Website organic traffic unchanged, impressions took a 98% drop in the last week.

[Joanne_Pendon]

Hi all,

I have a very curious predicament and I'd be grateful if someone could shed some light on the situation.

As mentioned in the title, organic traffic to our website has remained unchanged, but organic impressions have taken a 98% drop in the last week. This happened suddenly over one day; on October 22, impressions were 700, on October 23, they were 500, and on October 24 they drastically dropped to 50. The next two days they were at 22 and then up to 35.

Organic traffic, however, showed the normal "weekend drop" as of October 24, and is still showing normal level (even increased a bit) continuing into this week.

These are organic impressions according to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools.

We did perform a complete site redesign a month ago. Could this be an effect from the redesign?

We also noticed drop in Domain Authority, but our competitors suffered a similar (if not greater) drop as well, so we wondered if it could be due in part to the algorithm update.

If anyone could shed some light on the situation I would be so appreciative!

Thanks!

[MonicaOConnor]

The Panda/Penguin updates have shaken up the rankings quite consistently over the past couple of weeks. I noticed that my company, and my competitors have dropped a couple of points as well. I don't think that drop in DA is something to freak out about right now. If you have not received any notices from Google, it could just be that things are still trying settle down after the topsy turvy couple of weeks the engines have seen.

As far as search impressions go, there are a few things that could be happening. If you changed your URLs when you redesigned your website then you can start to see reduced impressions as your new pages become indexed and start moving up in the searches. Something to be careful of is if you see your impressions dip below your lowest average before the Penguin update. I have a few SEO friends who saw huge surges in impressions as Penguin was rolling out, and then a decline that they haven't been able to recover from. As long as you are staying above that lowest day of impressions you should be fine.

It could also just be a lack of searches on those days. It is something to keep an eye on, but probably too soon to start worrying about. After updates, you kind of have to wait and see for a couple of weeks. The results are all messed up and usually don't start to even out for awhile. As far as I know, the Penguin update still isn't complete, so that could still cause some trouble for your impressions.

Have you checked your landing pages report to see where your organic searches are coming from? How about your keyword rankings? Have you noticed any changes out of the ordinary?

[Joanne_Pendon]

Thanks for the response!

In response to your questions, the really confounding part is that we are actually ranking higher for our keywords and all seems normal in terms of landing pages (so says Google Analytics and MOZ).

I don't understand how we could have an increase in organic traffic yet a decrease in organic impressions! Am I missing something?

[MonicaOConnor]

Nope, This seems kind of normal. Organic traffic can be coming from Bing and Yahoo also. I think you are fine.

I noticed a jump in rankings also. That is why you want to make sure you don't drop below your lowest average, if you do then you might see a dramatic decrease in your rankings when everything settles down.