Sudden drop in trafic from google

Hi guys,

This week we experienced a sudden drop in number of visitors coming from google for one of our website. Before that we had a consistent number of visitors but in just two days number dropped to less then half and still dropping. This was an amazing thing and we still could not understand why this happened. Can anyone give us any suggestion to trace the problem?

Thanks in advance
Ryan

 

Yes I could, but like ANYONE else who may answer this question it will be pure guesswork.. Only YOU know your site and possible reasons for this. There could be a ton of reasons, you could have been dropped from your existing rankings, your niche might be something to do with it if there are 'seasons', you might need to employ a decent professional to get your site ranked well and keep it there, it might be that the sun is shining far more than it should be for this time of year so people are going out having fun. could be this could be that.... Without knowing more info for a start it's hard to answer, but trust me, anyone giving you a more in-depth reply will only be guessing...

 

Thanks for the response. i actually wanted to know, what steps i can take to trace the problem? you guys can just tell me the possible reasons and i will try some or all of them.
may be people are going out more frequently to enjoy the sun but its not possible that in the mid of week, one day you get 8k visitors and on second day you get only 4k and then keep getting he drop. which was never happened before
Any tip would be appreciated

 

Over what kind of period were you getting 8k a day? If that was fairly recent then it could be that Google have just relooked at your new site and decided to rank you accordingly.. If you have been getting 8k a day for 2 or 3 years and then suddenly dropped that would be different.. so how long has the site been getting this kind of uv's?

 

8k was just an example. we were having consistent traffic since last 6 months and google has been crawling the site everyday..... thats why we got worried on this drop

 

One of you should check google analysis or google webmasters to check the keywords you where ranking under and which keyword you dropped from.

 

well you cant say it went from 8k to 4k if it's just an example as that is one hell of a drop... but if your site went from 800 visitors to 400 this is not such a big deal.. so which is it? Don't give examples.. give facts!

 

Same thing happened with one of my websites, and I see this since november. Is going to nowhere without any reason and then comming back after few days or even weeks. It could be a reindexing problem or just a penalty glitch. From my experience I advice you to wait few more days before taking any action.

 

Yeah thats what im doing. waiting and seeing the daily stats but still curious about the reason.
@1812. Sorry brother im not allowed to mention the exact stats but even if you are getting consistent around 800 visitors daily and suddenly drops to half, not just for one day but keep sticking on half i think its worrisome.
One more thing I have noticed is that the website is still on good position against our main keywords, the traffic is dropped only against long tail keywords. I think this would be interesting.

 

Are you using Google webmaster tools?

 

Don't know if you check your stats in dept daily or anything, but weekend traffic drops a ton compared to week days. Monday to Thursdays you generally see steady or up, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday it drops. Depending on the site it can be quite a bit. When Monday rolls around it tends to recover. Check your monthly stats and you may see this over and over again. But that is if it is consistent.

 

Yeah you are right on weekend traffic drops but this happened right in the middle of the week. on tuesday it was perfect but suddenly on wednesday things start getting wrong.

Yes im using webmaster tool. anything to see there?

 

Make sure you haven't lost some decent backlinks. And make sure it's not just the weekend traffic rush dying down for the week.

 

This could very well be the problem. Go to the basics. Check each page that you want to rank for long tail keywords, and do the basic on page SEO stuff, ie title & description tags, keywords in there as well as your page title, first paragraph, last paragraph etc etc.

Then check the backlinks to those pages and ensure Google does not consider them "bad neighbors) With their latest fiasco chances are you will probably find your backlink count way down..

 

If you have a high traffic site, don't expect that it will always be like that forever. Google changes its algorithm time to time and you may not know your site cannot qualify those algorithms. What you are gonna do is to try building more backlinks to your site and don't give up. Don't make any SEO violations. Follow all the guidelines in proper SEO. You will then find your site soon increases its traffic again.

 

check the searches for the keyword, that your using.

 

If you are doing Paid advertising... probably you are out of budget now.

If your organic traffic has dropped.... Go to Webmaster tools to know the keywords on which your rankings have dipped.

I use a tool to track rankings + content changes of competitors to reason any changes in my traffic / rankings (for the keywords that are important to me). Its called 'Keyword Country'.

Furthermore, you may like to set a Google alerts on your competitor websites... so that you know that where your competitors are getting a mention across the web. Links flowing to your competitors may lower your rankings over time.

 

A sudden drop in traffic could be because of several reasons. You can take the following steps in identifying the cause of traffic loss:

1. Determine what kind of traffic loss has been there - Search traffic, Paid traffic, Referring sites traffic, or Brand traffic
2. Find out the extent of traffic loss
3. Ensure the traffic loss is not seasonal
4. Analyze keywords for ranking loss using Google Webmasters OR Google Analytics
5. Check the Top pages report in Google Analytics to identify any potential problem with any of the landing pages
6. Try identifying if you are dealing with a Google panelty.

I hope that will help. I'd like to hear from you when you have identified the cause.

 

Some of your backlinks might have been disappeared (link in a site that no longer exist for example).

 

Thanks guys for your time and Suggestions.

Yeah you are right. SEO is an on going task and im concentrating right on the same thing. thanks

No im not using Paid Advertising and never tried keyword country. will definitly give it a try soon and see how can it help us. But i really dont know how to set google alerts on competitors websites. can you please explain it a bit more? seems interesting.

thanks alot for your itemized suggestions I have lost the organic search traffic from main google.com and it does not look like seasonal, might be a penalty but i dont know how to verify it. Is there any tool or technique available to check if my website is under any penalty? Main landing pages are just fine.

May be, I will try to find, thanks buddy