During the last month I have lost about 50% of my google traffic and doubled my yahoo traffic. Overall that accounts for about 45% drop in SE traffic, which is horrific as this seems to be an ongoing trend. I have not changed much in the way the site is done (not done any excessive SEO or anything else). Makes me wonder though what happened. I wouldn't mind building upon that increase in yahoo traffic (seems to be higher quality traffic), but it really bugs me to lose that juicy Google traffic. What can I do?
Did you track what keywords were sending you the traffic? Are you sure this Google traffic you lost wasn't coming from Image search or something like that? Are you certain it was quality traffic that you lost, as in did you verify the traffic Google sent had a good page view average, and the visitors spent at least an "average" amount of time on the site? What kind of site is it? If ecommerce, did your sales drop? More details are needed because what you have described could have a myriad of "whys?"
Hi, What kind of traffic were you attracting from Google? Did you have an active subscriber list that you were marketing to, or just first time contacts? The warmer the list of contact should lead to better retention rates... Scott
Some good points here, thanks. I checked with Google Analytics. Although I lost about 80% of my image traffic, I don't really care about it and it only makes up for about 15% of that 50% loss (so about 7.5% overall). Since its probably junk traffic I don't care much, although that huge drop might tell an entire story of its own. I do see an increase in overall quality of the traffic, but I account this to the fact that google traffic always has been junk and yahoo has always sent quality traffic. So far I have relied heavily on link purchases, but I haven't bought anything for a while now (due to the fact that Google plans to punish those). I have had a crash in my listings through link-vault due to the fact that they implemented a nofollow detection or something. That list is slowly building back up again, but its all junk links. The site has some quality links from wiki and about.com and I recently bought a link on botw.org to get the trust up (and make the spammy links count again). The niche is travel and its not an e-commerce site. I don't really have anything optimized for specific keywords (except maybe through anchor text). Basically I am relying on a rather broad search. Looking at the DP keyword ranking tool, I see a lot of red. I mean tons of red. Some Keywords seem to have dropped entirely out of the rankings (and those are pages linked by about.com and wikipedia <- i didn't link it and its been there for well over a year). WTH: I just checked Wikipedia. Almost all external links are gone, including mine and a bunch of other hiqh quality sites. Looks like vandalism.
were you getting traffic from similar keywords in both google and yahoo? It could be that you were ranked high in google for keywords that wasn't a good fit for what you are selling...