Saturday, October 27, 2018

70% website traffic drop on Oct 24. All in one day.

My website currently generates about 7,000 unique monthly visitors. The traffic was declining for the past year because I wasn't working on it (it used to generate 14,000). This summer, however, I started working on it again and it was showing improvement. October was already a very promising month with about 15% improvement comparing to previous month. And then all of a sudden Google traffic decreased by 70% on Oct 24 for no reason at all, from 300/day unique visitors to 90.

I don't use any shady tactics, almost all of my traffic is organic. It seems Google just stopped showing my most visited pages, possibly lower ranked pages as well. I have looked through all the articles I could find online, but none of the suggestions apply to me. Not manual actions, issues with no follow or robots.txt, no redirects, no website redesign, server issues, no new plugins or other tech related stuff.

As I was working on it for the past few months, I have optimized content quite a lot and this was the reason why the website improved. The last major content changes were made on Oct 14, but again, I could clearly see that my traffic kept growing to those specific pages. Those were targeted optimizations to make all the sections of the webpage most relevant to the page title (not keyword dense over-optimization, more like less relevant info replaced with more targeted content). On Oct 15 it went from 250 unique daily visits to 300.

In the past I also did tend to make quite a few "rearrangements" on the webpages on a regular basis (like keeping the info up-to-date) during the best performing times and it has never affected my website ranking. Like never. The only time I experienced something like this was when I moved the website to a new domain.

I am out of ideas. Does anyone have any suggestions besides waiting it out and hoping it would come back to normal in a couple of months or so.

submitted by /u/viewframer
[link] [comments]

from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/9ruokv/70_website_traffic_drop_on_oct_24_all_in_one_day/>

No comments:

Post a Comment