Search appearances drop, search traffic increases ... how to interpret?
-
I've just been comparing search appearances in Google Webmaster Tools with organic search traffic from Google and found that the two do not correspond at all. Why would this be?
GWT says my appearances in search crash-dived around the second week of September (does this correspond with a Google algorithm update?), but my organic search data in Google Analytics for the same time period shows that search visits actually increased.
Anyone else seeing anomalies like this?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Hotel SEO, 3-pack & Search Console: How to get the right data and how to improve CTR?
Hey guys, I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions.
Algorithm Updates | | Maggiathor
Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems. Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance. Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this). Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results? Hope there are some travel experts in here 🙂0 -
Lost Wikipedia page and dropped heavily in rankings. How many of you aware of and experienced this?
Hi all, We lost of our Wikipedia page for 2nd time and we dropped in rankings 2nd time too. I got confused first time whether Wikipedia was the actual reason as we had couple of major changes in our website. But recently it's been clear that losing Wikipedia page is the culprit as we have no website changes around these days. How many of you aware of this and experienced this? Please share your views. Hope this info will help you. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ecommerce sites 30% drop in organic since the spring
I help manage SEO for a number of large retail websites and we've seen a significant drop in organic traffic (upwards of 30%) since around May 2015. It's likely we were hit my Google's Phantom Quality update, but I don't understand why it had such a big impact. Can anyone explain that Google update in more depth and advise on steps to take to recover from it? Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | JimLynch0 -
Trafic drop after a huge indexation
Hello everyone, My website used to have about 500k indexed pages in Google. After publishing fresh sitemaps and a little local "buzz", it now has about 6 millions indexed pages and the numbers are skyrocketing (GWT says 7 millions and it will probably keep going). My website has a total number of pages of 10 millions. I used to have about 5k organic visite each day, but since the big indexation has started, I now have half less. I read many things about that kind of trafic drop, and it seems to be a normal step when indexing a huge site. I just wanted to know if you guys had any similar experiences and if yes, if there are specific tasks to do in order to recover/develop the organic trafic or if it's just a matter of time. Thanks for your help and share of experiences 😉
Algorithm Updates | | Pureshore0 -
Rankings drop
Hi! Since the new Penguin rollout, we've seen rankings drop for http://www.leanonturkey.co.uk/ for the terms 'turkey recipes' (UK) and 'low fat recipes' (UK) from #4 and #15 respectively. This may be down to very strong competition, but I'm also concerned over the on-page content, which may not be detailed enough. Any tips would be much appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | neooptic0 -
Sudden drop after 301 redirection
Hi Experts We did a 301 redirect from an old site to a new site to get rid of any bad link juice. We recently found a big drop in rankings and traffic after google last indexed the new web pages. We did 301 using asp at page level coding. The website had 4000 approx. pages and we did 301 section by section. This is how we did as per one of the blog post in seomoz. Create a sitemap for your old domain. Create content (contact information, description of your company, indication of future plans) and something link worthy for the new domain. (You should start trying to build links early) Setup the new domain and make it live. Register and verify your old domain and new domain with Google Webmaster Tools. Create a custom 404 page for old domain which suggests visiting new domain. Old Domain error checking and fixing In a development environment, test the redirects from the old domain to the new domain. Ideally, this will be a 1:1 redirect. (www.example-old-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html to www.example-new-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html) 301 redirect your old domain to your new domain. Submit your old sitemap to Google and Bing. The submission pages are within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center (This step will make the engines crawl your old URLs, see that they are 301 redirects and change their index accordingly.) Fill out the Change of Address form in Google Webmaster Tools. Create a new sitemap and submit it to the engines. (This will tell them about any new URLs that were not present on the old domain) Wait until Google Webmaster Tools updates and fix any errors it is indicated in the Diagnostics section. Monitor search engine results to make sure new domain is being properly indexed. We also did a press release with prweb to announce the new launch. We followed the steps recommended in one of the I am not sure what to do next. Can anyone suggest if its normal to see a drop and we should wait for some time or if we did something wrong? We are loosing business with every single day. Please help !
Algorithm Updates | | ITRIX0 -
Dramatic Rankings Drop
We've been slowly working up the rankings for some targeted keywords, and though it's been slow we have recently moved up to pages 1,2 and 3 for some of these kwyrods. Friday I got the rankings report from SEOMOZ and we have completely dropped from all rankings. Everything is gone. We've dropped at many at 40+ positions almost overnight. I haven't gone into deep research as to why this happened yet, and I have not asked the client if he did anything off-site to hinder our rankings, but I know that I have changed nothing in terms of SEO techniques in the past week...and these techniques have been working and moving us up so I'm at a loss as to why all of a sudden we've lost everything. If anyone has dealt with this issue before or can take a look at this site I'd appreciate it: http://www.EraseDisease.com Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Linwright0 -
Tuesday July 12th = We suddenly lost all our top Google rankings. Traffic cut in half. Ideas?
The attached screenshot shows all. Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic. Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back. Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine). Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong?? eartheasy.com wtf.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | aran0880