Hi guys, last few weeks my traffic from search engine (Google) was increasing so fast and last week I got 500 traffic from google. The amount may be too small for some of you guys but its really a lot for my new 5 months old blog. So, when I found out from last 3/4 days my traffic from SE is decreasing tremendously I got scared bcoz I m not sure why exactly its happening and how to prevent it. Today it came down from 500 to 80. Obviously all my keywords lost their position in Seach Engines. 1. Does joining affiliate programs affect your ranking in any way? (just joined an affiliate program this week.) 2. Am I being penalized by google? Please help with your knowledge and ideas guys its really killing me. I wouldn't have felt so bad about it if I knew what is going on.
Your site is still new, you may see ups and downs in SERPs. YOu need to get quality and relevant backlinks to get a stable place in SERPs. And too much of affiliate links in site can have a negative affect. I am not surely about it, but I have seen people talking about problems that arise if too many affiliate links are included in a site. But you just joined the affiliate program a week ago, I do not think that you can be penalized for such think this fast.
All sites fluctuate in the rankings to some extent. Older, more established sites may not fluctuate much, but new sites can fluctuate a great deal. If you were ranking well before, chances are you will rank well again, perhaps even soon. Just keep adding good content and quality links and you should be ok.
It normal to have changing SERPs and thus changing traffic. Sometimes you rank for a highly searched topical content. After a week people stop searching for that term and traffic dies off.
Thanks guys for your answers. I know a post ranks higher when its new and fresh and naturally drops ranking as it gets older. That's what also happened with one of my post, it alone brought me 300 daily traffic from google and was ranked in the 3rd position for couple of weeks. Now it's gone to the bottom position of the 2nd page. Why suddenly this particular post along with some of my well ranked keywords dropped their position that's what I can't figure out. I have heard google values a page if it meets the users needs and if that's the case my post was completing the SERP visitors very well. Even if the post drops its rank bcoz its no more fresh why my keywords also losing their position? Okay, I was just talking about what was going in my mind after reading your replies. Now pls help me prevent my site from losing its SERP ranking. I have thought about it already, please correct me if I am wrong and also suggest anything you would like to add. 1. I don't update my blog regularly (Lazy) 2. Didn't work at all on getting backlinks, neither for homepage nor for any particular page. So, if i start actively updating my blog and work on getting backlinks is it likely that I will be able to keep hold of my position in SERPs? Coz with my little experience I have seen that without backlinks and good PR I keep losing position to some crapy copy pasters when my posts gets older just bcoz they got higher PR than my blog. Thanks a lot again @ angilina, jitendraag and cgoulart. Feeling much better now.
As you mentioned your domain is only 5 months old so it's still not well established in the eyes of google. I hope you didn't create too many links too fast. That could get you penalized and drop in SERPs.
@adamgookey I didn't work on link building at all. That's why i got only PR1 in the last PR update. Anyway, I have figured out not only my older posts and keywords lost rank in SERP but also google is not indexing my newer posts. I think it's time to mail google for support even though their support for webmasters sucks.