Hi All My Website with 35K visits per day dropped yesterday mid-day roughly, just disappeared from first results it had before and went to the very bottom of results. Some days ago I made 2 changes: 1- increased in 5 the number or related posts show bellow every posts. 2- I changed post title tag <h2> by <h1> ... 2 days later the drop. (not sure if this was the cause) I have reverted the changes. But I am not really sure what the problem was. My Site is still a Pr4 website, DMOZ listed, 200.000 links indexed in Google at the moment of the drop and 206.000 link indexed right now in Google after the drop (so it continues to grow). Decent backlinking from quality sites. When I enter a term of some of my posts it does not appear on google result or just appears very far from first page when they used to be always on first result page. Conclusion: My site has been kicked to the bottom of the Google Serp's sea You guys, based on your experience, is this sandbox, Google Dance, Google Hell*, what the * is this really ? What should I do ? I am on total Panic, please drop some advices here. Thank you a lot in advance!
That is a really steep drop in traffic. Are you using Google Analytics so you know exactly what keywords your traffic has decreased for?
There is a chance that your site has been hit by panda update. Are you using duplicate content? if yes, remove it ! and allow your site to be reconsidered by google. What happens is when any site is panda affected, google either de-index it or give it a bad rating. This may last from few days to few weeks and may be for years. If you are not sure that your site has duplicate content, you can check on copyscape site and see if there is any copied content. I'm 100% sure this wasn't due to the changes you have made.
I also noticed a huge drop (approximately 90% drop in daily traffic) on 14th October. It has something to do with recent algo changes and I am stil confident that it is a "dance" and it will normalize in time.
That not sounds good, but it may be a temporary problem and you should have to wait for couple of days before taking any steps.
If you have been using any black-hat methods for getting onto higher SERPs, then it's likely you have been flagged. IF you can honestly say that you've never implemented Google black-hat techniques for link buildig, then you may have been using duplicate content. Use an advanced Google search with specific keywords for your content to see if it has been duplicated also to ensure that no one is ripping off your content for use in their sites. Google can typically take into account inception date of content, unless it was ripped off relatively quickly and the crawlers hasn't indexed your pages recently. Do some proper SEO auditing and you should uncover if there are some red flags you need to address. If there are, just be sure file for a reconsideration request after you have THOROUGHLY verified that your content is neither duplicate nor your backlinks were acquired with questionable tactics. Good luck!
Geezuz!..... That is one hellava drop! How about you shoot me a PM with your site and keywords you were getting all that traffic from and I will be more than happy to take a look at it for you. GC
If it only happened yesterday then you have done right to revert the changes but may also be an idea to get google webmaster tools to see if you get a message with some form of penalty. Guess you should leave it a couple of days, build some more links and get recrawled by google who will see you have reverted the changes and hopefully back to where you were before.