Google Search Traffic Dropped Off Significantly

I don't have a huge site, but I generally get about 1,000 visitors a day from Google Search and its been that way for months on months. It's a bit of a hodgepodge of topics - like a Buzzfeed type site so I'm not stuck in one niche or anything in that regard.

Then today I log on and see that I have about 15 visitors.

I'm a bit of a novice but I did know enough to check to see if I had been removed from Google's searches (which I have not been) and checked everything in my Google Webmaster tools and all looks okay (sans one 302 redirect from a sitemap).

I'm completely confused as to what happened.

I mean I literally went to bed - all was fine. Wake up and there's no search activity.

Any help? I'm lost

 

Google make >500 tweaks to the algorithm every year and factor in new data (ie link metrics; updated PR; recalculated quality scores; etc) every day. Rankings can and do change every day.
Without the URL, impossible to give an advice

 

Seems to be the common trend this year.

I personally lost 30,000+ in traffic after switching from http to https in January. Google says "If you migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPS, Google treats this as a site move with a URL change. This can temporarily affect some of your traffic numbers." I'm still waiting 6 months later for the traffic to return.

What I've learned from this is to never put the majority of your eggs in the Google basket! They got me paranoid to make any improvements on my sites now.

Good luck getting your traffic back.

--
G r e e n h o r n
j a m i e

 

Perhaps you might find some additional success outside of your reliance on Google search traffic. There are many ways that a site could gain traffic. Search engines are merely only one of them.

It's always best to have multiple traffic sources, in case something happens to diminish one source -- just like you've noted.

 

This might be caused by Google bot,
you might be aware of the Panda Update,
please check your web master tool for messages
and your inbox too.

 

Well maybe your site gets deranked .check your site position etc

 

My domain is GuyHut.com if anybody needs it check things out.

I checked my Webmaster tools and everything looks normal - no messages or anything like that either.

The strangest thing out of all - twice yesterday I looked up the site on Google and it appeared just fine as did some of my higher ranking posts/pages. I instantly saw the jump in Google search traffic in my real-time stats. But literally like an hour later they and the homepage were no longer getting any Google search traffic. Stayed that way for about 5 or 6 hours and then the site and higher ranked posts came back for like 15 to 20 minutes then they were gone again.

Also, I will say that I tried out Ezoic on Monday and had a speed issue, so I disabled it and went to bed. Woke up and my @ record was changed somehow. So the site was a parked domain for about 8 hours but I fixed it immediately. Somebody suggested that Google could've crawled the site at that time, but that seems too coincidental.

And when I do the site:URL.com on Google, the pages come up so I didn't get banned or anything.

I'm so perplexed.

 

Did you read @Agent000 reply? That's exactly what's happening to your site.

 

You guys think so? It just seemed so weird and coincidental that everything seemed to happen exactly the same time that Ezoic thing happened and my A record got changed, considering I've had an almost identical amount of Google traffic (within a couple hundred, plus or minus) every day for a couple years now.

And then the fact that sometimes Google seems to show that some of the higher ranked posts and the main page of the site in the search results for about 10 or 15 minutes and then they vanish for hours before they return for a few minutes.

Shouldn't the main page of the site show up first when you type it in in Google? It does in Yahoo for me, but not Google.

Appreciate all the assistance from everybody, btw. Thank you.

 

And now all my traffic is back to normal and it's been that way for 12 hours or so. Hopefully it stays that way. How weird.

 

Perhaps it was a hiccup in the algorithm. Whatever the case, I'm glad to hear that everything is back to normal.
-

 

tampering with your site can have a negative affect. I was editing one of my posts, and
accidently left it in draft mode, within 1-3 days, all the keywords vanished from ranking....

google does not play around these days, and when they say your site needs to be accessible
all the time, then they mean just that, removing your site, even for a short period can cause issues...

always use a reliable host, because if your host goes down, then you can be screwed....
even if your posts linger in the engine, any keywords you have can vanish quickly....

 

Well, looks like everything is normal again and has been for a few days now.

Man, that was rather terrifying lol.

Thank you everybody for the help.

And wow - really @dscurlock?! Just from a draft? Yikes - Google really isn't playing around!! Thank you for the tip!

 

You want to set up everything right the first time...
even if you change your post url, then that could cause issues also...

I am not sure if google treats authority sites different from newbie sites if they
should go offline, but i know if my site goes down, then I could lose rankings quite fast...
on that post that was in draft, I had 20 ranked keywords, now I only have 10...
I imagine over time, the remaining keywords will come back, maybe....

now I am facing google crawl issues, and I do not know if they will affect
anything, so If you see anything like this, then let me know...

domain.com/wp-login/?loginFacebook=1&redirect=domain.com/this-is-how-google-crawls-this-post
(and the link does not exist, and only provides error 500)

ps, I have been getting these crawls from google every since
I removed a WP plugin called Nextend Facebook/Google....