UK Google traffic drop beginning March 12?

[ohno]

Anyone else experiencing a big drop in traffic this week? I noticed it start to decline on the 12th but this week has been dire-well down on normal. I also noticed some strange anomalies in Google Merchant centre, some items were showing as updating & the price was in $ not £, when I went back 10 mins later they were fine!

[goodroi]

I am curious:

What percentage of traffic drop are you seeing?
Is it your entire site or are some pages ok?
Is it only Google referrals that have fallen?

[zerillos]

I also saw smth strange starting around march 12. I'm under the impression, and i could be wrong, that the algo update is being implemented outside the US. However, i think they are putting it to work gradually this time, so the impact will not be as obvious as when it rolled out in the US. I belive they're doing it this way now to avoid all the attention they got starting Feb 24. Again... this is just a hunch.

[sklosed]

Seeing the same for our site in Australia. March 12 saw a 10% plus drop, then a partial recovery over the next two days, with a definite drop again on the 17th. Appears to be the same on the 18th.

I thought it may have been the situation in Japan but I'm not so sure now.

[Whitey]

I'm not sure either , but searches have dropped in Asia/Pacific up to 20% - less in the the UK/Europe , maybe 10%

For now I'd put traffic demand down due to Japan .It is picking up a little now though.

[ohno]

% drop around 25-35%, Google Merchant centre seems to be broken to my eyes, I get error on page and strange things like products not found/currency incorrect. Yesterday was the best day sales wise since the 12th, today will be interesting. GA has shown the traffic decline, our own server logs show a lot of foreign traffic-something that always seem to show when things are on the down. What we sell is UK specific.

[ohno]

Forgot to add, I am still convinced there is a geo targetting issue too, when sales do come back they are sometimes from the same post code region! This seems too coincidental to me, sell nothing all day then in a 30 minute period have 5 sales from the same town/city?! This may explain why when things are dead there is lots of foreign traffic? Maybe I'm paranoid!

[vordmeister]

I've just checked my server logs. Overall traffic and Google searches look consistent over the last 3 weeks for a .co.uk even for sub-sections of the site.

However Adsense earnings on a non-commercial part of the site are up this week and sales from the commercial part are down which might suggest a change in the type of person finding the site.

Could well be they've got the Panda to float and are seeing where the wind takes it.

[kellyman]

I'm noticeably down this week around 15% UK based compared to last week but i am tweaking a lot and could be down to that

[100up]

hello everyone - long time lurker, although i have posted a couple of times under an old colleague's work account. Now I'm going rogue...

Anyway, I noticed a Panda-esque drop in UK google traffic on March 7th. It fell 80% and has not recovered.

For the record, we have a US version of the site that was definitely hit. I thought for sure Panda rolled out on the 7th in the UK, but maybe it was just fallout from our US site linking to the UK one?

[union_jack]

I'm noticing a lot of movement today, i have about twenty clients and about half have changed in rankings. UK results only.

[ohno]

Which way union_jack? This week has started how last left off-well down & dire.

[union_jack]

Bit mixed, seems to be the keywords i have not worked on in a while have gone backwards. Noticed a couple of my keyword domains have slipped too. One gone completely.

[engine]

It has been an interesting few weeks.
Initially, traffic up for some sites with some good quality enquiries. These have fallen back last week and the start of this back to 'normal-ish' levels.

None of the sites i'm monitoring have lost their positions for the key phrases i'm interesed in. I can only think that it's affected other sites that were linking in. Perhaps, initially, they were doing better and have now dropped back.

Some sites have seasonal swings, so they are hard to measure, especially in such short timescales.

There have been some big events which affect traffic to an extent, and this has to be taken into account, too. I'm more interested in trends than a one-day or one-week swing, although if traffic fell off a cliff, it'd ring alarm bells.

[ohno]

-60% compared to the last 4 Mondays. Not good.

[ohno]

GWT giving me strange results now, the number of URL's indexed had remained static for a while, this had then declined late last week, this morning it was showing ZERO! I've just gone back and checked and it has now jumped to higher than it has ever been! The last 24 hours has been mostly foreign junk traffic.

[ohno]

Sales all but gone & rather unsurprisingly logs show visits from just about anywhere in the world OTHER than the UK! For a website that sells products that work in the UK ONLY not much good. Merchant centre now seems to be fixed & actually gives data, WMT is all over the place still.

[edited by: ohno at 10:13 am (utc) on Mar 24, 2011]

[kidder]

Our main money site is off at least 60% of its normal G traffic. On the other hand our adsense site is growing almost daily.

[ohno]

Foreign traffic down today but so is UK traffic. Graph looks like the stock exchange when the banks failed!

[ohno]

Checked GA today-that shows the SAME number of visitors for TWO DOMAINS over Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday!

[tedster]

That is suspicious - of course with GWT occasionally going buggy, it's not proof of anything. Have you checked on DNS problems?

[ohno]

TBH it either shows traffic throttling or it is a bug. I'm not aware of any DNS issues-our hosts are usually very good. Today has seen much more UK traffic & a return of sales!