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Sudden Plummet in Rankings for High Traffic Site

by solution4u
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi there,

I have a high traffic site (a WP Blog) of about 3 years standing with several hundred posts.

Until around 8 April I had numerous page 1 rankings on Google for quite a few reasonable traffic keywords.

I use no black hat tactics.

I use mainly article marketing, as well as social bookmarking and directory submissions and link services.

Currently I use a variety of article marketing type services - UAW, 1WayLinks, NeuroLinker, BacklinkSolutions, Web2Mayhem, ContentSpooling, etc.

I also use link services like MyWayLinks.

At around 8 April, my traffic suddenly plummeted from around 600 per day to around 100 per day, and has stayed at that level. Currently some of my page 1 rankings are now on page 7 and some I can't even find on Google at all.

This is a major, and sudden, unexplained drop.

Does anyone have any idea as to whether there was anything that may have caused this?

Thanks.
#high #plummet #rankings #site #sudden #sudden drop in rankings #sudden drop in traffic #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author John Wilkes
    Did the traffic drop before the google rankings dropped? Or did the google drop affect the traffic?
    Is it possible that the traffic coming to your website has been Hijacked? Check where your traffic was coming from and if the links are still valid.
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  • Profile picture of the author kchui1028
    No idea.. you're not guaranteed the ranking of Google. While you are happy and stop doing SEO for your site, Other blogs might have done a lot of SEO and bump your site all the way back. It's hard to say... hard to say. You should go on the Google webmaster Forum and ask over there.
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  • Profile picture of the author SilentX
    I'm really not the best person to answer such a question, but perhaps one of your main article directories suddenly got a black eye with Google? Just a thought.
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  • Profile picture of the author Texjd
    I have several sites that got hit in the last few weeks. There is something affoot in the new Google rankings. I've looked at the websites affected and there is no common factor or any obvious reason other than Google has been tweaking their algo.

    I think we have a new set of rules and somebody forgot to send us the notice. I'd bet this is being rolled out by datacenter since not all webistes have the same date on the drop in rankings.

    I never use any tactics that could be judged to be black hat. This could get ugly.
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  • Profile picture of the author warriorkay
    It's clearly important to first find out what caused the
    sudden plummet. 600 uniques per day to 100 is obviously
    cause for concern.

    Here's what I will do:

    Go through my stats to find out what was really bringing
    me the 600 uniques per day and determine why that's
    no longer happening. For example, one site I had was
    getting tons of uniques per day from EzineArticles
    because I had about 10 (yes 10) articles in the
    "Most Viewed EzineArticles" section and also in the
    "Most Published EzineArticles" sections. As you know,
    these only stay for 90 days (now 60 days).

    They were bringing me LOTS of daily visits until
    the 90 days were up.

    Kingsley
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    • Profile picture of the author ntnsllc
      Your answer can be found at seomozdotorg. Today's "White board Friday" touches on this topic.
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  • Profile picture of the author Texjd
    Just read the article and watched the video at seomoz. I agree with what they guesstimated happened.

    I just checked and it was my longer tailed traffic that was impacted. I also just checked the numbers on number of sites indexed under several of the terms and the numbers were reduced by around 15%. So Google is reducing the size of their indexes.

    None of my websites disappeared but they did drop in rankings. I've already seen some movement back up the ladder so maybe they will slowly climb back up.

    Of course I'm still losing traffic during the interm which sucks.

    Thanks to ntnsllc for pointing out the article.
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  • Profile picture of the author emigre
    This happened to me too, a sudden big drop in search engine traffic couple of weeks ago. It seems to have returned back to normal but already lost some income.
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  • Profile picture of the author zenji
    Well, this explains why one of my sites "disappeared".

    Thanks for the link
    zenji
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    • Profile picture of the author solution4u
      Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.

      Actually, the only one that I think may be anywhere near the mark is John Wilkes.

      John, you said:

      " Did the traffic drop before the google rankings dropped? Or did the google drop affect the traffic? Is it possible that the traffic coming to your website has been Hijacked? Check where your traffic was coming from and if the links are still valid. "

      John, I have no idea if the traffic dropped before or after the Google rankings - I had no idea anything had happened at all until nearly a month after it happened (I did notice a drop in earnings, but didn't check any further). Is there any way I can find out now which happened first? And if I can find that out, what will that tell me?

      And how could my traffic be hijacked?? And how can I tell if it has? And what can I do about it?

      I really hope you can give me a few more hints. I'm pretty clueless about stuff like this.

      Thanks so much.
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