Bizarre: high rankings but huge drop in visits and impressions

[svsanchez]

Hello Webmasterworld community, I am new to this forum and hope to find some answers as well as contribute with others here.

I would like to start my participation with a very bizarre issue I am having since February 24th: my site's visits have dropped by 50% but I am still ranking well on SERPs. When I checked WMT, what stands out is a huge drop on the amount of "IMPRESSIONS" for most of my keyphrases.

For example, the keyphrase "widgetsA country" went from 848 impressions on February 17th to only 124 on February 24th. Other examples are:

"widgetsB country" from 144 to 48
"widgetsC country" from 230 to 113
"widgetsD country" from 99 to 57
"widgets E keyword" from 373 to 251

Overall, on the 24th I lost 30% traffic compared to the 17th, and on the 25th the loss of traffic was a further 30%, getting 50% less traffic than on the 18th (although I still don't have WMT data on the 25th).

I am very concerned on what is happening here, as I see the usual fluctuation in my rankings as always, but I had never experienced a drop like this and the only thing I have noticed so far is the drop in the impressions, but of course it's impossible that 50% of users decided to do less searches on Google...

Any help will be very appreciated.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 6:24 pm (utc) on Feb 26, 2014]
[edit reason] Exemplified [/edit]

[aakk9999]

Hello svsanchez and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

When you are checking your rankings, are you clearing your cookies and remaining signed out of Google?

With regards to WMT, the drop in impressions means that for some keywords your rankings have fallen so much that the searcher did not even get as far as seeing your site in SERPs.

What I would do is compare a week before the fall with the week after the fall, looking at the impressions, clicks, CTR and the average position.

It would also be good that you can discount other reasons for not appearing in SERPs, such as blocking your site accidentally with robots.txt

[svsanchez]

Hello aakk9999, thank you for your reply.

Yes, I cleared my cookies and signed out of Google, in fact I just did it again with a formatted tablet and I get the same results, still good positions in Google, many #1 rankings but my traffic still to the floor.

I understand the drop in impressions should mean that my rankings would have fallen, but as I said above, I still have many #1 rankings, so that doesn't seem to be the issue.

Yes, I will have to do that as I can only compare monday now on WMT, but when compared to the previous period (sunday) there are no important changes in Ranking. Having said this, I just realized that the impressions are also being compared to sunday, which will of course be much lower than a week day, so maybe there isn't an impression drop and as you say I will have to wait to compare the whole week against the previous week. But this makes it also more frustrating as I thought I had found a reason why the visits had dropped, but now it doesn't seem to be the case so I am totally clueless about the course of action I should take.

No blocking of Robots.txt either.

[nomis5]

How long has the site been running for?

One reason for the same rankings but lower page views is where a site is topical. For example a baseball site may receive very high page views when an important match is pending and then drop hugely the day after it is played. 50% drops of page views in sites of that, or a similar topical nature, is normal.

[roshaoar]

@nomis5 - what a good point

[svsanchez]

Hello nomis5 and roshaoar, thank you for your replies. The site is 14 years old and I'm sure this is not a topical issue, since it's a horizontal portal for my Country.

If the drop in impressions / visits was only on pages related for example with Valentine's Day then I wouldn't be worried, as I know every year visits to those specific pages go up on and before february 14th, but this is a general drop, meaning visits to such general and different topics as economics, sports, news, etc. have dropped.

WMT was reporting almost 300,000 daily impressions and over 20,000 daily clicks, annd this dropped to less than 50,000 impressions and less than 8,000 clicks yesterday!

I also checked WMT to see if there was any "manual action" against my site but it doesn't report anything. I'm really desperate to find the cause of this to start working on whatever improvement that needs to be done.

[svsanchez]

Hello again, the drop seems to have stabilized at around 48,000 impressions / 8,000 clicks per day from about 280,000 / 22,000 so 83% and 64% drops respectively.

Some of my search terms have actually improved, but the impressions for those terms are still at their lowest.

