Google’s Traffic Alerts – What to Do if You Receive One

Since around March, site owners have been receiving messages from Google Webmaster Tools informing them of both traffic drops and traffic increases for particular pages.

The messages appeared ambiguous at first, and speculation was widespread as to what Google was trying to tell people – were they trying to alert you to site penalties? Or were they just trying to give you a heads up to potential site issues that may need looking into? (A handy notification for those that don’t regularly check their analytics).

Google recently updated these messages to make it clearer, and it turns out they really were just meant as friendly notifications. So what should you do if you get one?

IF YOUR TRAFFIC IS UP

If traffic to a particular page is up then you really have little to do but celebrate. However, there may be an opportunity to capitalise on here, so it’s worth investigating where this traffic came from.

Take a look at your website analytics and try and pin down where the visits are coming from – search queries, referral traffic, social media or direct. If you can identify why people are suddenly visiting this page more perhaps you can introduce more of the same.

IF YOUR TRAFFIC IS DOWN

If your traffic is down then there are a number of things you’ll want to check. Broadly speaking you need to investigate:

• Indexing errors
• Ranking losses
• Click through rates

To check if the page is indexed enter ‘info:http://www.example.com/pageinquestion‘ into Google. If results are shown, it’s still indexed.

IF NOT:

• Check there is no meta robots tag in the code blocking Google from crawling it i.e.
• Check your robots.txt file for the same
• Use Webmaster Tools’ crawl errors report and see if the page is listed

If it is still indexed the traffic drop could be accounted for by a drop in search rankings. These can be checked within Webmaster Tools by going to Search Queries and then Top Pages. Use the expansion arrow to see what search queries brought people to that page. Then use Search Queries to see if the rankings have changed.

Finally, if the rankings haven’t changed, check if the impressions have gone down (perhaps fewer people are searching for that query) and if your click through rate (CTR) has changed.

If your CTR has gone down there could be any number of reasons. Perhaps brand recognition has gone down. Perhaps a coding issue is preventing your meta title from being displayed. It could be any number of things, so just keep checking until you find a likely candidate.