Traffic halved overnight - Can't find a reason

[surfgatinho]

One of my sites went from around 4k visitors per day to 2k overnight. Looking at the analytics it's like a cliff edge between April 2 and April 3.

I've been on the Search Console and there is nothing to report - no errors. The performance graph shows both impressions and clicks dropping dramatically but position and CTR remain constant.

I don't really do much in the way of overt SEO these days so I doubt it is some kind of penalty. I also don't really keep up to date with Google algo changes - unless I have a problem - but I like to think my sites are good quality and don't usually get touched.

Any ideas what might have caused this?

[tangor]

Check your raw logs to confirm the traffic drop.

Wonder if the old number (4k) was over stated by g and the 2k version is the corrected. (Such as counting images AND pages together then shifting to pages only?)

[surfgatinho]

Check your raw logs to confirm the traffic drop.

Traffic definitely down as the advertising revenue took the same hit.

[surfgatinho]

For the record this is an old, established site I have been running for almost 10 years without anything weird like this happening.

[Dimitri]

I've been on the Search Console and there is nothing to report - no errors.

It might take a while, for a problem to be reported in the Search Console. Be sure to check all the sections, such as "manual action" too.

In the "old" times (early 2000's), I had a site with 10.000 visitors per day, which, within a matter of a minutes went to 1.000 visitors. It took me a while to figure what was wrong, and it was because my content had been scrapped, and all my pages in the SERP, had been replaced by these copies. After weeks, I succeeded to get Google to remove the scapper site, but it was a pain. This is since that time, that I am actively monitoring the activity at my sites, and blocking massive amount of "suspect" traffic.

[LuckyLiz]

The performance graph shows both impressions and clicks dropping dramatically but position and CTR remain constant.

Did you dig down into the queries to see if you lost position any high volume keywords for your top pages?

[surfgatinho]

Did you dig down into the queries to see if you lost position any high volume keywords for your top pages?

Same cliff edge pattern across a range of unrelated keywords - but not all.

I seem to have lost the top spot on a number of keywords, but not gradually - just bang! Pre April 2 - 4k visitors a day / after 2k...

I'm not too worried about this site as it wasn't a huge earner but would really like to get to the bottom of what could cause this, short of a penalty - which IMHO would be completely unwarranted.

[Dimitri]

May be more content was added on top of the SERP fo your keywords (answer box, videos, news, ads, etc...) pushing you lower on the page.

Is it on both mobile and desktop traffic ?

[surfgatinho]

Is it on both mobile and desktop traffic ?

Across the board.

The 2 pages now outranking me on one particular search are 2018 and 2014 - so not really new content. I do still have the info box list at the top of the page.

[surfgatinho]

Still looking for any issues that may have caused this. The only change I have found that coincides with my traffic drop is on the "Mobile usability" section of the Search Console. The number of valid pages jumps from around 200 to 350.

[JS_Harris]

Check the top of your .htaccess file for coding that redirects visitors coming from search engines.

[tangor]

Also check htaccess for any bot exclusions/regex patterns which might affect new bot rollouts from g ... they do change. :)

[surfgatinho]

Thanks, but none of the above seem to address the problem.
.htaccess is pretty much standard Wordpress with very little modification by me. Any bot type filtering is done at server level and all my other sites are doing great.

The keywords seem to be across the board. That kind of drop would suggest an algo or competitor related change, if this was the case I don't think the drop would be so sudden. I wish I could post an image of the chart - looks pretty much like this: ŻŻŻ|___

I feel it is some kind of penalty, but the content is (IMHO) high quality, authoritative and original.

To add some details the site is mainly list based and deals with anything dangerous - mainly animals. As mentioned it is a Wordpress site. However, there is a bolt on bespoke database section detailing thousands of incidents. I did wonder if this could be considered thin content, but as mentioned the penalty is across the site and most of my traffic was to the standard posts.

Next step I think will be to noindex the incident database pages...

