You wake up one morning, open your favorite analytics program and discover that your organic traffic has decreased over night. If you’ve done nothing to violate Google’s terms and conditions it’s quite frustrating. Here’s a useful guide for common reasons of drop in traffic, how to check each one and possible fix.
1. Site IP Address Change – If you haven’t already I’d recommend getting a fix IP address from your host. A change in IP address to one which has been blacklisted or even random changes could undermine your ranking. Keep a record of your IP address on file or use Domain Tools to view your IP address status or IP address history if you haven’t kept a record. The last one is a paid for service.
2. Domain Blacklisted - I hear this often, ‘my domain has been blacklisted’ and almost always it isn’t the case. If you search for site:domain-name in Google and get results, you’re not blacklisted. If you’re getting no results found you might have a problem which could be down to getting blacklisted or even using the robots.txt file incorrectly. You’ll need to get to the bottom of the possible reason and file a reconsideration request. Take this request very seriously, admit what you think might have gone wrong and how you’ve now taken steps to rectify the problem.
3. Outbound Spammy Links – Mostly common for blogs with little or no comment enforcing policy, it might also occur for websites offering user and product reviews with the option to hyperlink. One spammy link getting through the net could see the that page disappear from the index. Start by enforcing a comment / review policy, use spam filters and check your current outbound links using bad neighborhood. Once the offending link has been removed, the page will appear in the index the next time it’s crawled.
4. Aggressive Internal Linking - Leveraging internal linking to optimise your site is a legitimate tactic. For example, internal linking between closely related products will help boost their authority. On the other hand, linking back to your homepage from every page with an optimised anchor text might result in an automated penalty as Rand pointed out. If the drop in traffic happened after you’ve made this change, then revert back.
5. Site Structure Change – I always recommend against doing site-wide structure changes to an existing and well indexed site. If you’ve done this, I guess you had your reasons, still when possible perform structural changes hand in hand with a testing procedure so you’re able to quickly go back to the previous structure. If you suspect your change might help explain the drop in traffic, you can either wait for the engines to fully index the site (that is if you’re 100% certain the change is going to work) or revert back.
6. Misuse of Robots.txt File – The ease in which webmasters and site owners could update the robots.txt file is its great attraction, but also makes this file dangerous at times. Blocking certain pages and directories which previously proved essential to your SEO efforts might help explain drop in traffic in the long tail. If you suspect the robots.txt file might be the cause, analyze it using Google Webmaster tool.
7. Breach of Webmaster Terms and Conditions – If you’ve breached Google’s T&C you’ll need to face the music and try to resolve it. Your first action is to fix the breach and ensure your site complies with the T&Cs. Now you’ll need to file a reconsideration request with the precise action you’ve taken to fully comply with Google and wait a few weeks for an engineer to look at your case. MattCutts of Google suggested recently at PubCon that you might want to look at a new domain and start fresh, though only for very serious cases of violation.
8. Change in Google’s Algorithm – Google constantly changes its algorithm, be it a small update or a major update such as Google Caffeine it might affect your traffic. If such an update does end up affecting your traffic, it will also affect others. Search Google and fine tune the results by date to see if anyone else experienced a change. There’s little you can do in the short time, you need to hope further algorithm tweaks will restore your ranking or you’ll need to optimise your site better in accordance with new update.
9. Your Site Was Hacked - If your site was hacked and injected with scripts and viruses it might disappear from the index or users might be getting a message about malware on your site. There are many checks you can make, but basically you’ll need to fix the hack and file a type of reconsideration request called a malware review of your site. Once again the key is to explain to the engineer looking into your case actions you’ve taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again, from upgrading your software to blocking FTP and running a virus check on your PC.
10. Keyword Penalty – Be in algorithmically or manually you might experience penalty based on a keyword, rather than a site-wide penalty. If you’ve moved on a keyword level over night from page x to page x + 10/20/30 justly or wrongly you’ve probably been penalized. Try and find the reason why, it might be from aggressive anchor text reach internal linking, to a spammy outbound link finding its way through the crack to a Google mistake. The last one can happen when a new site in particular enjoys a large amount of backlinks in a short space of time, it seems unnatural to Google and gets penalized. If you suspect that might be the case, guess what… you’ll need to file a reconsideration request.
11. Seasonal Change – If you’re offering seasonal products or service, don’t be too surprised when your traffic drops. If you’re new to the industry and have little historical information to work on such as using Google Analytics, try using Google Trends for some insights.
12. Pages Dropped From The Index – Large sites with many SKUs are more susceptible to drop in traffic due to certain pages, in particular long tail pages disappearing from the index. This might happen due to content duplication, poor use of the canonical tag or even due to a structural change. Use the site: operator and keep a record of your findings, in particular use the site: operator on a directory level for more precise results i.e. site:site-name.tld/directory/
13. You’ve Lost Some Authority – The last one is tricky to diagnose. If you’ve enjoy links from authoritative sources and those links are now gone for what ever reason, it can influence your ranking over time. You can get a feel for the number of backlinks you have and perhaps their authority if you can recognize names, however the best advice is to keep on building natural quality links.
Hopefully I’ve not missed too many reasons.
Great list! While sites can and do get banned and have technical issues with indexing like you mentioned above, I find this is rarely the case. Rather than start chasing your tail evaluating possible technical SEO issues, I think the first thing to do is determine the source (engine, keyword, or overall).
For instance, many of my clients will do offline marketing like radio advertising from time to time. Naturally this can cause a sharp increase in direct traffic due to people typing the URL they heard in the ad into their browser. However, this also causes a sharp increase in organic traffic due to increased search activity for their branded terms (name of brand, URL, etc.). When they drop the campaign, those branded searches can drop dramatically. This in turn can make the overall organic traffic drop significantly.
In short, if you just looked at overall organic traffic dropping and didn’t get more details on what source dropped, you can wind up wasting a lot of time thinking there is an issue with indexing. If at that point you determine there is a good possibility of an indexing problem, I think you’ve got a great list of scenarios above.
Thanks Brian, some useful insights there.