I'm admin at pickadvisor.com. We launched in the summer and were doing well getting organic traffic, 100-200 visitors / day was pretty standard and our articles were indexed on Google seconds after being posted. Then on Nov 20 it dropped to maybe 20 visitors from Google / day and I've been trying to figure out why since. Articles from Nov 19 and older still ranks well, newer don't even show up until a couple of days later after created (most articles already irrelevant by then). I've been trying "Fetch As Google" in Google Wed Admin, and sure, the page gets indexed but with super low ranking. We did have two broken links in the footer for a while after an update, but that is corrected since long. So ... any advice on how to troubleshoot or solve this would be much appreciated.
You have to isolate problem first determine what causes your drop in page rank. Only then you can take necessary steps to fix your problem.
there were google updates in October, November and December of this year. Check if it is one page, all pages, all or single keywords and then you can determine if it is algorithym vs manual penalty or simple hummingbird meaning you don't have the content to support ranking keyword. http://www.genesisevolutionmedia.com/
I think your site go down due to the penalty. your organic search may be decrease by the problem of server. if mostly Errors in the form of 404 then its a server problem. just organic search decreases anything else?
Hi thank you for your reply. I realize this, and this is what I'm trying to figure out . I have a couple of theories but I could be way off with them and that's why I came here basically, I will throw them out and perhaps people with more knowledge could help me out. Thanks, I will definitely check that out! I can not find any 404 errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools. I would say only the organic search traffic has gone down, at least for new posts/articles. Some old content still ranks fairly high.
So, here are my theories why our site has lost almost all organic search traffic. Please feel free to tell me how wrong I am if that's the case or solutions if it's a possible problem, thanks. 1) Too many pages indexed in search engines: Might be a silly idea, but problems started when we reached about 1500 indexed pages on Google. Most of our articles have a very similar titles. Could newer posts be considered spam because they're too similar in structure as older articles? New Articles barely get any exposure at all in search engines, while older and already outdated pages/articles still ranks fairly high. Could delete old articles solve anything? 2) Duplicate Content: Maybe the strongest possibilty imo. A lot of our content can be found at other sites. Did we just rank high by luck for a while and then got "found out" that we got more exposure than we deserved? Our domain/page authority is not very good ... 3) Bad Code: We did have a broken link in the footer for almost a month before we found out. Since it was on all pages we got like 1500 crawl errors in Webmaster Tools. It has since been fixed, but have we already lost credibility because of it? If anyone has suggestions about how to troubleshoot the issue please feel free to chime in. Some might be noob questions, but I'm here to learn, thanks .