I found this thread [webmasterworld.com...] with a member who had the same problem but only for 2 terms, while in my case the impressions drop is general. Unfortunately that thread is too old so I couldn't post there to ask if and how they had solved the problem, hopefully somebody will be able to help me a bit here!

[martinibuster]

but I am still ranking well on SERPs

Did you check for changes in percentages of visitors by country?

Did you ask someone in a different geographic area to check the rankings to verify if they match what you see?

[svsanchez]

Hello martinibuster, I did check for changes in percentage of visits by country, also by device (phone, tablet, pc), etc. and the drop is general. About 85% of my traffic comes from my home country and it shows the same behaviour (severe drop in impressions) as other countries.

I did NOT however ask someone in another country to check the rankings since my analytics show me this is worldwide.

What I did notice is that Google searches done in Chrome / Firefox / IE are all showing different results, in some cases very dissimilar. For example one particular search term shows 4th when searched in Firefox while it shows in 12th in Chrome and 10th in IE.

What do you think?

[bluntforce]

You do realize that keyword targets like:
"widgetsB country"
"widgetsC country"
"widgetsD country"

could appear to be doorway pages based on minor keyword variation.

"Country" seems redundant to me, if there isn't a significant difference between "widgetA" and "widgetB" pages, then why would a search engine consider them significant?

Country>Widgets>A/B/C...
would be my preference if widgets were distinct.

[svsanchez]

Hello Bluntforce, thank you for your comment. Yes, my widgets are very different since it is a website for a country, so widgetsA could refer to something like economics, widgetsB could refer to something like tourism, widgetsC could refer to something like health, etc... So no redundance, only different information tailored for people searching for different data but all from the same country.

I have almost 1 week of data now, and the impressions are still rock bottom, even with search terms that have improved their rankings. What can cause this?

It should be:

Loss of ranking => Loss of impressions => Loss of visits

But in this case I have:

Equal or better ranking => Loss of impressions => Loss of visits

I don't know what to do.

[Sally Stitts]

This time last year, I was getting 40,000 hits a day.
Now, I get 15,000 hits a day (revenue cut in half).
Almost nothing has changed on the site, except for additional material (not spammy in any way).

My site is 10 years old, and has 80,000 backlinks.

After studying this for months, I have concluded that:
my traffic has been "dialed back", for reasons beyond my comprehension.

Why? Tell me when you figure it out, because I sure can't.

What is REALLY frustrating are the constant admonitions from Google to "change this" and "change that" for marginal improvement, when in fact, NO CHANGE that I make will ever make up for cutting my traffic in half.
.

[martinibuster]

What I did notice is that Google searches done in Chrome / Firefox / IE are all showing different results, in some cases very dissimilar. For example one particular search term shows 4th when searched in Firefox while it shows in 12th in Chrome and 10th in IE.

What do you think?

Ok, this is leaning toward what I suspected. You're probably not really ranking where you think you are ranking. Your ranking position may have dropped. Google is simply showing you the site where it makes you happy since you probably visit it all the time. It's a form of personalization based on your browsing activities, even if you're logged out.

That is why I asked you to ask others in a different region, city or country to check your rankings, especially in different browsers. If that person's SERP check matches that of someone else's SERP check, and especially if it matches across most browsers, then whatever position they're reporting is your true ranking position.

[svsanchez]

Hello matinibuster, but many of the rankings appear improved or unchanged in WMT, so why would that data reflect the "personalization" if it's taking into account the searches done by the general public and not mine?

[Andem]

"widgetsB country" from 144 to 48
"widgetsC country" from 230 to 113
"widgetsD country" from 99 to 57
"widgets E keyword" from 373 to 251

Looking at those numbers, I'm surprised you got any traffic at all from those keywords. I believe you're looking at the wrong statistics while trying to determine your traffic loss. I would *guess* that your first and second page rankings have fallen for long-tail key terms.

[svsanchez]

Hello Andem, yes I did get traffic from those keywords, since I am ranking very well according to WMT, so I have decent CTRs. In fact, most of my CTRs increased alas not enough to compensante for the loss of impressions. So even having CTRs as high as 60% - 70% which increased some 10% it doesn't compensate at all for the loss in impressions.

