Help. Recently my organic traffic has dropped 40%. Any advice / ideas?

[Humanovation]

Interestingly, our site traffic is down ~ 25% in the past 3 weeks as well, with no loss in keyword rankings.  We are presently assuming that it has something to do with Google's removal of the separators from between paid ads and organic search results.

Just something to think about ...

[kimtastic]

Thanks for your help. My url is www.HomeSpellingWords.com.  I've been tracking my ranks in Moz and it seems like my site is getting a little better every week.  However, my page views are steadily dropping, while my rank remains the same or better.  The CTR for ads has not changed much.  It's almost like I'm ranked but invisible?  Anyway, I rank fairly well for many good keywords like spelling words, 1st grade spelling words, 2nd grade...etc and so forth.  I've never done any kind of strange link building - was too busy and maybe too lazy.

When I think about this problem, it seems like I'm there (ranked) but invisible???

I need to get an imgur account - will upload images if I can find some that make sense.

[kimtastic]

I guess that would at least make me feel better in that it's not something I did wrong.  Thanks for responding.  I feel like my site became invisible.  I hope traffic comes back!

[mrkidd1985]

I work for a UK company, and by the looks of things the school holidays and easter played a part in the slight traffic drop for us.

[evolvingSEO]

My initial thought is "ads above the fold". It's hard to tell in Archive.org's archive of your old design, but it looks like ad space increased a lot on the new site? You have the block on the left which kind of interferes with the content, as well as the banner ad on the right which is pretty large (but doesn't distract from the content much).

Plus these ads are not just on the homepage, they are on the inner content pages as well.

They way Matt Cutts explained "ads above the fold" - it's not so much you need to cut down the pixel size of ads, but make sure not ALL your pages have too many ads - so only make a %% of pages on your site have ads, and some not.

I would play with how ads are appearing on the site to begin with.

Your issue does not sound like a migration error, because that is usually immediate. This sounds like something Google takes a little longer to process (page layout / design, user metrics, ads etc).

[kimtastic]

I agree.  I checked and found that I got much less traffic than last year though.  Thanks for answering!  My traffic really dies on holidays.

[kimtastic]

Thanks.  That's good information.  I have to say, I really dislike the huge ad on the right.  I kept getting emails from Google saying that I don't have enough ads and that they should be bigger.  So, I gave in and put bigger ads and three per page as they suggested.

I did actually move the main ad down a bit below copy, which it used to be right up top before any copy.  I also removed an anchored ad in mobile that sat at the bottom of the page no matter what.

Is it possible that Google asked me to do something (more and bigger ads) and then punished me for it?

My bounce rate is lower than it has ever been so I don't think users are put off.  I'm sure some of my problem is ad blockers and lower click through on mobile ads as mobile traffic increases - but that is not my immediate problem - that's a long slow decline of income.

I think I will play with the ads and also see about the new information on adsense about how much ad is visible as I am sure that will have an impact on future revenue too.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Kimberly

I don't think Google did anything to purposely hurt the site. The AdWords and Organic search depts are really huge in themselves, and I don't think there is much cross-conversation there. What sort of quality scores are you getting from AdWords for your pages? Are they good?

Bounce rate is a weird metric. A lower bounce rate could be bad too, because users are maybe not easily finding what they want on the landing page and are forced to click around.

Definitely play with the ads. Keep specific notes about what you change and when. And keep in mind, it may take some time (weeks) to reflect in any ranking change.

You should also make a proper 404 page in the template/design of your site - it's just the default server message. These sort of things help show Google you are a responsible site owner

Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links

[TheWebMastercom]

I agree, Easter weekend was quiet for us as well.  Starting to pick up again now though.

[kimtastic]

I think this is the problem! I checked and found that Google thinks I have double the pages now.  Maybe they are thinking I have duplicate content.  I will fix this asap. THANK YOU!!!

"Internally, you should also avoid linking to 301 redirects. Link straight to your final URL. For example you link to http://www.homespellingwords.com/About (capitol A) but it redirects to http://www.homespellingwords.com/about (lowercase a). This hurts crawl efficiency and reduces how link authority flows through the site. This happens a LOT on your site, so update all your links,"

[evolvingSEO]

Kimberly

You're welcome. To clarify, there is no duplicate content penalty for this. It just means Google can't crawl your site as efficiently and also might not pass link value (page authority) to all the pages as strongly as they might otherwise.

This article is pretty advanced, but explains the idea of crawl optimization really well.

[evolvingSEO]

Kimberly

Here's a little more background straight from Google on "duplicate content" - http://www.thesempost.com/duplicate-content-penalty-exception/