Search traffic steady, Landing pages receiving traffic had massive drop

[Garmentory]

Following the week of Google's major algorithm update in January, we saw this graph in our Moz dashboard. (green bars are # of landing pages receiving traffic from search, blue line is traffic from search)

Traffic from SEO grew slightly, but number of landing pages receiving traffic fell by more than 50%. We didn't make any changes to sitemap, rel=canonical, number of pages being published, etc. Traffic from top keywords held consistent. Number of pages/images google crawled and indexed grew per webmaster tools. Big spike in Nov/Dec is because we are in retail, seasonal not technical issues.

Is anyone else experience the same thing? An algo change? Or something more specific to our site?

Quality traffic is what we care about, so number of pages traffic is going to could be a positive thing (easier to optimize). But jury is out.

M9bOgi8

[Mobilio]

Same here - normal traffic till mid Dec. Then drop for Xmas and NY. And this is normal for holidays. Then up in beginning of Jan, from 24-25 drop little bit (back to normal traffic).

So there is also change called "core update":
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
http://mozcast.com/

[Dr-Pete]

We don't have much useful data (i.e. we have a lot of data, but can't see any clear patterns) around the January core algo updates, other than knowing that they occurred. It's hard to pin down from the graph, and I'm not sure what the scope of your traffic and page count is, but my first guess would be that you lost ranking on some long-tail pages that weren't contributing much in the way of traffic.

It's possible these were low-value pages or even some pages that shouldn't have been indexed (like duplicates), in which case this could be fine. It's also possible that these pages had quality issues that knocked them out of ranking contention, which wouldn't be so good.

It's not an easy problem to solve, but the first step I'd take is to try to pin down: (a) what those pages were, and (b) if they have any relationship. If you lost traffic to 500 completely different pages, that's going to be tough to interpret. More likely, though, there's a pattern. Maybe these are mostly product pages, or blog posts, or internal search results, etc. If you can find their commonality, that's your best chance of knowing what went wrong.

[Garmentory]

Thanks - excellent analysis. Exactly what I was looking for and hadn't considered this possibility. Will dig in!