Hello,
Difficult times with lockdown and now a confusing May core update but I have some data in front of me that I don't know what to make of via analytics. What's your take?
Firstly the site is old evergreen circa 2007 with stellar rankings, solid traffic and high quality original content. It has sailed through every core update, until now. Well, MAYBE until now. I say maybe because the data I see makes no sense whatsoever(to me).
- The site did not lose traffic in early may, it didn't falter until the 27th and it went down 75% according to server data, analytics and adsense earnings. The loss is very real.
- Analytics says DIRECT traffic has trippled(YES, INCREASED x3) butsearch traffic is down 75% from EVERY engine(Bing & Yahoo had no update so makes no sense)
- The site has not had any downtime
So what's going on? Additionally my search console shows me the massive loss but only under the partial data tag for now. I looked for pages/keywords in which I lost traffic and found a few.
- Former #1 is now a dual entry at #4 and #5 for different pages of my site
- Former #4-5 is now #1(going from dual entry to single as well)
So what seems to be happening is for the rankings I didn't hold I fell from first to 4th AND 5th while the sites occupying the 4th AND 5th jumped to 1st, very odd behavior. Also this is impacting only SOME of the keywords generating traffic to a page, not all of them, suggesting the content hasn't fallen at all.
- All three search engines sending a third of the traffic starting from the same moment suggests site issues or downtime but that's not the case.
- The amount of direct traffic trippling suggests people who found my content via search are now visiting directly OR Google is having issues OR google has some new way of classifying what is direct traffic
Lastly, and this is confusing too, according to search console the amount of impressions and clicks from a page fell 75% but the rank of each keyword and CTR remain the same, how is that even possible?
Something feels broken here and not on my end. The fact Yahoo and Bing traffic moved in the same direction, by the same amount, at the same time suggests.... I dunno, the site had ZERO downtime this month, confirmed twice with my rep over the phone.
WHAT is going on with google?
