21 Dec 2015 - site bounce rate went high for no apparent reason

[bajsee]

Hi all. New here. Just joined to ask some questions. Never saw such traffic behavior before so I wanted to discuss it with you.
I own a few sites in different niches. All are doing well as I play by the book.

But one site was "hit" on 21 Dec 2015. The traffic before that date was around 1000 unique sessions per day, which is good, considering this is a very specific niche site and only locally important (no, it's not "Ohio Dentist in Ohio).
The reason I put hit in quotes is that I still get the same traffic to the site (all main keywords are still #1 - did not change), only the bounce rate went up. So, it's the same number of sessions / users to the site, but bounce rate went up, resulting in lower pageviews. Also, time on site hasn't changed that much.

Now, before that date adsense on that site was earning really nice money, but now fell down about 90%. And I don't get it.
I mean, I understand that ads sometimes earn more, sometimes less - this is natural - but this looks like the site would start to receive irrelevant traffic (visitors).

Why all of a sudden bounce rate went up, but traffic to the site stayed the same? Site is still ranking for main 3 keywords as #1 on google.COM and these 3 keywords bring about 90% of traffic to the site.

And no, I haven't changed anything on the site - like layout or something (as this could increase bounce rate).
The only thing that changed was the IP of the website (I moved it from USA to EUROPE). But like I said, traffic and ranking stayed mostly the same and most visitors (95%) are still from USA.

Where's the catch?
My only guess would be that google changed something and that now I'm receiving irrelevant traffic.
Site has very strong backlinks (natural), from influental pages like news sites (abcnews), huffpost, some .edu sites etc. This site is not dropped domain, it has been the same for years with steady traffic.


I would appreciate your comments on this.

[glakes]

My only guess would be that google changed something and that now I'm receiving irrelevant traffic.

Welcome to zombie land. You may want to visit [webmasterworld.com...] because you are not alone in this problem.

[bajsee]

Yeah, I stumbled upon that thread also. Seems like this is no myth. I'm still waiting for my site to "bounce" back - if it will happen at all.
It's now new year and I'm not expecting adsense to perform that well anyway (budgets are depleted, new campaigns are being launched...), but FEB / MAR should perform better.

I did some more research in GWT and here's another fun fact. Daily impressions went up from average 2000 to 3000+ in January. I believe this has something to do with the trend of my niche, but still. More traffic, 90% lower conversion (for me "conversion" is clicking on ads).

How did you get out of this sandbox or how did you got rid of zombies? Any cures?

Again, this site really has good natural backlinks and I can't see how it got into this?

[Robert Charlton]

Though the "zombie" effect immediately came to mind, there are several other potentially related issues.

The only thing that changed was the IP of the website (I moved it from USA to EUROPE). But like I said, traffic and ranking stayed mostly the same and most visitors (95%) are still from USA

That's not a small change. The change of hosting, eg, possibly could affect...
a) Site performance (eg, site speed)
b) Geo-location factors.

Conceivably, these might be affecting you directly, or they might have caused the site to be shifted into a test area. I've seen that large changes in a site, eg, can cause Google to look more carefully, re-evaluate backlinks, etc. Change of hosting shouldn't normally do that, but it might.

With regard to your self-description...

...very specific niche site and only locally important....

This makes me ask... where are your inbound links coming from? If the site is "only locally important", it would make sense that its backlinks should come from the geo area which the site is targeting. A move from hosting the site in the US to hosting in Europe might cause Google to check localization issues more carefully.

How closely does the timeframe of the apparent change in visitor behavior relate to your move and hosting change?

The above is speculation only... but it should be said that simply saying "zombies" doesn't get into the potential issues very deeply.

