My website impressions as viewed in my Google Webmaster Tools have been around 20,000. However beginning on 10/30/2012, my impressions dropped to near zero. My website is http://www.strongfamilies.us. I have only been making very minor text edits to my site, nothing that would cause alarm. Webmaster Tools doesn’t indicate any warnings suggesting that they are penalizing me. I placed a thread on Google Webmaster Tools Forum about this problem getting little to no help. Can anyone tell me why my impressions dropped and what I can do to increase them? Thanks.
URL incorrect, bad spelling of families?
The below image does not exist.
<img id='SG_STATS_GOT_REQUEST_FROM_SERACHENGINE' src='<<SG_CONTENT_SITE_URL>>submit/r.jpg?type=stats&req={<<SG_REFERAL_URL>>}' border='0' alt='' height='1' width='1'/>
That looks to be the tracking beacon. Therefore, hits are not being tracked because the image never gets loaded.
My guess is that <<SG_CONTENT_SITE_URL>> and {<<SG_REFERAL_URL>>} are tokens which are obviously not being replaced with the proper values. The change that caused that is really anyones guess. The best bet to resolve it without professional involvement would be to step back through the changes to figure out what change broke it.
Thank you so much for your reply. I am somewhat confused however. Which page on my site contains the code you referenced of the image that doesn’t exist and what should I do about this code?
Last week, I used PageSpeed Insights, a Chrome extension, to help me scale all my images so that my pages are easier to open. Do you think that scaling these images is the problem? Do you think that I should revert back to the original images?
[FONT=Verdana]It appears on each page, a couple of lines from the end. Another thing you might want to check is whether this part:
id='SG_STATS_GOT_REQUEST_FROM_SERACHENGINE'
is correct, or whether that last word should be SEARCHENGINE.
[/FONT]
That snippet is probably on every page of site though I pulled it from the home page.
That sounds like it might be the cause considering it manipulates images. Worth a shot.
Actually, PageSpeed Insights doesn’t manipulate images. It simply makes recommendations as to how much to reduce images to make pages open quicker. I simply used my logo maker to reduce the size of each image, uploaded them to my ftp service, and made sure the the image url on each page was correct. Do you still feel that this might be the issue because I could always return all the original images? Thanks.
The two codes in question:
<img id=‘SG_STATS_GOT_REQUEST_FROM_SERACHENGINE’ src=‘<<SG_CONTENT_SITE_URL>>submit/r.jpg?type=stats&req={<<SG_REFERAL_URL>>}’ border=‘0’ alt=‘’ height=‘1’ width=‘1’/>
and
id=‘SG_STATS_GOT_REQUEST_FROM_SERACHENGINE’
do not appear in my php editor when I edit pages. Therefore, these codes must be coming from another file perhaps in my Includes folder. Would you happen to know exactly which folder/file these codes can be found? Besides changing SERACHENGINE to SEARCHENGINE, what should I do regarding the first code? Should I simply delete it?
Since these codes have been on my site for years ever since the site was built, do you honestly feel that these issues have anything to do with the drop in impressions this month? I could fix these codes but I don’t feel confident that they have anything to do with the current issue.
[FONT=Verdana]I know I get confused by US date formats, but isn’t that today? It seems a bit early to be panicking about something that may just be a glitch in the system.
Do you have any other kind of stats on your site? e.g. AWStats, Webalizer, etc. If so, are they showing a dramatic loss of traffic for today?[/FONT]
I use GetClicky and Google Analytics. They have both been pretty consistent. Right now at noon, GetClicky is only showing 4 search engine clicks.
This doesn’t seem to be anything to do with design, so I’m going to move the thread to the Internet Marketing forum. Hopefully somebody there will have some ideas.
Okay. Thank you.
hello,
you problem is all about OPTIMIZATION… Look :
-
Title is too long
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Description is really too long too
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you use a lot of keywords… this last option is become unuseful because all search engines bots never mind about it since a few months now…
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You don’t Close the Meta Tags on you Website , For Exemple :
<meta name=“Distribution” content=“Global”> That must Be <meta name=“Distribution” content=“Global” />
i did a SEO review for your website and it’s Score is 0. You have really to change all what i listed here and then you will see that there is a change and the traffic will get back.
Times change and it looks as though your site has been eventually suffered a Google Update.
I think your 20,000 impressions were gleaned from GWT -> Traffic -> Search Queries but far more meaningful statics are available at GWT -> Health -> Index Status.
Take a long look at the Help file at the bottom left, preferably use a print out and see over the past year how your data links have evolved.
GWT Help Excerpt
How to use this data
A steady increase in the number of crawled and indexed pages indicates that Google can regularly access your content, and that your site is being indexed.
If you see a sudden drop in the number of indexed pages, it may mean that your server is down or overloaded, or that Google is having trouble accessing your content.
A high number of duplicate pages could mean that your site has problems with canonicalization, duplicate content, or automatically generated pages, or that it has been hacked. In many cases, Google will send you a message when we detect problems with your site, so make sure to set your notification preferences.
Try comparing data:
To see the percentage of your site that’s accessible to Google, compare the number of crawled pages with the number of pages blocked by robots.txt.
To see how much of your site consists of pages perceived to contain unique content, compare the number of indexed pages with the number of pages marked Not Selected.
Recently I read an interesting article, that went through the stages of increasing the impressions of his friend’s site. What struck me the most from this SEO Professional was the analysis, attention to detail, improvements but most of all the non-dramatic traffic increase over a six-month period!
There is no easy solution, it takes hard-work to maintain a high level of traffic because you are unable to influence other important external factors.
Thank you for your response. How can I do my own SEO review? Is this a program or a software that I could use? Will this review tell me exactly what I need to do to raise my score?
Thank you for your response.
Agreed with MarkStrobel3367, biggest issue I found with your website that you are doing too much. Your activities including on page (title description and keyword) everything is not appearing natural, sorry to say but you are doing negative SEO. Losing impressions indicates your website is not shown in search results for keywords.
Coming to your website, it is good one, I think problem is with the approach for optimizing site.
Hi,
First check your on page seo. At a first glance you have some issues with the titles and also the meta keywords is tooooo long. Make it shorter or even remove it as the keywords meta is not as important as it used to be.
Fix this “on page” issues and than you can ask google for a reevaluation from you webmasters account. This can only have effect if your site was manually penalized and not affected by an algorithm change.
Good luck !
Thank you for your response. How would I no if Google penalized me? There is no indication of this within my account in Webmaster tools?