URLs marked with the canonical tag
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 8:50 am
Server errors, including 5XX errors
Redirect Error
URLs blocked by robots.txt
URLs marked with the noindex tag
Soft 404 Error
Returns the URL for unauthorized requests
URL not located (404)
Crawl Errors
Broken pages and links
Broken pages and links can cause all sorts of problems beyond just frustrating your visitors. They can also incur search engine penalties. When users visit broken pages, try to use broken links, or experience general japan phone number technical issues, the likelihood that they’ll abandon your site rises dramatically, and you lose potential engagement. A high bounce rate can have a significant impact on the total amount of qualified organic traffic your site receives.
In addition to a frustrating user experience, your rankings will also drop if you have broken pages and links. Search engines have long passed the days where keyword stuffing was enough to get high rankings. Today, they utilize many different factors for ranking, and one of the most important is user experience, or UX. If you have a poor user experience due to broken pages and links, your site won’t rank as high.
If you have too many broken links, the backlinks you’ve built will disappear along with your internal links. This reduces the amount of website traffic you receive and can also lower your ranking on search engines. Another factor that Baidu, Bing, and Google use to rank results is authority, and one of the ways to build authority is through high-quality backlinks . Without proper backlinks, your rankings, and subsequently your organic traffic, will drop. This is why it’s so important to focus on link building after you’ve redesigned or migrated your site.
8. Referral traffic
If you find through website statistics analysis that the referral traffic suddenly disappears in large quantities, it means that there is a problem with the source of the external links, such as the external link site has been revised or the website link has been cancelled.
9. Keyword ranking drop and SERP changes
Another common reason for a drop in website traffic is a drop in organic traffic rankings.
SERPs (search engine results pages) are always changing as more and more people compete for similar keywords . You may have ranked highly at one time, but over time, your ranking may be surpassed by your competitors. That’s why it’s important to monitor your rankings and make adjustments if necessary. If a competitor is ranking higher, you may need to start updating old pages with newer content.
Troubleshooting will be much easier if you’re tracking your performance with a rank tracker. If you don’t, leveraging the data in Google Search Console will be your best bet.
I used the following process to understand changes in rankings:
Export keywords before and after ranking drops
Use Excel to create a table and paste the data side by side
Compare the changes in position
Retargeting lost terms through keyword research and mapping
Featured snippets play a big role in Bing and Google rankings. For most keywords, you’ll find featured snippets on the first results page. It’s important to make sure you have the featured snippet. If it belongs to someone else, then traffic is going to go away from your site.
10. XML sitemap changes
If you're an SEO, you'll (hopefully) know that only URLs that return a 200 response and are indexable will be visible in your sitemap, unless you intentionally leave redirected URLs in to ensure search engines find them faster.
One reason you may be seeing a drop in traffic is due to changes to your XML sitemap.
Crawl the sitemap URLs and make sure they all return a 200 OK response and that any new landing pages or articles are included. If your site has 200 URLs and your sitemap only has 50, you'll need to regenerate your sitemap and submit it to search engines.
11. Network or CDN instability
Over the years, people’s patience with poor web performance has worn thin. Modern websites need to be properly optimized to keep visitors browsing quickly. If your site isn’t as fast as your visitors expect, it can cause people to abandon their site altogether, leading to a significant drop in organic traffic. Additionally, it can lower your search engine rankings.
The main cause of a slow website is bad web hosting. While cheaper web hosting may fit your budget better in the short term, in the long term it will result in much lower organic traffic growth rates, or even no growth at all. By investing in fast hosting, your website can deliver the necessary performance to provide a positive user experience for your visitors.
The server network is not in good condition (the server hardware and network environment problems or saturation attacks by a third party), resulting in a reduction in normal online time and the search engine spiders being unable to obtain your pages. The same situation can also occur if the website CDN server is unstable.
12. Low-quality website content
Outdated, irrelevant or low-quality content may cause visitors to lose interest. For example, non-original content, copying content from other sites; keyword stuffing; the website content may have a lot of duplicate content.
Regularly updating your content not only keeps users engaged, but it also shows search engines that your site is relevant, which can help improve rankings and increase traffic.
"Content is king" has always been the motto of digital marketing. You need high-quality content to attract traffic to your website, so content marketing and optimization should always be a top priority. But remember, just having content is not enough. You need to keep the content high-quality. Quality is determined by the EEAT criteria (i.e., Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in Google's algorithm.
This core of the Google algorithm has been part of its functionality for over a decade and is designed to ensure that people find useful results based on their queries. By ensuring your content is helpful, useful, valuable, and authentic, you can satisfy the algorithm and rank yourself higher in search results.
