Suddenly traffic drop

Hello,

Have you checked inside your Google Webmaster's area to see if traffic coming from long tails has dropped?

You may have been only tracking a small keyword set from a much bigger set of keywords of which you didn't know of.

I doubt Google Analytics is the problem, usually it does a good job. Sometimes traffic drops, it is hard to explain. I would recommend looking at the source of the traffic. Maybe you have built some links and the site deleted them. See where your current traffic comes from and where your old traffic comes from.

Google penguin 2.0 rolled out less than a week ago, it is likely Google is reshuffling the index and things might return to almost normal .... however, they may not, Penguin 1.0 hit my website very hard, we went from about 600 a day from Google down to 100, after about a year our Google closing ratio was significantly increased, so Google was sending us far fewer, but better leads, although we only ever got after the first Penguin about 300 visitors a day(from Google), last month we did fine, the company, my staff and I were all paid for with the sales, for only the second time in the last year, the last one being the December sales rush. Previously we had been profitable for several years already. (We are a retail company, the link in the signature.)

We have never used anything but white hat techniques, no automated, paid backlinks or anything else of the sort.

Thank goodness we do not spend all our time and money trying to please Google, now Facebook and other Social Networks not only give us a huge number of visitors, sometimes nearing 6 digits on our best days, it now can almost keep us afloat for direct conversions, not to mention addition conversions from referrals of the people brought in by the social media websites, you know the guys at work saying "Hey, look at this".

Penguin 2.0 so far has done pretty much exactly the same thing to my website as it did yours, from the (now) normal 300 visitors a day, we have gone down to only about 60 since Penguin 2.0 launched, and a largely increased bounce rate, this could be a reshuffling of Google's index as it tests it's results, and might work itself out, I hope. For us it seemed to work itself out last year, but it almost took a year to do so, if you have overhead, like we do, this is extremely painful.

I am still waiting to find out whether Google has tossed my company to the curb or not, and then I will have to decide whether to abandon SEO completely and just go strait for social media, as they are halve our sales now already. Facebook mostly.

If I were you, assuming you are white hat, you might not want to spend too much time trying to please Google with big changes and more SEO, as it never seemed to help at all for doing so, and just continue working on content, at least for a couple of months to see if it repairs itself, before you go to town trying to change things. I am told too many changes can upset Google's algorithms, and might increase the suffering.

Having said all that, in my current pessimistic, jaded and bitter opinion, sometimes I wonder if Google is going to a "premium" web service, where the big players, with big money will make the front page, 99.99% of all the websites that heavily rely on it will suffer and eventually die, and Google will become a big generic network of things similar to every shopping mall in the world, network TV station, and mainstream newspaper. It is far closer to this now that it was just 3-4 years ago, I hope this is not the future.

Hi winarticles,

I was wondering if your traffic has returned to normal, so far we seem to have settled at a 40% drop in organic Google search, but its still too early to tell what the long run will look like.

Yeah...

I've experienced a traffic drop somewhere between 40% compared with the traffic I've had before the Panda Update.

Let's hope it's just temporary.