Sudden Major Decrease in Impressions

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MarkStrobel3367

Member
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.
 
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chrishirst

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Why does everything have to be a "penalty"? Have you done something so blatant that it warrants a penalty from Google?

What do your site access logs indicate?

Google only "knows" about things that are Google related, it is NOT the Great Oracle where all the URLs on your website are concerned.
 
chrishirst

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Now having thought about that for a seconds or so.

General comment coming up.

How on earth do you decide that your marketing is working if you don't analyse your site access logs???

and please, please, please, do NOT tell me that you rely on "rank checking" and Google Analytics.
 
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MarkStrobel3367

Member
I just checked the error logs and I don't see any recent problems.

What is frustrating is that I have complied with all recommendations given to me by Webmaster Tools including inserting structured data on my pages. To lose my impressions without having any idea why is a real disappointment.

Two things have occurred since the impressions decreased - I scaled my images as per the recommendations of PageSpeed Insight, a Chrome extension and I added a Google plus badge to my site. Do you feel that either of these changes could have decreased my impressions? To me, neither one sounds like the cause.
 
chrishirst

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
To lose my impressions without having any idea why is a real disappointment.
Click to expand...
But you do not know if you have lost any REAL traffic or not. Until you REALLY know that for a fact you cannot do anything about it.

Google's webmaster tools only knows what sometimes happens to your URLs that are in the Google index. Google is NOT the whole Internet.
Google does NOT know EVERYTHING that happens to your URLs.

Stop treating it as if Google IS the be all and end all of everything because it isn't, and allowing Google to be arbiter of what happens to YOUR website is ludicrously short-sighted.
 
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MarkStrobel3367

Member
I tend to agree with you. However, I have been waking up each morning with a lower than expected number of visits to my site with a bounce rate of 100%. This is very concerning to me especially when I have made every attempt to comply with Webmaster Tools recommendations.
 
leroy30

leroy30

New Member
MarkStrobel3367 said:
Two things have occurred since the impressions decreased - I scaled my images as per the recommendations of PageSpeed Insight
Click to expand...

Very interesting. I recently following the suggestions by Pagespeed Insight and was immediately bumped from 2nd in several keyword searchs to over 400.

I figured it was over optimisation. Although I didn't change any text or links or anything I just compressed images, minified css, added cache control headers etc.

This may warrant some further investigation me thinks.
 
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MarkStrobel3367

Member
I think that you did more than I. All I did was reduce the image sizes, uploaded them to the server, and changed the image url on each page. I wouldn't think that this would cause a reduction of impressions. I would think that scaling these images would make the pages easier to open and all around better for SEO purposes but naturally, I could be wrong!
 
Edge

Edge

Member
Well Google has changed its algorithm so it is possible you have been affected by that. Looking at your code though there are some serious bloopers like this <html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"> in the middle of the document. Invalid code doesn't usually drastically affect rankings but I'd be inclined to clean things up anyway.
As already asked what are you using for your stats? Google Analytics? Have you tried using something else just to confirm?
 
chrishirst

chrishirst

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Because Google analytics has the problem of being javascript based, and as such only records URL access from javascript enabled user agents.

Why is that a problem you ask? Because it does not record scraper bots, content harvesters and other unwanted UAs that you may want to block, search crawler traffic which is useful to know what URLs get requested most, which will give a much better insight into what URLs are seen by SEs to be "important" as they will get crawled more frequently.
 
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