[bajsee]

@Robert
thanks for your insights. What you mentioned above crossed my mind also. But the I checked GA and GWT and there's no sign of traffic decline (in terms of raw new users to the site, pageviews did decrease). Still, most of the traffic is from USA, just like before - I did compare 21 NOV thru 21 DEC 2015 versus 22 DEC 2015 thru 22 JAN 2016 and checked the traffic sources, keywords, etc. It is approximately the same. No major fluxes there.

Regarding webpage speed - this site now serves faster as I put it on private VPS with dedicated 100Mbps uplink, dedicated CPU, SSD disk and RAM.

Regarding backlinks - most of the backlinks are from USA based sites as these are usually local sites that backlink to my site in addition to larges sites such as WSJ.COM, huffpost and others.

Regarding time frame - I did the shift from USA IP to EU IP on 8 DEC 2015. According to my GWT "Pages crawled per day" I see a major crawl rate increase on 9 DEC (which correlates closely) and then another spike on 15 DEC. There is also large increase in "Kilobytes downloaded per day" on 10 DEC. It seems to me, based on these numbers, that google recrawled my site on new IP on 9-10 DEC. Still, on 21 DEC this decrease in pageviews and increase in bouncerate happened. I believe that it takes some time for google to "reconsider" a site based on new metrics so this could correlate too.

Regarding "zombie traffic" - I am not a person who believes in conspiracies and I know that small sites are prone to traffic / conversion fluxes (I've seen it on my other sites) but this site performed very well for past 3 years with no major fluxes (some small trend fluxes only).
But never before have I seen such traffic patterns - increase in bounce rate and decrease in pageviews while maintaining the same number of visitors. This could happen for example when you change layout or site gets hacked, but none of this applies to my site.

So.......

Any other suggestions / tips would be greatly appreciated.

[bajsee]

Any other thoughts?

[Robert Charlton]

...other thoughts?

Yes, more thoughts, and some conjecture. Unfortunately, no time right now to elaborate as much as I'd like.

You may be looking at your target phrases simply as phrases, whereas Google may now be evaluating your site's rankings on those phrases in terms, say, of new levels of quality or user intention. That's something that's much more complex, making old keyword authority-based rankings possibly not all satisfactory. I'm suspecting we're going to see a lot of testing in this area as Google's machine learning gets "trained" on different kinds of traffic, and re-evaluates what had been ranking before under more stringent criteria.

It may be, for example, that some of the traffic you're seeing now demands content that's more comprehensive than what you're offering. If it's a "life or death" kind of query, it may be that Google may now be interpreting the query "placename dentist" to mean that searchers are looking for a site that will include advice about what to do before you see a dentist. Maybe that bar of quality will even require that the content be written by medical professionals.

I don't know what might apply in your case, but I strongly believe that those are the kinds of quality considerations that Google is beginning to look at. Whether this is what is affecting you is hard to say.

[Andy Langton]

It may not be possible, but I would be sorely tempted to switch back to the old host and see what happens.

Otherwise, the question is what's different about the traffic. How much like-for-like data do you have (ideally not Google Analytics data)?

[bajsee]

Hi. I did just this - switched back to USA IP. I did so yesterday so I will wait for some time to see if the traffic reshapes.

The difference is that now the same traffic just does not "convert" anymore (adsense went down 66-90%).

Unfortunately I don't have other statistics other than GWT and GA. Didn't need that much details for this website...

[Andy Langton]

The difference is that now the same traffic just does not "convert" anymore (adsense went down 66-90%).

I was thinking more of a methodical approach to dissecting it. Any difference in user-agents, screen resolution, anything!

Hi. I did just this - switched back to USA IP. I did so yesterday so I will wait for some time to see if the traffic reshapes.

Will be interesting to see what happens. Make sure you report back in a week or so! :)

[bajsee]

Thanks for this tip - I will check this factor also.

I will dig deeper, but so far from google analytics I've found out this:
most traffic still from usa - no change here,
traffic bounce rate increase, page per session decrease,
time on site about the same,
mobile traffic the same, desktop traffic higher bounce rate (this is a bit odd)

[bumpski]

I'm curious, what have you set your "Country" to in International Targeting?

