Rankings Keep Jumping And Drop In Traffic

[awaisashraf]

Hi Everyone,

It has been 6 months since we have been working on a website, traffic and rankings were good - but since SEP 9, the rankings keeps jumping and the traffic is decreasing gradually.

We are getting links constantly and are trying to stay under the radar.

Even when the rankings get better the traffic remains the same - i wonder if this is all due to the Google Update?

Traffic has dropped almost 50%

Any help will be appreciated.

[GetReal]

Hi awaisashraf,

We have experienced a similar decline in clicks and impressions in a few of our critical campaigns. Our CTR is the same, keyword QS is the same, 10/10 on our critical keywords, and keyword placement is the same, yet our impressions have decreased significantly since July/August.

I do not understand how the impressions can decrease without a drop in the quality scoring, but we are in the process of trying to figure it out. What’s odd is using the Google Preview tool, many of our top keywords are showing up, but for some unexplained reason the impressions have declined….

One more notable item, we saw a significant increase in 'Google Search Partner' traffic during September, a jump from about 5% to about 20% of overall traffic...

And finally, some of our less visible campaigns did not suffer traffic and impression declines…. I guess it could be explained by increased competition, but the drop is so significant that I find it hard to believe….

GR....

[tedster]

GetReal - you seem to be talking about an Adwords campaign, but to my reading the opening post (and the Google Search forum altogether) is about organic rankings.

Even when the rankings get better the traffic remains the same

Have you looked at your server logs and analytics to discover which search terms are involved? Rankings going up, if it's consistent across all data centers and geo-locations, should bring more traffic on those keywords. So either another keyword dropped off, or not all Google users are seeing the same rankings that you are.

[m0z70]

Guys, the "Google Dance" is going on right now. It's the term given to the period when Google updates their algorithm, and it typically throws the rankings all over the place.

Our major sites dropped off the rankings for major terms, came back to the second page, and we're now a steady fourth result. All in the matter of a few days.

This should settle soon and then, hopefully, the page rank update will happen too.

[tedster]

We might use the term "Google Dance" for this moment, but it's really an almost antique terminology from before the Big Daddy [webmasterworld.com] infrastructure change. Back then, the rankings were updated only once a month and during the days where the new rankings were filtering in it was called the "Google Dance".

But today, rankings change all the time and even the algo itself is changed about 400 times a year.

This is another very volatile time, with the influence of Caffeine [webmasterworld.com] in play, but it is quite different from the Google Dance of old.

[awaisashraf]

Yes, tedster

I have checked the server logs and they are the most "traffic oriented" keywords, for which our rankings are dancing.

I think its the UPDATE which is making our website rankings to dance around. AND the rankings are different on different data centers.

Now the traffic has gone up, its not back to normal, but i see a decent increase in the traffic.

I'm constantly reading the Google SERPs changes thread, to see when the update might get over and grab as much info as i can, so i know exactly what is going on.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[awaisashraf]

Just so you guys know,

Google cache date is 4th OCT, before it used to crawl my website daily.

Google Bot is no accessing my website at the rate it was doing it before.

[Bewenched]

Yea I'd say a MAJOR dance is going on right now. Two days ago ... phones ringing off the hook, record sales..... yesterday and today ... way quiet... too quiet.