Traffic drop after Facebook push

[ScottOlson]

Hi all,

We experienced a strange phenonema after a Facebook push, it appears the Google organic traffic was all but dead for five days after. Totally not sure why!

It has since returned to about 80% of previous levels.

http://postimg.org/image/3n1b7m7hf/

[DirkC]

Did you seem a similar drop in Webmaster tools?

When I see such a sudden drop & fast recovery my first guess would be that something went wrong with your analytics tag. How was you overall traffic during this period? Did you see the Facebook traffic appearing in referrals?

Apart from the Facebook push - did you do technical changes to your site in the same timeframe?

rgds,

Dirk

[ScottOlson]

Hi Dirk,

Nothing was changed during that time and it appears all the direct/social traffic was unaffected. It was as if the sudden rush of a thousand plus people over social caused an issue. I've never seen Google traffic zero out like that, in fact, it appears as if it was zero until WordPress automatically upgraded (that should have occurred on or around the 22nd).

[ScottOlson]

Okay all, I'm going to mark this as solved. After digging deeper in the cPanel stats, it looks more like the whole site went offline for a couple days! Yikes.

| 12 Apr 2015 | 46 | 201 | 1,016 | 28.07 MB |
| 13 Apr 2015 | 356 | 752 | 9,115 | 239.04 MB |
| 14 Apr 2015 | 1,823 | 3,897 | 50,698 | 1.15 GB |
| 15 Apr 2015 | 289 | 602 | 6,375 | 175.32 MB |
| 16 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 17 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 18 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 19 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 20 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 21 Apr 2015 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 22 Apr 2015 | 28 | 51 | 603 | 13.89 MB |
| 23 Apr 2015 | 73 | 1,302 | 2,514 | 36.23 MB |
| 24 Apr 2015 | 65 | 167 | 1,111 | 28.60 MB |
| 25 Apr 2015 | 59 | 142 | 1,115 | 27.35 MB |
| 26 Apr 2015 | 56 | 101 | 1,134 | 27.36 MB |
| 27 Apr 2015 | 74 | 192 | 1,353 | 31.16 MB |

[DirkC]

Hi,

When you say that referral traffic was unaffected - did you see the burst of traffic in Analytics or not?

In webmaster tools - do you see that clicks go down to zero during this timeframe. Was there an increased number of crawl errors during this period?

Was your site able to handle the traffic or did it go down - sometimes when sites are unstable or frequently offline Google temporary removes them from the SERP's until the situation has normalised.

Without additional info it's difficult to judge what exactly could be the cause. I never heard that a sudden peak of traffic from one source had an impact (in the negative sense) on search traffic - normally more visits from other sources are rather positive for your rankings.

rgds,

Dirk