I being paranoid ? there hasn't been any major changes to the site and I don't seem to have major duplicate content issues! Any suggestions and Ideas would be great, website is www.sparrowmakeup.com.au Thanks.0 -
SERP dropping along with competitors - Google algorithm mix up?
I am hoping someone will have some insight as our recent ranking drop has been driving me crazy trying to figure out what happened. Our site is www.dgrlegal.com. We've been building links by creating quality content and getting others to link to it. We've seen our rankings rise to 3 for a number of keywords. Suddenly around March we saw a pretty drastic drop but only for certain keywords (maybe a Penguin hit?). For example, "new jersey process service" still has us ranked 3rd but "new jersey process server" sees us much lower around 19. I've noticed several competitors have dropped while one has risen so is this negative SEO? Probably not as our backlink profile doesn't seem suspicious but it has me very confused. We've received no warnings or notices from Google. The only thing I see is that our indexed pages went from 13 to 98 in January and have been now steadily increasing to 129, although I thought this would be a positive. Any suggestions or thoughts? I thought maybe things would shake out but it hasn't happened as of yet - we just keep dropping.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | amandadgr0