Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Across datacenters ( I have even checked using several proxy servers) my rankings remain where they have been but the traffic has halved. I'm talking about a site here that usually gets 2000 uniques per day getting 1000.
How is this even possible? How can google still rank as it has done but traffic from google halve?
This makes no sense to me at all.
1. Is the SERP position relatively constant?
Yes, very constant.
Beside my major search terms, I took about 20 random queries from Friday October 13th
Also my sites are not seasonal and have a very stable traffic all around the year.
2. Actually click on the result each time -- does the click go to your URL?
I would check more.
What IP Address
Is the AdSense code on the site with Your publisher number.
Maybe there is a manipulation in the DNS system
Maybe there has somebody copied all the sites, where the DNS is manipulated. Only change, the AdSense publisher ID.
Let's start an investigation program
1.) Where is the hosting
2.) Write to some friends, they should visit Your site and look in the html for the AdSense publisher id
At trying to find something about DNS problems, I just added the 3rd DNS server of my hosting to my domain registration.
UK hosting
Adwords ID correct
non-search engine referrals the same
google.com referrals down 75%
google.co.uk referrals down 50%
yahoo referrals steady
Hosting company in Canada, server in California
Adwords ID correct
direct visitors down on all affected domains 26% down
Google referers down in about the same number 40% down
And here is the big difference!
Here the daily average from direct visitors according to Google analytics:
May 1...June 27 583 all was running fine, only soccer world championship reduced visitors
June 28..September 29 710 my time in the Google filter
September 30 October 20 631 recovered at Google
October 21 to October 29 485 the mysterious traffic drop
I mentioned this on a different thread and I think that there is a chance that this is either being tested on some data centers or part of some beta algo.
See below quote;
"I wonder if there is a chance that google has tracked the clicks for different reigons and came up with some way to provide regional results based on historical traffic for each region?
Example:
Bulgaria gets a different set of results because they are more likely to click on site X, Y, and Z.
Indonesia gets different results because they are more likely to click on sites Q, R, and S.
North America gets different results because they are more likely to click sites A, B, and C.
I think that it has been mentioned a few times that Google SERPS occasionally have click tracking on URl's. If thats the case, it may not be a stretch they are small scale testing this out."
[webmasterworld.com...]
I don't think it would be a far fetched thing as Google is very able to track this stuff (look at Google Trends). I have seen my rankings remain stable and I would assume the the service i use is hitting the same geograhical DC's.
This is an interesting discussion and while i think it could be more than one thing that causes this, I wonder how many factors weigh in to this.
I know for me my sites were absolutely crushed when september came around and the kids all returned to schools across europe and US. Our traffic page views per day plummited from 50-55K a day, down to 19-23k a day! That is an absolutely massive hit and came as a killer blow after an impressive summer for my sites.
Now i understand this trend is going to occur hopefully i can find ways to get around it for next time! Right now weve got backup to about 22-32k a day but still far far off where we once were.
Im upping my affiliate sites to try help solve such issues but unfortunately im very fussy over who i want to partner with lol!
Carl.
Is there any chance what so ever that we see the rankings as stable, but the trafic is halved due to regional results? At least part of the equation?
85% of my visitors are German speaking coming from Germany or Austria.
So this theory would also mean to divide the German area massive into many small regions.
I don't think this is done by click tracking, though. I think they have salted their algorithms with a certain bias towards local results. It could be based on language, the server's physical location, the site's TLD, or maybe even the number of inbound links from different regions.
I think that last one is a new suggestion. It's merely speculation, but I've been wondering if link origin could begin to explain how two .com sites based in the US could have different relative rankings in google.com and google.co.uk.
We have not seen this trend before at half term or US sporting events, and only has been affecting our UK site not our .com's.
It looks like some loss of "long tail", yet despite sending considerable time on this I cannot find any..:)
It may be just an oddity that will revert so I would caution against taking any action other than what you intended to do, site updates, redesign, clean up html etc
As we have had no major site changes it must be something that is outside our control, a Google tweak too far or a reduction in importance of a set of inbound links ( scraper sites? )
I put the long tail in the title, description and keywords, and was easily being found on these weird searches. My page would pop right up because of the title.
Now recently, the pages are not being found at all, even though they are still in the index. After venturing into the reasons why, it appears that, right now titles are not carrying much weight. All of the sites in front of me, all have the long tail in their snippet, none have it in their title, except me, and I'm on page 5.
Exactly on 21 October the organic Google traffic to my site went through the floor. I had been averaging about 2500 uniques/day; since 21 October it has been less than 600, with no appreciable change since that date. Google is the only search engine affected; the small amount I get from Yahoo and others has not changed. My site is international, but mainly with US traffic; even so, the identical drop has happened with google.com, google.ca, and google.co.uk.
I run four websites; this drop only affected one of the four, and it was the only one that made me money; the other three are really hobby sites. I lost my job a year ago and have been working hard to develop this one site as a clean, growing, public-service, white-hat site, and it has paid off -- until 21 October. Until that day there had been gradual and steady increase in traffic and earnings, with no particular bumps or drops; I was just developing content and making the site better; I even successfully switched domains and hosts a few months ago with almost no noticeable change. On 21 October it went through the floor.
The site has nothing to do with sports, holidays, or regional interests. The only key I can hook onto is that this is very much a long-tail site, with most of the traffic coming from minor keywords.
Google, I beg you, whatever knob you turned on 21 October, please turn it back.
And after I tried from June 27th to September 30 to eliminate everything what could be wrong, now I have absolut no clue what to do.
Just the next disaster ocures, my main domain again filtered in Google.
And after I tried from June 27th to September 30 to eliminate everything what could be wrong, now I have absolut no clue what to do.
Now an other mystery. I can not very exactly verify this, because only the traffic from Friday to Saturday night is now available for comparsion.
But it looks like a new mystery.
Ranks lost - traffic remains stable.
My data has not changed: before 21 Oct I was averaging 2500 uniques/day; since 21 Oct only about 500. A sharp, sudden, Google-only change across a site with hundreds of pages and hundreds of keywords. It's the exact problem that has happened to a number of posters in this thread at the very same time.
