Organic traffic severely dropped from 40K daily users to 3K

Hello,

My site (kind of a Forum site) was getting over 60K users per day 30K of them from Organic Google results.
Yesterday all search queries dropped by 300-500 positions. Traffic from Google dropped by 90%.

I made no blackhat SEO moves and my entire site is UGC from my community.
My pages are not indexed so I don't believe I've been banned (could I?).
No major changes to the site over the past few weeks either.


Can anyone tell me what could have gone wrong and how should I approach this?

 

How are you getting organic traffic if your pages are not indexed?

 

gonna be hard to say without a URL to investigate, whether you want to post it here or PM to people you trust to look into it is completely up to you.

But its hard to say without a URL to look into everything, right now all someone can do is give you guesses.

 

same thing happened to me... just an usual google shuffle I would suspect. I jump up 48 hours after this happens for my top keyword terms.

 

wait for another weeks or month, your traffic will come back eventually IF your url is not banned by google (you can do that by type your url name into google and see if it's turn out).

I've experienced this before and i could imagine how u feel, but don't worry mate, your traffic will come up soon or later.

 

Did you get lots of links to the website all of a sudden? Paid links maybe? That could have led to a drop in rankings on Google.

 

Sockmoney - My pages are indexed (over 600,000 of them), that's the strange thing. They actually increased a bit over the last day.

Is that proof that I was not banned for some reason?

No major changes in Link placements. Am not buying any links but am active in forums for a very long time.

Let me know if you have any other ideas/questions.

Very frustrating and frightening experience.

 

did your keywords dropped too???

 

When I saw the title of the thread I knew you were going to say that.

I can't make you any promises but, wait a 3 to 7 days and it MIGHT revert to your normal traffic again.

But also be prepared to see it continue to bounce around like that every few days/weeks.

And be prepared to make a re-inclusion request. I've seen some sites return to normal just fine, while at the same time I've seen others increase in page-count and then suddenly disappear from the index entirely overnight. And I'm talking about truly "white-hat" sites.

 

i think its the google dance, or google changed its algorithm that's why this i happenning... have you done something different??

 

I can't understand how you're getting traffic from Google if your pages are not even indexed?

I would start a link building campaign

 

Zexy - My pages are indexed (see my comments above)

My site is a serious one has been online for 2.5 years and has a thriving community and lots of unique content.

My primary question is how I can verify that it hasn't been labeled spam for some reason and what's the best way to contact Google. They must keep an open door to let people submit problems, at least for major sites.

 

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

 

Check with your host, maybe your server went down. If this was the case Google will give you your results back soon.

Do you have lots of external sitewide links? Do you buy or sell links?

 

mad4, I don't trade links. I have plenty of links from blogs (serious ones) who covered our site.
The servers were down a week before the incident for a few hours but since then results were only going higher till yesterday.
Sounds kind of strange that this will have such a drastic effect right?!

 

Do you allow signatures in the forum posts for users? It could be that some one is linking to some gambling or p0rn site, or to a banned site which could have led to a penalty. If you have allowed sig links, make sure people follow the guidelines of including sites in their sigs.

 

have you changed any on your site like

* getting too many link in a short time
* loosing backlinks
* changed your theme
* linking to a bad site

etc

pls give some more detail

 

Have you tried logging in to Google webmaster central? Does it give any errors for pages unreachable?

It sounds like all the pages google couldn't find have been dropped until google crawls them again.

 

trichnosis - none of these.

We're constantly bringing up features and pages so it's hard to track but I'm quite certain that nothing dramatic was changed.

 

rosiee007 - I use nofollow for all external links so I guess the problem couldn't stem from there.