Hello, lovely people. Was pointed here by my personal SEO guru to seek advice.
tl;dr of below-- google organic traffic dropped 75% in one day, ranking on keywords dropped dramatically, no manual actions or changes in crawl, weird spike in one particular kind of keyword.
Yeah, that`s the tl;dr version. It`s a long question.
On 9/18 my client, an online catalog of scholarly articles (deepdyve.com), saw a huge drop in organic traffic from Google only. Most of their traffic comes from organic, mostly from nonbrand long-tail terms that land people directly on the article pages.
I used Webmaster to pull up the queries from each of three days before the drop (BD), the day of the drop (Dday), and two days after the drop (AD).
BD there were 600+ queries showing on the first page (of 1300 total queries). On Dday that dropped to 49 queries (of 1700), and AD it`s around 75-80 (of 1200).
Because Hummingbird was said to affect longer queries, I looked at the length of the queries; because the site is full of scientific articles, the long-tail queries are often multiple words. When I charted query length by day, the thing that stood out was that on Dday we showed up for many more 1-word queries than usual-- on the other days sampled we showed for 200-300 1 word queries, but on Dday we showed for 1, 100.
Looking at the particular words, almost 1, 000 of them were 4-letter strings like "aljk" or "ipzo"... kind of gobbledygook. But because we have 12 million scientific articles, and scientists like using acronyms, these random terms were in fact generating results, although our stuff wasn`t showing until the 10th, 20th, 30th or 40th+ page of results.
So:
1) Why would we suddenly, and on this one day only, start showing up for hundreds of these kinds of searches?
2) Why was someone digging 50, 70, or 90 pages into the search results for these terms?
3) Is it just coincidence that this happened on the same day that our results tanked?
There wasn`t a spike in pages crawled or errors discovered before the drop. There were no manual actions. It happened quite a few days after Hummingbird rolled out. So what gives? Any ideas?
