Analyzing Traffic Drops That DON'T Coincide With Major Updates

[Planet13]

Any suggestions on analyzing traffic drops when they DON'T coincide with the various Panda and Penguin updates?

One of my sites (an ecommerce site) lost nearly 50% of its visitors around April 19th, 2013. We are based in the US.

Looking at a list of google updates, that puts it a month AFTER panda 25 and about two weeks before the Phantom update and nearly a month before Penguin.

I've had a few other significant drops (and sometimes gains) in traffic and they aren't on the exact dates of updates as well. For example, we have seen drops that were a week after a Panda update, or a gain a week before Hummingbird.

Is it a google brain cramp? Were they just not that into my site any more? Is it a case of the "google makes 500 updates a year to its algorithm so blah, blah, blah..."?

It doesn't seem like a single page / keyword was lost, but more like a global loss across ALL products.

I am PRETTY sure that it wasn't a problem with our google analytics installation.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[goodroi]

I know you are pretty good at playing this game but for the sake of being thorough and to help the less experienced people I am going to post a bunch of things to consider that you probably already did:

-Make sure analytics is installed correctly
-Make sure analytics doesn't include traffic from sites that stole your content and republished your analytics code
-Look for sites that stole your content and might have kicked your site out of serps due to duplicate content
-Fire up the VPN to see how the serps are being displayed in different areas, universal serps & adwords can steal big traffic
-Double check that your site is healthy (no errors or hosting issues or htacess of robots.txt mistakes)
-Check out google trends, the consumers might be using different vocabulary making your keywords off target
-Make sure the site isn't hacked which could be secretly diverting traffic elsewhere
-Make sure the traffic drop is just Google SEO drop and not something else
-Check backlinks, I'm not just talking about negative SEO attack. I'm also talking about a friend giving you a ROS link that accidentally makes your anchor text look artificial or a partner site that deleted a big traffic generating link to your site.

[Planet13]

Thank you, goodroi;

Thanks for the reminder list. Yes, I did double check all of the above at that time.

I will probably have to look at various historical backlink reports for unusual activity.

The drops LOOKED like the type of drop one would expect from a site wide penalty, such as Panda or Penguin. (The site doesn't seem to have been hit by ANY animal-related update of any kind).

[Sand]

It's possible that it was Panda. It's part of the core algorithm now, but even back when it wasn't, they didn't announce every single data refresh.

I know this, because I was hit by a refresh in April of 2012. I posted here, and even tweeted to Matt Cutts asking if Panda rolled out. Matt didn't answer, and I couldn't find anyone else who saw the same thing as me. But it sure *felt* like Panda.

Eventually, I emailed Barry Schwartz and sent him a screenshot of my traffic pattern. With that, he was able to get confirmation that there was an unannounced Panda data refresh on the exact date my traffic dropped.

That's a long winded way to say that Google doesn't tell us everything, and it's possible that they ran an unannounced refresh that hit you.

[Sally Stitts]

My two execution days were May 1, 2014 and Thanksgiving Day Nov. 27, 2014, FWIW.
I still can't figure it out.
January 2013 - $600/day.
After May 1, 2014 - $100/day.
After Thanksgiving 2014, $10/day. No explanation, whatsoever. Thanks, Goofle.

On another front, after just ONE WEEK, media.net is paying me $60/day.
Bye-bye Goofle. This is a classic "no-brainer".
.

[Planet13]

@ Sand:

Thanks for the info.

Do you know the date you got hit in April of 2012?

It seems to me - whether announced or unannounced - it would be hard for google to keep Panda refreshes a secret. So I am a little surprised that there wouldn't be a mention of some kind on the various sites that track updates.

(Also, I guess I should mention that I am still unclear on the differences between an update and a refresh.)

[dethfire]

There are always secret updates. Google doesn't confirm everything.

[Planet13]

There are always secret updates. Google doesn't confirm everything.

Understood.

But when there IS an update - secret or not - there is usually a pretty big discussion amongst the blogosphere about whether there was an update or not, and there is generally at least a mention on the (third-party) site that track updates a of a POSSIBLE update.