Organic search traffic vanished

  • Resolved Jack

    (@jenwealthen)


    7 years, 10 months ago

    Just had to abandon my first split test using the free version of the plugin.

    I got the plugin installed, created the variation post (backdated so it wouldn’t appear in RSS feed and “latest”), and started the test with 50/50 traffic and no “see same variation during session” option. I verified the variation had a canonical link to the original, and the Google Analytics code was in both as expected. Visiting the original URL would show the original and variation more or less equally. Appeared to be working fine.

    Unfortunately, my organic search traffic from Google disappeared immediately. Went from ~10 sessions / day to average less than 1 per day since the start last week. I’ve disabled the test today, and am hoping the traffic will come back tomorrow.

    Any idea why this happened? At this point I’m too scared to try another split test on a more popular page.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author Josh Kohlbach

    (@jkohlbach)

    Hi Jack,

    This is definitely unusual, I’ve run multiple split tests myself on my own homepages and never had a problem with search traffic disappearing.

    Google is pretty quick to recognise changes so if this indeed was the issue it should return to where it was pretty quickly.

    How is your link profile for this page? Any spammy links or anything pointing back to it? Sometimes these things can be coincidence or random fluctuation, at 10 visits a day this might be hard to tell though.

    Once you get search traffic back onto it I would encourage you to test again but this time use the “see same variation during session” option.

    Hope this helps and apologies for the inconvenience.

    Josh

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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