Google impression drop - just me?

[whiterabbit]

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Anyone seen anything odd on Google (natural search) since 2nd June?
I've got a drop in impressions (and clickthroughs) of about 60%. Is it just me?

If it is I've checked the usual suspects (no warnings in webmaster tools and no real change on the site). It's a good quality site with regular good content. No obvious new competitors in SERPS.

Any further ideas?
Thanks,
WR

[dc000000]

try searching 'google may day'
apparently there was a big algo change that has affected a fair proportion of sites.

[boxfish]

There is the May Day algo change which is affecting the longtail traffic a lot of people get and also they seem to be split testing the top 3 adwords results between a pink and blue background. I think this is affecting the ctr of the serps results. Google seem to be doing everything they can to reduce this as much as possible.

[kylah16]

Anyone seen anything odd on Google (natural search) since 2nd June?
I've got a drop in impressions (and clickthroughs) of about 60%. Is it just me?

If it is I've checked the usual suspects (no warnings in webmaster tools and no real change on the site). It's a good quality site with regular good content. No obvious new competitors in SERPS.

Any further ideas?
Thanks,
WR

Yes I have experienced the same thing but it began in May for me.

[whiterabbit]

Weird a lot of people seem to have been hit in May, but my May traffic actually improved slightly. It's just suddenly on 2nd June it's dropped off.

Guess I'll have to recheck all my inbound links to see if anything has changed.

Cheers,
WR

[boxfish]

What site is it?

Could it have been affected by half-term/hot weather etc rather than algo changes?

[whiterabbit]

Its this site: Best Router - help, guidance and reviews for wireless modems / routers (all comments on the site welcomed)

Its not been too seasonal previously, but I thought the hot weather might explain the weekend, but no comeback since.

WR

[boxfish]

I can't see why it would be affected at all really by half term, the weather a bit but not 60% for a whole week.

I think it is more likely to be you have lost positions for some high traffic keywords or lots of longtails.

I'd just go through analytics for the previous week and check where terms rank for each week and see if there is an overall drop.

That's the thing about longtails though, there is no way to check as no-one keeps tabs where they rank for them.

Also, what kind of daily traffic levels are you getting, I mean losing 6 out of 10 visitors for one week isn't as big a sign as losing 600 out of 1000 - is it a good sample size?

[whiterabbit]

Thanks for the response. It's a decent enough sample size (hundreds rather than thousands) but enought to make me to think its a real change.
I'll have to check my back-links and as you say dig through the ranking positions.
WR

[Fruit_and_Veg]

I got hit on 31st May. Traffic sank by over half.

The only clue was that my site performance slowed down on that day - I have cut a lot of bloat from various wordpress plugins that weren't really needed and speeded up the site so it's faster but not sure if this was the only reason as some of those plugins have been there for months.

[whiterabbit]

Having dug into this a bit further it looks like the longtail has gone, so it really is the May thing just being applied really late. Maybe its working its way down the google spider list in terms of site priority :-)

I did check the speed thing and made a couple of tweaks a few months back so I'm hoping its not that.

Looks like the only way to recover that traffic is generate lots of spammy pages with those key phrases on. Surely that's not what big G was after.

WR

[boxfish]

Or some decent inbounds into your deeper pages

[confuscius]

Looks like the only way to recover that traffic is generate lots of spammy pages with those key phrases on. Surely that's not what big G was after.

WR

It is exactly what Google seems to be rewarding and will continue to reward.

[whiterabbit]

Fair point. I'll have a thunk about the best way to do this.

WR

[Fruit_and_Veg]

Yeah, I think it is the MayDay thing too. Saw a good article on it here - http://searchengineland.com/google-c...-traffic-43054 - if anyone wants to find out more.

More pages and more links in seem to be what the doctor is ordering.