I am also starting to notice something: it seems Google is not taking into account new articles I publish in their SERPs. Previously, my articles would get indexed and displayed on google SERPS very quickly and usually well placed, but now they don't appear unless I search for them in my own search box from my site.

[aakk9999]

If you take a longer sentence from your newer article and search for it in quotes, does Google return your site in results?

Have you tried Fetch As Googlebot for a newer article? What do you get?

[martinibuster]

...but many of the rankings appear improved or unchanged in WMT...

WMT ranking information is different from what your eyes saw on Chrome. Do you believe WMT or do you believe your own eyes?

[svsanchez]

@ aakk9999: thank you for your suggestion. I tried googling for a longer sentence from a new article, and Google only showed me the parent category: the new article is listed on that category, and since the long sentence I searched was placed on the intro paragraph it showed me the URL of the parent category, but not the URL of the article itself.

When I tried fetch as googlebot (i had never tried that feature), it appeared as pending and a button allowed me to submit the url. I did the search again this time using a long sentence from deeper on the article and this time Google showed me the URL of the article itself. Unfortunately, when I searched for the article's title, I couldn't find it in the first 3 pages, but I don't know if this is due to the article being just submitted. I will try again tomorrow, meanwhile I will play a little more with the fetch as google page.

@ martinibuster: WMT is, for the most part, the same or very close as what I see in chrome and other browsers SERPs. If WMT reports a given term as being in position 1, I also see it in first place in the SERPs. If it tells me it's in 4th place, I see it in 3rd, 4th or 5th place.

There's only a few terms that I have checked that are "dancing" in the SERPs which show different results accross browsers.

Still, I'm not so worried about my rankings, my real worry is the loss of impressions for terms for which I rank high and which have sent me good amounts of traffic for many years. I need to understand why the number of impressions dropped so drastically so I can start working on getting them back.

[bluntforce]

Since you mention articles and categories, have you searched for site:yoursite.com and did the results match the pages you would expect?

I've seen unintentional duplicate content from content management systems.

I'd also pay attention to what martinibuster is saying. It's simple enough to have someone from a different geographic area check SERPs for you. Rather than theories, it helps to define the issue.

[svsanchez]

Yes, I asked two people from different geographic areas to check, and they get the same results as I do, but as I said this is a very small country with only 3 big ISPs, so the farther geographic areas are pretty close (200 miles radius). I will ask someone from the US to try to force a search to google.com.gt and see what he gets.

Regarding searching for site:yoursite.com I just did it and get more than 2 million results which is what I would expect, but I don't know what you mean about it and articles and categories.

Sorry for my bad English, and thanks again for your continued help!

[bluntforce]

Does Guatemala need a site with millions of informational pages?

I'd guess your problem probably lies in programmatic generation of content.

[svsanchez]

Hello bluntforce, what do you mean by "programmatic generation of content"?

My site will turn 14 years old friday, and it has been updated every day since + it also has forums which were very active a few years ago and thus generated thousands of pages. So many in fact that I couldn't migrate my old forum and had to start a new one.

[aakk9999]

@svsanchez, the forum and the age of the site explains your high number of pages.

Still, 2 milion is quite a lot, are you sure that you do not have a duplicate content issue where the same page content can be shown using many URLs? Forums are particularly bad for this.

A week has passed from your opening post, how are your impressions now comparing to the last week? Do you see any changes?

[svsanchez]

Hello aakk9999, I have tried to keep the number of duplicates as low as possible. My CMS creates a separate page for a "printer version" so I had this problem but about 2 years ago I started adding the rel=canonical to the printer pages so most of that problem should be solved.

My traffic is still down (horrible!). Too bad I can't upload a graphic of the "main pages" from WMT which shows exactly what I have been trying to explain. Seems like I'm the first to experience this nonsense.

I was wondering, since many people seem to believe my problem is due to losing rankings which cut my impressions (although I feel it's more related to losing impressions and thus losing visits) if this could be related to google's most recent algo change (page layout).

