Loss of 85-90% of organic traffic within the last 2 weeks.

[Whebb]

Hey Everybody,

Have a client that recently came to us asking for SEO help. Did some initial analysis on their current SEO status and most everything looked pretty good. On-page work was pretty good, nothing really lacking there other then missing alt tags for all images. Their linking profile looked good too. Lots of good links from quality sources, all relevant. Client has done some good press releases. They could probably use a bit more focus in their content as it is somewhat general and not keyword focused. Initially it didn't look like they needed any help with their SEO, so was a bit curious as to why they contacted us.

Today we get their google analytics information and immediately noticed that they have had a 85-90 percent drop in organic traffic from all major search engines that started about two weeks ago. If all their SEO looks to be done properly, any ideas what would account for the massive drop in traffic? The only thing that looks like may have happened is that they may have dropped a couple spots from position #1 to position 2-3 for some of their highest traffic terms.  Even if that is the case, I would not expect such a high drop off in terms of organic traffic.

Just curious as to what anyone else can attribute the huge drop in traffic to or what else may help identify the issue. It's almost as if analytics was turned off or removed from the site, but that is not the case.

[Whebb]

So, just from doing a bit more investigation, I read Google rolled out a new algorithm update a couple weeks ago, (around the same time the traffic dropped) Google Hummingbird, and my initial impressions of this are that, Google is now trying to interpret your search phrases as opposed to just reading them and returning matching results.  This clients site is built around some wording that could be interrupted as slang. So it looks like instead of returning the clients site when these keywords are typed in, google is now returning slang term results, since my guess is that more often then not people were looking for the slang term not the clients site, resulting in the massive traffic drop. Has anyone seen anything similar?

[EGOL]

copyright infringement

downloads / malware

hidden text

duplicate content

noindex applied by dumb designer

bad robots.txt

Lots of things could cause this problem.

[Whebb]

copyright infringement

• No they are the copyright/trademark holder.

downloads / malware

• Checked webmaster tools, noting is listed there under the malware section. Is there another way to check this?

hidden text

• No, there is none of this.

duplicate content

• Did some searches for this and did not find anything.

noindex applied by dumb designer

• Ha, I wish, but no.

bad robots.txt

• No, nothing is being blocked that should not be.

Thanks for the suggestions, anything else worth checking?

[zoicaremus]

Hi,

1. Maybe you should check the exact timing of the drop in organic search with the latest algorithm updates visible on:

http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

2. Also, you could check to see if other SEO's here had similar problems in August:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17268.html

3. If they dropped a few positions in SERP's check your competitors backlinks, especially the "Just Discovered" section of open site explorer, maybe they do some shady stuff.

[Jonathan1979]

If you post a link we might be able to see if anything obvious shows up in the metrics.

[Whebb]

Hey Remus,

While it doesn't coincide with the exact time that the last algorithm hit, it could be that it just took time to go through the web. I found another post mentioning something on September 17th (http://moz.com/community/q/what-happened-on-september-17-on-google) and this is the exact day we saw the dramatic loss in organic traffic, so it seems that it's possible something has happened on that day if this client is not the only one to run into issues. Also I would kind of seem to go along with what was mentioned as being changed in the new update, in that google is interpreting the results now.

[fablau]

Yes, I got the exact same issue on September 17th, but the drop in traffic was around 10% from Google only. It is really bad for us because usually from mid September traffic is picking up toward the Holiday season.

I am trying to understand what caused that drop in traffic. I have opened a thread about my own issue starting on September 17th:

http://moz.com/community/q/what-happened-on-september-17-on-google

Jonathan1979: what kind of metrics would you like to see? I'll be glad to share as much as I can. Thanks!