Huge Dip in Traffic Last Week - New Algo Update?

[Travis-W]

Hi Mozzers,

We experienced a huge dip in traffic on Thursday, 8/14, across our entire site.  It was not a specific set of pages, it was sitewide.  Google Webmaster Tools notes our impressions are down as well.  The traffic has not recovered.  It appears our pages are still indexed in Google, just not ranking well.

Here are some questions I have to help isolate the cause:

1. We recently completed a major redesign of our entire website on 7/26.  We did not notice any dip in traffic after the new design launch - in fact, it actually increased a bit. Is it possible that only now Google sees our new site design and this is the reason for our dip?  Is there a way to see Google's past cache dates?
2. Did anyone else experience a similar dip in traffic since Thursday?
3. Was there a recent Google update?

It would be much appreciated if someone takes a look at our site - www.consumerbase.com for any glaring SEO errors (missing necessary meta tags, etc.).

What steps do you guys suggest I take to isolate the cause in this dip in traffic?

Thanks!

[MrWoc]

Why does your site redirect to index.html when i goto the url ?

[ecommercebc]

There's a good chance that the issues you're experiencing are related to your redesign, but as an FYI there has been rumblings of a Penguin update over the past week or so. There's a bit more coverage over at SERoundtable, which might be worth taking a look at: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-three-19009.html

[David-Kley]

1. Google likes to see fresh new content, so the fact that you saw an increase in your ranking for a short period is not a huge surprise. Once they crawled all the pages, you saw the realistic position of your pages.

"Is there a way to see Google's past cache dates?"
You could try using this:
http://www.googleguide.com/cached_pages.html

2. We moved down one spot. Doesn't look like it.

I think you are seeing movement due to an error in the sites documents, meaning redirects, sitemaps, etc. Check to make sure all items and old pages have been redirected and resubmitted.

[evolvingSEO]

To my knowledge this was just speculation by the author "reading between the lines" and there was no such update.

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Few recommendations;

• Your robots.txt may be blocking CSS/JS - http://www.consumerbase.com/robots.txt which is now something Google recommends NOT blocking. See this article for backstory and about the fetch and render tool in webmaster tools.

• How long has the homepage redirected to /index.html? Google does they they actually sort this out for you, and it doesn't quite cause the harm some people assume - but it can't hurt to use the normal domain for the homepage.

• This one returns a 404 http://www.consumerbase.com/index.php

• One troubling issue is that bad URLs don't return a 404, they 301 to the homepage: http://www.consumerbase.com/bad - I'd highly consider using a standard 404 not found response code with an error message.

• This ALSO makes it impossible to run a proper crawl test on the site to check for bad pages. It's possible old pages are not being 301 redirected to the right new pages when they break, and you're losing traffic because Google won't pass value if the redirects don't match in content (more info here)

Did you change URLs with the redesign? It doesn't look like it, but just checking. You may want to export a list of trafficked pages prior to the migration from analytics, and run a crawl test on them. As said above, this is almost impossible to test properly right now because bad URLs 301, and aren't being picked up as 404s.

In terms of next steps. You have to get really granular. Segment, segment, segment - and isolate things until you find a "smoking gun" (which you don't always find, but you should look for).

The redesign date seems suspect - and your increase in traffic could have been in the lag time Google has from crawling and caching the updated site. It's just my hunch about the redesign - I'd look thoroughly everywhere.

[David-Kley]

There was a Panda update that happened on September 5th. For reference:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-update-19126.html

http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/panda-update-september-5-2014/