Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Seeing some big traffic dips with no ranking changes
I've noticed over the past few weeks that several of my (I believe) Panda/Penguin affected sites seem to receive a massive rush of traffic during a given hour in the early morning (GMT).
This doesn't occur daily by any means but it's in marked contrast to the traffic patterns either side of that hour. Typically during that one hour period the traffic volume will be 6-8 times that of any other hour that day.
[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:01 pm (utc) on Nov 28, 2013]
[edit reason] Exemplified ranking tool [/edit]
big traffic dips from google over the past several days.
What's the time frame for various dips? I see two patterns going on.
The next sign that something was changing was on Nov 21st, Google visited 33% more pages according to my logs and downloaded 100x(!) more data than average according to GWT.
Google reported 3,000 new 404 urls on the 22nd and another 11,000 on the 25th, all of which have either never existed or have been gone for years (no links on my site point to these pages, they properly resolve with a 404 header etc).
I've observed that in addition to periodically rechecking the lists of 404s it keeps, Google also often recrawls these lists when there's a refresh of the index, as might occur at a large update of the type we just had.
This observation from a 2006 interview with the Google Sitemaps Team is helpful... [smart-it-consulting.com...]
My emphasis added...When Googlebot receives either (a 404 or 410) response when trying to crawl a page, that page doesn't get included in the refresh of the index. So, over time, as the Googlebot recrawls your site, pages that no longer exist should fall out of our index naturally.
My sense of the above is that by recrawling the old lists at updates or refreshes, Google is able to generate "clean" reference points of sorts, with currently 404ed urls removed from the visible index. The above interview was in 2006, though, and the index has gotten much more complex, so it's hard to say whether the 404ed pages are removed from the index in one pass, or after many.
There is a separate crawl list, and your observation suggests that the old urls are recrawled. I note from your report that the number of 404s peaked at just about the time of the update, and that the number is trending down gradually.
Does anybody know something about this update? Does anybody see traffic gains again?
On Sunday I had a couple of strangely busy hours as if it was meant to compensate me for past few days of low traffic
I've been seeing spurts of foreign traffic for some time now which worries me.
Articles with a product focus took the biggest hit, informational articles that are not directly product related actually got a little boost and the movement is continuing over time.
i added a section "related to widget" with links to the related widgets. As this is what the whole site is affecting and many internal links ( all are "nofollow" ) are created, maybe a treshold has been reached.
I'm trying to pin down what kinds of sites/pages are seeing this.
In particular, please explain why you're using "nofollow" on internal links. That IMO is a very bad practice
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that it may have a lot to do with Hummingbird.
I'm thinking that because of the non-converting foreign traffic, which I'm seeing widely reported.
Such traffic usually accompanies changes or tests in the way Google is looking at user intent... and the big new thing right now, which is to say Hummingbird, is all about new ways of looking at user intent.
During such tests, ranking changes are generally not very obvious.
