5 Major Reasons For Sudden Drop In Organic Traffic Of Your Site
Your site is getting huge traffic through organic search and all of a sudden you see drop in traffic?
Your keyphrases lost their page rank?
Don’t be panic, it’s possible to make a full recovery. You are at right place and this post is specially for you.
There are many reasons why organic search traffic can drop all of a sudden. Following are top causes to check if organic traffic suddenly drops:
1. Google algorithm update:
Google algorithm updates is one of the major reason of traffic drop. Google keeps on updating its search engine algorithm every now or then in order to make more relative data and site to rank higher and make it more user-friendly.
Major Google Algorithm Updates are
· Panda
Launch date: February 24, 2011.
Hazards: Duplicate, plagiarized or thin content; user-generated spam; keyword stuffing.
· Penguin
Launch date: April 24, 2012.
Hazards: Spammy or irrelevant links; links with over-optimized anchor text.
· Hummingbird
Launch date: August 22, 2013.
Hazards: Keyword stuffing; low-quality content.
· Pigeon
Launch date: July 24, 2014 (US); December 22, 2014 (UK, Canada, Australia)
Hazards: Poor on- and off-page SEO.
· Mobile
Launch date: April 21, 2015.
Hazards: Lack of a mobile version of the page; poor mobile usability.
· RankBrain
Launch date: October 26, 2015.
Hazards: Lack of query-specific relevance features; shallow content; poor UX.
· Possum
Launch date: September 1, 2016.
Hazards: Tense competition in your target location.
· Fred
Launch date: March 8, 2017.
Hazards: Thin, affiliate-heavy or ad-centered content.
2. You Got Penalized by Google:
Google will penalize site anytime if they identify that any attempt is been made by a website to be deceptive or to try to artificially inflate google search rankings.
Following are some common penalty reasons you should keep eye on:
· Hacked site
· Thin or Duplicate content
· User-generated spam
· Malicious links
· Unnatural links to your site
3. Your Competitor Outnumbered you:
When dealing with the organic traffic drop, make sure your competitor didn’t overtakes you and you didn’t get outranked by them. If this is reason then you know well who stole your traffic.
Here are few ways your competitor can outnumber you:
· Competitors launch a new pages and posts.
· They added new and unique content to their sites.
· They have more internal and external links pointing to site pages than you do.
Getting connected with experienced website development and design company for best SEO Services, you can outnumber your competitors and get your site ranked high in google search.
4. Your number of referring domains and/or links dropped:
If your site doesn’t have loads of backlinks developed then losing backlinks may hurt your website visibility and search traffic.
It might be possibility that large number of your backlinks have been removed or no longer accessible.
Make sure that you:
· Never sell your links.
· Don’t engage in practices that you know are associated with spamming.
· Never hide links on your website.
This will help you to review the quality of your inbound and outbound links and determine of some of them may need to be disavowed or removed.
5. Major site changes:
Website migrations, site updates or redesigning of site may also be the major reason for drop in traffic these days. Look at Google Search Console for helping hand to trace this. Go to Crawl, then look at Crawl Errors graphs to spot any differences that may have taken place after your site’s redesign and renovation.
You can go to the Site Audit dashboard in the Site Structure module to check for other issues which are needed to be taken care off.
6. Migrating website:
Migrating website from one domain to another domain can also play major role in drop of site traffic.
Google’s mostly covers migrations with site location changes and categorised them as follows:
· Site moves with URL changes.
· Site moves without URL changes.
Common site migration pitfalls:
· Poor strategy.
· Poor planning.
· Lack of resources.
· Lack of SEO/UX consultation.
· Late involvement.
· Lack of testing.
· Slow response to bug fixing.
· Underestimating scale.
Conclusion
Being dropped in Google ranking and not getting genuine organic traffic is not anyone’s desire, but it happens to be a reality. We just need to take a closer look at the actions done by ourselves to rank the site instead of blaming Google algorithms, Google penalties etc.
Make sure you are following best practices for ranking the website — updated content should be unique, clean up old pages and never follow unethical practices to boost up your site.
Author’s Bio
In the above article, the author has explained the reasons that why your rank start dropping all of a sudden and what are the reasons which are needed to be taken care off.