On the 31st December my web traffic dropped to 50% and has stayed like that. My website is about a year old and only has just over 100 pages on it. My traffic was consistently growing from 200 to 300 in December and then on the 31st December it cut to about 100 where it has remained. I have recently started my WMT but there are no warnings and data is currently being updated however I have looked into my analytics and sure enough about half my pages have lost half their traffic the others are either too small to consider anything or have gained a lot of traffic. I did a quick ranking check for my pages main key terms and a lot of them are still on the first page of Google but I also noticed new pages in my place. There have been some drops ie. top four to bottom four or maybe bottom of first page to top of second page so I don't think I have incurred a penalty. This makes me think some form of ranking change? I didn't add any content to my website in January at all since I was changing the look of it. Could this be the cause for drops? I have started adding content again and Google is indexing it really fast as it has been and they are ranking as I would expect first page top of second page so I doubt I have a penalty. I don't do any dirty SEO tactics I just purely write useful unique content and let the web take over. So is this anything to worry over?Do you think its just a ranking change since my content is now a fair few months old?
If you stopped adding content for awhile, that could account for a drop. Also, Google seems to be tweaking their alogrhytms pretty regularly. Keep adding content and hopefully you'll see a pick up in traffic again soon.
Thanks. Yea I was thinking that could be a contributing factor to plus December was holiday season. I saw they released a page layout algo on the 6th Feb and my traffic dropped slightly again even though I don't have many ads above the fold I still pushed one below the fold. I'l just keep adding content and see what happens.
Google TWEAKS daily now and has reported that they will adjust over 563 times in the next year #TRUESTORY BRO
You can't put it down to just one factor, there are a range of factors that could be contributing. Just keep adding fresh content
One of my sites dropped on the same day and just recovered a few days ago. Nothing changed at all on my end. Did you see a recovery yet?
It certainly is not an algorithm change, there is a neat list of such changes, compiled by MOZ, you can check here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change As for your movement in keyword rankings, its important to consider not only what changes YOU made, but also how are your closest competitors developing. The ranking is based on the overall performance of all similarly keyworded websites, so it might just be that the others made some significant improvements and that moved you down the list. Still, the way you explain it, you are going on the right path, so just keep it up with the fresh and useful content and keep a close eye on your analytics and you should be able to regain the lost traffic.
Have you tried to look into what pages and maybe keywords are performing worse? Maybe that was just a single page which has received a good amount of traffic.
Hi everyone I haven't checked this post in a while because I've just been focusing on writing new content. I have had a look at some of the "new" pages on Google and to be honest they are just bad in comparison to mine. Mine are really good long unique product reviews but some pages I haven't noticed before are the likes of shops and product info pages, Amazon and forum posts. I actually recently thought of what the problem could be. For the majority of December/end November I worked on a top 100 Christmas gift list. So I think Google didn't like that with all the affiliate links. I took it down today and also since I was updating the look of the site for all of January that's really two full months without "fresh" content. So I have started adding more info articles to balance out the affiliate links and I am confident that will get it back on track.