Image Search / sudden drop in traffic

[DirkC]

One of our sites in Germany had a very sudden drop in traffic (starting Oct. 7th). The site gets most of it's organic traffic from Image Search. Checking in Search Console revealed that

• search volume for keywords increased in that period
• our average position is stable
• our click rate dropped dramatically

(we double checked - searching the keyword in "anonymous mode" still showed our results for main keywords in top image positions (first 2 rows)).

As an example (see attached screencopy) - keyword had clickrate of 1% (average) - dan dropped to 0.06% while the position remained stable.

Germany is still using the "old" version of image search (unlike the rest of the world) - which gives the site preview rather than just the image slider when you click on a result in image search. Our first thought that this was changed - but it seems that it didn't change.

Ideas what might cause this dramatic drop in click%?

There have been no major technical modifications on the site for the last 2 months.

thanks,

Dirk

GjlV8CW.jpg

[Toddfoster]

Hi Dirk,

I know you said there have been no serious technical changes in the last couple months, but is it possible the UA Tracking Code (GA) has been removed? We had a client that underwent a similar decrease in traffic without any noticeable ranking changes, and it turns out their web developer had removed the tracking code.

Have the metrics been in consistent freefall (or plateaued out) since you noticed the decrease?

Let me know,

Rob

[DirkC]

Hi Rob

forgot to mention that - analytics was the first thing I checked and is working fine. That's why I checked search console.

Dirk

[EGOL]

I have the same problem.   The graphs look the same.  What's happening is that infringers grab my images and replace my site in the image search results.   Then my images on their sites replace my images on my site part of the time in the search results.  The result is a loss of traffic.  The result is no change in my average rankings and a loss of impressions.

A casual check of the search results shows my images, but when I look closer they are often on other domain and those other domains are getting my traffic.

Google is not doing a good job of attributing images to their creator - even if they have a copyright mark on them.   Pop-up infringers can grab them and get good results in the image results almost instantly.

I fight this by filing DMCA complaints every week.  Over time I have filed  hundreds of DMCA complaints.  Dozens of DMCA complaints have been filed for some of my images, for the same search queries on dozens of different sites.  If you scroll down to the bottom of the image search you will see Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint, Complaint,....... for all of the complaints that I have filed.

Lots of this infringement is hosted on blogspot sites.  Most of the infringers are monetize by Adsense.

Doing a few image queries and filing DMCA complaints is now part of our routine weekly duties.  Plus we often drop what we are doing at other times because we see a drop in traffic on important pages, and damn that is coming from weasels stealing our images.

[DirkC]

Hi Egol,

Know exactly what you mean - we had this on our Spanish site after a less successful (to put it mildly) site migration - our images remained in the search results however the site was no longer ours but from someone else (that was also the moment we discovered all our images were spread all over the web...). Multiple complaints (and months) later the site started gaining traffic again.

It doesn't seem the case here - I did manually check key images - and the site behind is always ours. I also used the "search by image" to see how many times it was copied - and although copies existed - it were mainly smaller sizes on non concurrential sites (like schools).

Positions remain good to excellent. Even more amazing is that for some keywords the position improved more or less at the same time as the drop in CTR

Can't understand why the click rate decreased that dramatically.

Dirk

[dohertyjf]

Hi Dirk -

Very interesting case going on here. A few more questions (the URL would be helpful if you are keen to share it as well):

• Anything change around your titles of images? Or those of your competitors?
• Do you track rankings on these other than what Search Console has? "Average rank" is pretty unhelpful sometimes, I'm afraid.
• Did Google maybe change the layout of the SERPs where you had images showing up, so that the images are getting less exposure in the search results?

John

[DirkC]

Hi John,

URL: goo.gl/gPC9FY  - we rank high for all keywords containing the words "malvorlage" or "ausmalbild" + keyword - like "malvorlage stern"

Titles  - no changes on titles recently - as most images were labeled with Malvorlage & we noticed that Ausmalbild became more popular - the new images we added were using "Ausmalbild" as title rather than "malvorlage"

Layout - that was one of the first things I considered - given the fact that the image search in Germany is still on the old presentation (preview of site rather than slider). We checked this and it seems that it's still the old version which is used.

Dirk

[DirkC]

Thanks everybody for your help.

We are still figuring out why the click rate in WMT has dropped but we discovered the main reason of our traffic drop. Our external advertising company had added a Analytics tracker in an external script which was interfering with the normal measurements.

When I checked the codes last week with the Chrome plugin everything was fine but I was visiting the site with my Ad blocker activated (so the external script wasn't called). When I visited the site today with Ad block de-activated it indicated that our tag wasn't measuring. The external tracking code was removed & traffic went back to previous levels (it's a bit scary to realise that about 50% of our visits have the ad blocker activated)

Dirk