I Think I Killed My Site!
I have been struggling with huge traffic dives for months now. I blogged about it here back in October, but traffic still hasn't improved despite updating content regularly, adding new content, writing new posts, etc. In fact, my new posts are faring terribly.
Yesterday i decided I was going to switch over to YOAST instead of using All in One SEO plug in. I was hoping the features in YOAST would help me optimize my site better.
But I just checked analytics and I only had 32 hits to my site yesterday. 32!!!!!!!!!!!! That's pretty bad and SO MUCH WORSE than what I have been getting.
I followed the instructions on YOAST to import data from All in One SEO and I deactived All in One SEO after.
Does anyone know what might have happened? Is a temporary traffic hit normal?
Today I am at 0!!!! Even from Pinterest! I usually get steady traffic from Pinterest, though obviously yesterday I did not.
What could be happening?
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When you imported, make sure you brought over you Google analytics data. You may have to reinsert the code to yoast.
OMG you're a lifesaver. I only input the Google Webmaster's code, not analytics. I'll look into this now--thanks so much! Hopefully things are not as dire as it seemed?
Do you use YOAST by chance? I'm seeing now that they don't have a place to input Google Analytics code. They used to have a plugin for that but have gotten rid of it. From what I gathered, many recommend using the Monster Insights plugin. I installed that but I feel like I have too many plug-ins, so wondering if this is really the route to go or if I'm missing something.
The members answered perfectly! I particularly liked BenjisDad's response as I believe that is the problem. If you were getting some traffic, it would not just go down to zero. Make sure analytic is still able to see your site
All the best and please let us know it the situation was rectified.
Claudia
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If there is one thing I have learned in these 2 years I am at WA is to have patience. There have been moments, usually around major Google updates, that I also had some pretty major traffic drops. But what I did is to look away from the analytics numbers and keep putting out more quality content. And guess what, after 2-3 months things started to get back to normal and even better than before.
Patience is the key. It can take months before Google improve your position so if what you were doing was improving your traffic slowly you shouldn't change anything. I can understand that you changed to YOAST to get even better results but in my opinion this was a mistake since you were already having some steady traffic. Because at some point it did went down didn't mean you should start panicking and taking drastic measures that can do more harm than good.
But reduced traffic is one thing and getting zero is another. Check in analytics in what positions your articles appear. Also try to resubmit your sitemap. But no matter what is going on, don't panic or change things around that could make things even worse. Everything you do takes a certain time to show some kind of change in Google so take it slow and just monitor the situation.
Stratos
Unfortunately, my traffic decline started in August and is still trending downward, not steady or up. Been about 4 months getting worse and worse each day. This was all after having a pretty amazing summer of traffic, so it was quite disappointing. The hit was sudden, and it's been getting worse as I said, not holding steady or getting slightly better. Something needs to be done here, not sure what.
Though I'm realizing now my traffic wasn't truly 0. I didn't have analytics connected when I made the switch to YOAST. So whatever the traffic was, it wasn't tracked. Makes sense because switching to YOAST should not have impacted Pinterest traffic in the slightest.
Have you changed anything in your regular schedule? Because usually such changes in traffic happen because of some chang in Google's algorithms. But even so if you continue to do exactly what you were doing things will bounce back.
I remember in the beginning of August Google made some changes and my traffic was hit hard. But I didn't change anything on my regular schedule and continued to produce content like nothing happened. And it was not under the end of October that traffic started to bounce back and it did in a major way. But for more than two months it was like something was going on.
The key was that I didn't let that affect me or panic me. I knew that I was doing good by following exactly what I learned here and just kept waiting for things to turn around. If you do exactly as it is being taught here in the training and Jay's webinars then at some point traffic will bounce back. I know it's hard to see your numbers dropping and do nothing but this is how things work with Google.
At least this is my experience.
Stratos