[tangor]

Before you go making major changes to your site chasing lost "whatever" ... read through the rest of the posts here at WW ... MANY HAVE SEEN THE SAME THING for no apparent reason. G changed things, and that change in the black box affected a lot of folks!

[not2easy]

There is one scenario that can take a little investigation to find that can cause this same steep drop: when someone is showing your domain on theirs.

One recent case is here: [webmasterworld.com...] though there are several such discussions that involve using an iframe. Some are easily detected by examining access logs.

[surfgatinho]

@not2easy this may not be the exact issue but I did find some interesting things whilst looking for duplicate content.

When searching for phrases from my site I'm either seeing my site is nowhere to be seen or it is lower than copied content - sometimes on really sketchy looking sites and sometimes facebook posts.

This is for pages that were #1 in Google for years up until 6 weeks ago. Search Console says they are indexed but the SERPs are suggesting otherwise.

@tangor I spent hours sifting through posts but found nothing that helps.

[pbaddock]

If it's a wordpress site, consider things like the old Yoast attachment bug or a flood of thin pages finding their way into the index (yoast settings change? archives?) - unlikely to be Yoast attachments given it's almost a year since that was prevalent, but have you had a lot of new pages indexed? I've had a site go from 9000 to under a 1000 overnight due to panda style hit from thin content Maybe look at the bounce rates / time on page or the database on incidents you mention - if there are thousands of pages, light-on for stats it could be an issue. Are users interacting or bouncing off these pages? With Panda baked in these days, I tend to see this sending ranks down however not falling off a cliff. As others have suggested - checking carefully to ensure it was a real drop is sensible (revenue seems like a good indicator if the revenue wasn't driven purely by page views). Try before and after searching/filtering in GA's search console reports - put in various keywords to see if the drop was based on one of the major keyword themes feeding you traffic or equal across the board. I find this better than looking at rank reports unless you're tracking hundreds / thousands of keywords.

[surfgatinho]

Traffic seems to be returning. Graph has gone into reverse.

I wish I could say for sure what the problem was and what I did to fix it, but having tried so many things it is hard to tell which did the trick.

Looking back it seems to coincide to some degree with a server move. That's not to say this was the root cause - I may well have "tweaked" the site once on the new server. However, what I did do just before the stats started improving was change the hosting from Nginx to Apache - I notice some of the URLs with trailing slashes were giving 404s ...

Anyway, I'll see what happens over the next few days, but the recovery is looking pretty much as dramatic as the drop.

[surfgatinho]

Back off the cliff again...

Up to June 20th ~3k+ clicks per day - June 21st on ~950 clicks. Absolutely no indication what is causing this...

[JS_Harris]

Cloudflare has been having major issues and has been down for parts of days going on two weeks now. At one point yesterday half the internet was down according to [datacenterdynamics.com...]

Some signs of targeted and extended attacks between the US vs Saudi Arabia and China vs Saudi Arabia according to their charts, something political or oil related no-doubt.

Anyway, take this as an opportunity to get away from cloudflare dependency. By removing cloudflare you remove an extra fail point that, obviously, is likely to fail eventually. While these dramaticv outages are news I see sites having blips lasting 2-3 minutes with the cloudflare down image. It's almost like advertising for them.

If your traffic primarily comes from one country you don't need it, use htaccess to protect yourself with, learn how today.

Note: even if you don't use cloudflare perhaps your data gathering provider does, or some other part of your 3rd party services or even the hosting did, and it cascaded.

[surfgatinho]

I wish I could point the finger at Cloudflare, or my hosting but I don't think it is. I run 3 other sites on the same setup and they have all been fine - traffic increasing actually.

Figure I'll just give it another few weeks and see if the traffic picks up again. If not I'll start removing things one by one...

[surfgatinho]

Also, it is only traffic from Google that is dropping. Other search engines are still providing the same number of visitors.

[tangor]

G is changing ... and some of those changes are ideological, not web based. Not saying that is your specific ... but is something to consider.