Could someone please tell me:

1) If the page layout algo was rolled out on February 6th, should I have been hit by it on that date or could it happen until february 24th?

2) If a new algo hits a site, does it penalize the whole site or only the pages / sections that fall into that algo's scope?

Since the page layout is the closest big algo change I'm wondering if I was hit (at least a little) by it, but since my problem began until the 24th and not all my pages have the same banner layout I don't want to start changing everything without knowing this.

[engine]

Unless i missed it earlier in this thread, have you looked to see if the referrers are actually coming from google from your own urls in the SERPs? What I mean is, were you previously getting referrers from other sites (could be scrapers, could be legitimate directories or other sites) which you're now not getting? These sites would have been using your keywords. Perhaps they've been penalised, and you're now seeing your real traffic levels all along.

[svsanchez]

Hello engine, thank you for your message. More then 80% of my traffic comes from Google, but yes I did check the referers in analytics and it looks normal. Plus, I don't think WMT takes into account the referers when it counts the number of impressions which, to my understanding, is the number of times search queries were searched on google alone.

Thanks to aakk9999 who told me how to show you the graphics I have. As suggested by her, I have uploaded 2 graphics to imgur.com of what WMT tools shows as the main pages to my site. One is from the week BEFORE this all started (from february 17th to february 23rd), with "changes" so you can see how that week compared to the week before. Here's the link:

[i.imgur.com ]

The second graphic shows the past week, from the day it all started (february 24th to march 1st), also with changes so you can see how the impressions, clicks, CTRs and Rankings changed. On this second graphic you will notice a huge dive in the number of impressions and clicks, a nice increase in the CTRs, and my usual ups and downs in rankings.

[i.imgur.com ]

Bottom line is, rankings seem to be the same but I am getting half the traffic because impressions are down 50% to 90%!

Ok I hope I did this correctly as it's the first time I paste a URL on this forum :)

[edited by: aakk9999 at 7:47 pm (utc) on Mar 4, 2014]
[edit reason] Fixed image link (was thumb instead of full image) [/edit]

[aakk9999]

The charts above show "Top pages" and this explains why average position is the same although impressions dropped.

For example, if a page has two keywords (keyword A and keyword B) that drive traffic and both keywords are on position #1, then if keyword A disappears from SERPs, your average position for this page will remain the same (as the keyword B still ranks #1) but the number of impressions and clicks will drop (as there is no more traffic driven by keyword A).

You need to analyse more. What you need is to look at the "Top Queries" (the other tab on the left) and analyse what happened with your keywords. You had the first impressions drop on 21st (from 150,000 to 100,000) then another drop on 24th (to 70,000 impressions) and then on 25th down to 30,000 impressions. All together it seems you have lost 80% of your impressions.

Firstly, I would split the periods as follows (4-days each) and produced the following charts:

a) 17-20 Feb
b) 21-24 Feb
c) 25-28 Feb

What you want to find is what happened with keywords. The first crude comparison is a number of keywords driving traffic. What does it say for each of these three periods?

Secondly, look at the top 10 keywords on chart a). Try to find where are these keywords on chart b) and c), compare impressions, clicks and avg. position.

The results of this investigation should give you indication on where to drill down next.

[svsanchez]

Hello aakk9999, thank you for your answer.

Ok, I understand now, what I am looking at is my pages which are still ranking well for SOME keywords, but you are right, their ranking dropped for OTHER keywords. I just analyzed the top 25 keywords from the week from february 17th to 23rd versus 02/24 to 03/02 and there are many changes, then I found the option to "filter" for the keywords I had on the previous week and in most cases there is a loss in ranking, even some very important losses in ranking.

So now that I know this (and even in some cases I still see the drop in impressions with keywords that ketp their rankings but I don't care about that anymore) I would like to know what caused this sudden fall in my rankings, I had been very well placed for years for many of them. Is there a way I can figure this out?

A) Could this be the latest "page layout" algorithm change from february 6th, even if my problem started until the 24th?

B) When an algorithm change is "unleashed", does it affect a whole site or only the pages within that site that fall into the algorithm's scope?

Thank you!