
Google hates Survey.io - 32% drop in SE traffic - vaksel
http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/356647486/google-hates-survey-io-32-drop-in-se-traffic
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jbyers
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

The numbers here are too small and the data too limited to make that claim.
Also search engine changes aren't instantaneous -- I've seen it takes days or
weeks for changes found in a crawl of a small site to percolate through
Google. Did Google even crawl the pages in question on the day Survey IO went
live?

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vaksel
survey.io widget is site wide, so it was showing up on all pages on the site.
Google crawls the site every day, so changes are more or less instantaneous.

A lot of times, it takes like 7 minutes from the moment a question is posted,
to the moment it shows in Google.

But yeah I'm just as baffled as you, as to why it had such a big impact

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hshah
Hi, This is Hiten from KISSmetrics / Survey.io - We do not know what is going
on with this and have not heard of this issue before. We're taking a look at
this issue right now. At the moment, we think it _might_ have to do with the
Google Analytics code on the survey.io embeds, so we will be removing the GA
code from them shortly. If anyone has any feedback or ideas please feel free
to shoot me an email: hshah at kissmetrics.com

~~~
hshah
The Google Analytics code has now been removed from the embed. I took a quick
look at the stats for our own ProductPlanner.com and didn't notice any dips as
a result of the survey.io code. If anyone has any more details or ideas,
please let me know.

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marklubi
Wow, if that inclusion is the reason then it's uncanny. On Monday I pushed a
minor update to one of my websites that included the survey.io code and
watched traffic coming from Google tank.

Just rolled back that inclusion... we'll see if that was the reason for the
traffic drop.

Edit: quick clarification... the survey.io code was the only change that would
be showing up to spiders. The other updates included in the change were all
within areas that require authentication

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ahi
This may have nothing to do with with Survey.io, but I've noticed some weird
survey behavior in the past week. When I click through some newly opened tabs,
occasionally there is a large blank survey page up, like the javascript choked
on the survey and never managed to get to the requested page. There's no
obvious way to click through to the actual site. Reloading the page usually
gets it to go away. I have not been paying close enough attention to say
whether the survey was from survey.io.

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patio11
My first advice for any perceived SEO issue: Take a deep breath. You're
probably seeing random variation. (Incidentally, I don't know what time zone
you are in relative to your users, but my first thought would be "A sharp drop
that lasts two days and then abruptly reverses, hmm, was either of those days
Saturday?" And indeed, it looks like it was.)

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mogston
I don't believe that survey.io would have had that type of effect on your
website traffic. We've been using it on <http://technews.am> for quite some
time with no impact on visitor numbers.

