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Since the 13th April I have been noticing some strange data appearing in my Search Console analytics as seen below: enter image description here

Normally, I would assume that we have been penalized or massively de-ranked for the majority of keywords - however, data is still appearing inside Google Analytics showing thousands of sessions specifically from Organic Search?

What is going on here? Im unsure as to whether I need to take action or if it is just a data anomaly that will end up being fixed down the line?

Any advice or if you've experienced something similar then please get involved!

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  • Double check that the organic search Source / Medium is Google / Organic - as there are other search engines that will qualify as 'organic search'. Also it's worth looking at position to see if it's declined with the traffic. There may be 'Fred' update related issues at work here if your site is ad heavy or content thin. – L Martin Apr 19 '17 at 10:21
  • @Yhorian I have just done this and the majority is coming up from Google as expected. Our position hasn't declined for top keywords and if anything is improving? In terms of content we have a decent amount of content on every page and don't run internal ads so Im unsure as to if it would be related to the 'Fred' update? – Jvital Apr 19 '17 at 10:24
  • If Analytics is registering traffic for those dates where Search Console is not - I'm inclined to say it's a bug in Search Console. Analytics doesn't tend to create large amounts of data whereas the console can be very buggy at times. – L Martin Apr 19 '17 at 10:42
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Google is likely sending search traffic to a different version of your site that isn't represented in the one you have registered. There are two common ways that can happen. Lets say you have http://www.example.com/ registered in search console:

  1. Google is now sending traffic to http://example.com/ (no www)
  2. Google is now sending traffic to https://www.example.com/ (HTTPS)

Unless you have implemented redirect to no-www, then the HTTPS case is more likely. Google is automatically migrating the indexed version of pages over to HTTPS where both are available.

To fix this, add all four versions of your site in search console:

  • http://example.com/
  • http://www.example.com/
  • https://example.com/
  • https://www.example.com/

Then create a property set to view the stats from all four of them together.

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  • Thank you very much. I hadn't thought about HTTPS, we have actually just switched over to it so this would make perfect sense. Thank you also for providing the fix. – Jvital Apr 21 '17 at 13:23
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Its possible that there was a change made to the website during the period where you noticed a decline.

One time we started losing thousands of clicks per day and were super surprised that this happened.

We went through every single release note for web changes made for 2 weeks prior and 2 weeks after every date traffic had gone down and discovered some changes that had been pushed without consulting the SEO team.

We also found the following:

Certain set of changes A to the website caused a small decline when they were first released, but later when a new set of changes B were released, B caused A's initial minor impact to increase dramatically leading to huge declines.

Note: It took 4 months to get our traffic back up to the same level as it was initially, during that time we made a lot of other improvements as well, leading to huge overall gains. But traffic falls fast, rises slowly.

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