See WMT Webmaster Tools (now Search Console)
Search Traffic->International Tools->Country Tab

You can choose "unlisted" but I'm fairly sure that's not the default.

Here's a link talking about the specifics:
[support.google.com...]

[bumpski]

Another thought, Adsense itself may have to "relearn" all your pages (Couldn't say why, other than the country IP). It could be the Ads are inappropriate for your audience and if they are not clicked on your bounce rate would go up for every ad not clicked.

So do the ads themselves look targeted? (Its hard to tell anymore!)

[bajsee]

I've checked the ads and from my IP (Europe) they don't look much related nor did they look related before 21 DEC. From my IP these are mostly "interest based" ads that are displaying and so google is showing me ads for my recent searches which is, of course, unrelated.

I really can't test from USA IP as I don't use proxies, nor do I know people from USA to help me out.

But I did check adsense graphs for pre 21.DEC and post 21.DEC clicks and guess what? Before 21 DEC most clicks were on "contextual ads" and now most clicks are on "interest based" ads. "contextual ads" are earning 0€ now. This could closely relate to what @bumpski said! But on the other hand - google taking more than 1 month for adsense bot to recrawl the whole site (which, by the way is only about a few dozen articles) seems a bit unreal to me.


As a side note:
I did set geo targeting as:
Previous target: -
New target: United States
But that was quite some time ago.

but then I switched back to "none" as there were no obvious boost in traffic from USA (I tested for 45 days).
I switched off this option so the site is not targeting USA audience anymore (option to target is now unticked).

Traffic from USA however did not change during any period.

[bumpski]

This Adsense post could be related?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[bajsee]

I appreciate the link, but this isn't my case. I am generating money each day with this site, and there are clicks and pageviews registered in adsense for this particular site. Also, my other sites are at the same rate as before 21 DEC (more or less).

The problem really looks like it could be due to "contextual ads" not earning any more cash on that site.
The way I see it this could be due to "irrelevant" contextual ads.
Or
It can be due to some powerful campaign ended and did not restart.
But I may be wrong.

Before 21 DEC there were 30-40 clicks per day on average (never less than that) with some nice CPC, now there are only about 5 clicks per day on average, CPC is about the same.

/edit: added some details.

[bajsee]

I analyzed adsense graphs a bit. Seems that now the only thing that's still earning money are the so called "placement" ads. "contextual" ads earnings basically dropped to 0 while "interest based" ads earn some money.
Some days there's no earnings from "contextual" and "interest based" ads, only from "placement" ads.

[Andy Langton]

When you talked about bounce rates in the original post, would this have included or not included people clicking ads?

[bajsee]

I am talking about "overall" bounce rate - what GA reports for this site which takes into account people that already "bounced off" of site via ads.

[bajsee]

Traffic still the same.
Still no contextual ads on the site...
Depressing.

[JS_Harris]

Zombie traffic isn't a conspiracy, I think we've all seen it happen at one time or other, usually near the holiday shopping season for some reason.

I'm actually reading post after post here on webmasterworld tonight because I'm hoping to come up with ideas to solve my own website concerns with. I've made some site changes recently and am in the 'wait for effect' period and, unfortunately, I seem to have timed my changes with changes happening in general. My webmaster tools account, for example, is showing me traffic data that is a week old at this point(from Feb 23rd). Another site I own just received a huge spike in crawling(8x normal) which sometimes happens before a rankings change(usually a bad one). There *might* be something moving in the form of a major update(1%+ of queries) right now, but there's no way to know for sure yet.

Contextual ads, have the settings in your adsense account blocked section changed?

[bajsee]

No changes in adsense regarding contextual ads. I have no reason to switch them off manually.
But my problem is not in contextual ads but in decline of traffic. The target audience is "gone", therefore there are no conversions in adsense....