Redirect Error
URLs blocked by robots.txt
URLs marked with the noindex tag
Soft 404 Error
Returns the URL for unauthorized requests
URL not located (404)
Crawl Errors
Broken pages and links
Broken pages and links can cause all sorts of problems beyond just frustrating your visitors. They can also incur search engine penalties. When users visit broken pages, try to use broken links, or experience general japan phone number technical issues, the likelihood that they’ll abandon your site rises dramatically, and you lose potential engagement. A high bounce rate can have a significant impact on the total amount of qualified organic traffic your site receives.
In addition to a frustrating user experience, your rankings will also drop if you have broken pages and links. Search engines have long passed the days where keyword stuffing was enough to get high rankings. Today, they utilize many different factors for ranking, and one of the most important is user experience, or UX. If you have a poor user experience due to broken pages and links, your site won’t rank as high.
If you have too many broken links, the backlinks you’ve built will disappear along with your internal links. This reduces the amount of website traffic you receive and can also lower your ranking on search engines. Another factor that Baidu, Bing, and Google use to rank results is authority, and one of the ways to build authority is through high-quality backlinks . Without proper backlinks, your rankings, and subsequently your organic traffic, will drop. This is why it’s so important to focus on link building after you’ve redesigned or migrated your site.
8. Referral traffic
If you find through website statistics analysis that the referral traffic suddenly disappears in large quantities, it means that there is a problem with the source of the external links, such as the external link site has been revised or the website link has been cancelled.
9. Keyword ranking drop and SERP changes
Another common reason for a drop in website traffic is a drop in organic traffic rankings.
SERPs (search engine results pages) are always changing as more and more people compete for similar keywords . You may have ranked highly at one time, but over time, your ranking may be surpassed by your competitors. That’s why it’s important to monitor your rankings and make adjustments if necessary. If a competitor is ranking higher, you may need to start updating old pages with newer content.
Troubleshooting will be much easier if you’re tracking your performance with a rank tracker. If you don’t, leveraging the data in Google Search Console will be your best bet.
I used the following process to understand changes in rankings:
Export keywords before and after ranking drops
Use Excel to create a table and paste the data side by side
Compare the changes in position
Retargeting lost terms through keyword research and mapping
Featured snippets play a big role in Bing and Google rankings. For most keywords, you’ll find featured snippets on the first results page. It’s important to make sure you have the featured snippet. If it belongs to someone else, then traffic is going to go away from your site.
10. XML sitemap changes
If you're an SEO, you'll (hopefully) know that only URLs that return a 200 response and are indexable will be visible in your sitemap, unless you intentionally leave redirected URLs in to ensure search engines find them faster.
One reason you may be seeing a drop in traffic is due to changes to your XML sitemap.
Crawl the sitemap URLs and make sure they all return a 200 OK response and that any new landing pages or articles are included. If your site has 200 URLs and your sitemap only has 50, you'll need to regenerate your sitemap and submit it to search engines.
11. Network or CDN instability
Over the years, people’s patience with poor web performance has worn thin. Modern websites need to be properly optimized to keep visitors browsing quickly. If your site isn’t as fast as your visitors expect, it can cause people to abandon their site altogether, leading to a significant drop in organic traffic. Additionally, it can lower your search engine rankings.
The main cause of a slow website is bad web hosting. While cheaper web hosting may fit your budget better in the short term, in the long term it will result in much lower organic traffic growth rates, or even no growth at all. By investing in fast hosting, your website can deliver the necessary performance to provide a positive user experience for your visitors.
The server network is not in good condition (the server hardware and network environment problems or saturation attacks by a third party), resulting in a reduction in normal online time and the search engine spiders being unable to obtain your pages. The same situation can also occur if the website CDN server is unstable.
12. Low-quality website content
Outdated, irrelevant or low-quality content may cause visitors to lose interest. For example, non-original content, copying content from other sites; keyword stuffing; the website content may have a lot of duplicate content.
Regularly updating your content not only keeps users engaged, but it also shows search engines that your site is relevant, which can help improve rankings and increase traffic.
"Content is king" has always been the motto of digital marketing. You need high-quality content to attract traffic to your website, so content marketing and optimization should always be a top priority. But remember, just having content is not enough. You need to keep the content high-quality. Quality is determined by the EEAT criteria (i.e., Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in Google's algorithm.
This core of the Google algorithm has been part of its functionality for over a decade and is designed to ensure that people find useful results based on their queries. By ensuring your content is helpful, useful, valuable, and authentic, you can satisfy the algorithm and rank yourself higher in search results.