For some time (since at least March), Google webmaster tools has
been sending messages to site owners about substantial traffic
changes (increases or decreases) to pages of a site. Some site owners
found these messages perplexing as they werent sure exactly what
was actionable about the messages. Were the messages just
informational, intended to help those who didnt look at their
analytics every day? Did they imply something specific about what
Google knew about how the site? For instance, some people thought
perhaps this was a warning message about a new penalty on the site or
a penalty being removed from a site.
In reality though, these messages were just intended as a heads
up to let site owners know when a page that previously brought
substantial traffic to the site might be having issues of some kind
(in the case of a traffic drop) or when a page may newly have become a
traffic driver. Googles latest blog post highlights that these
messages have been revised to make that clearer. This is part of
Googles larger attempt to provide alerts of important issues related
to sites.
If you receive a message about a traffic drop, your plan of
action should be the same as any traffic drop investigation.
Check:
The best way to check this is to go into Google Webmaster Tools
and then navigate to Search Queries and then Top Pages. Once you
find the page in the list, you can look at a couple of different
things:
Below is an example with the Search Engine Land article on QR
codes:http://searchengineland.com/what-is-a-qr-code-and-why-do-you-need-one-27588.
If rankings have held steady, then seasonality may be at
play. As you can see above, at least part of the issue is due to
fewer searches related to QR codes. If impressions havent declined,
then check for changes in click through rate. At my company, Nine
By Blue, weve built software that charts categorized query data:
impressions, clicks, rankings, clicks through rate, and number of
queries in a category over time to make it easy to tell which
factor may be causing traffic drops. In the example below, you can
see for all review-related queries, average ranking and click
through have held steady, but impressions are down substantially,
due in part because fewer review-related queries are bringing
traffic to the site. In this case, you know that while seasonality
may be at play, its also worth investigating why the site is no
longer getting traffic for some queries.
If click through rate is down, check your search results
display. Did you lose your rich snippet? Is a technical issue
preventing the descriptive title from appearing? We often assume a
rankings drop, when any number of other factors might be causing
issues. If you do find, as a result of this investigation that a
rankings drop is the problem, its possible Google has penalized the
site, but also check the queries that have lost ranking. Has the
content on the page changed that makes it less relevant to those
queries? Has the page lost incoming links with that anchor text?
Have you changed your internal link structure in some way?
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