Did Google Breakup With Me?
Ever since the middle of January, my traffic from Google has taken a pretty good drop and I don't know why. I thought I was ready to break through in January, I was getting more organic traffic than ever before, then it just dropped off. Granted I wasn't rolling in traffic to begin with, but I was starting to see some progress.
I searched for algorithm updates, but I didn't find anything that would pertain to my niche.
Interesting though, traffic from Bing/Yahoo has picked up. I have had some sales as well, more on that later though.
Has anyone had a similar experience recently with a drop in traffic on Google? Any ideas why the shift in traffic from Google to Bing?
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Any updates on this Steve? My traffic was up this last week which is great but not so much today...I guess the start of the long weekend means people are out having real life fun instead of being on the computer!
Hey Jessica,
Since mid March my traffic has been trending up pretty good. Up and down is the name of the game for me. Overall trending in the right direction though.
Good. Mine has been up (getting 75 to over 100 visitors per day for the last week) but sales are a bit down.
I check my rank in Jaaxy, and not all of my rankings have dropped, but Google traffic has taken a serious dive. There are a couple of things that I can think of. Around mid-December, I started posting every day and I posted 25 articles in 25 days. These were not as high quality as I had been posting so that may be part of the issue. I also changed my theme. Just seems like a strange that these 2 events coincide with my drop. Probably something there.
I am not too sure. I honestly don't think lower quality articles would contribute to that large of a drop unless they were really low quality which is kind of hard to do. I'm sure you were still implementing good SEO. Not too sure, things like repetition of content and keywords or change of focus from your niche could play a factor.
(What is your organic search productivity like per day on average anyways?)
Theme could play a part possibly. Changing your theme could demonstrate a large change to your site which google could recognize and have to adjust to, but if that's the cause, you should go up eventually.
It's hard to say. I don't know enough info about your site to make an educated guess.
But I also haven't seen this too much without solid reasoning like a google update or something.
I would go into serplab.co.uk (not sure if you have used this before) but you can check every keyword you have targeted and check its rank. But you won't be able to check your ranking adjustments until you input your keywords in there.
All in all, I would check exactly which rankings have dropped (because that is the cause of your drop in traffic) and then check your competition to see who surpassed you. Then maybe try to make the articles you were getting most of your traffic on better to up those rankings again.
I did some research because I am curious too. I think you may be right on the quality of the content. But it might not be that the quality is that bad.
I think google gets used to your publishing frequency and consistency. So if you were publishing twice a week, that may tell google your content is thought out, prepared, and published and high quality.
Then suddenly changing to a post per day could tell google that this isn't your normal publishing consistency and so you are spending less time on articles and your content is less quality and provides less value to readers.
From what I read, consistency is more important than frequency.
So maybe google thinks your content is less quality because you have started to publish more frequently and that's a big change. I don't think this is bad, it just might take time for google to adjust to your new consistency.
Just my 2 cents. Honestly, who knows. Google works in mysterious ways.
I agree with you on that and I heard that from someone else also. It may take some time to recover. I threw a wrench in the works, so now I have to deal with that. I didn't understand the ramifications, but consistency and quality are tops in Google's eyes.
Bing and Yahoo don't seem to care though LOL.
I think you'll get back up there eventually! When you do, you'll have way more posts to rank for anyways.
Ya Bing and Yahoo are way behind lol
I don't know why Google has dropped but I would continue to watch it and if it keeps dropping like this then I would contact and see what is going on.
I don't know if Site Support can help with this but it is worth a try to see if they can maybe there something go on with your site.
That is the only two things that I can't think of right now if I think of something else I will contact you.
Mary
Hi Steve,
I know both of us are in similar niches and both started our sites at similar times. I've had a few operations lately so have struggled to post regularly for the last 6 months or so, but my traffic is always on the up.
It seems very strange how your site seems to be going backwards when you are posting regularly. Your site and reviews are great, so I see no reason why your traffic is going down.
I compared both of our sites on the free version of Sermrush and yes your site seems to go on a steep decline from Dec 18' onwards.
Might be worth shooting Karl or Jay a pm to see if they can figure it out because there's something weird going on there.
Hope you get to the bottom of this,
Cheers
Jake
Yikes, that is scary thanks for getting back to me on that.
That is interesting, see my comment below too. I pumped out a bunch of lesser quality articles in mid December and I wonder if I am paying for that now.
A few low quality posts here and there as long as the SEO is done correctly shouldn't affect ranking that much
And I would think even if you wrote 20 low quality posts your traffic wouldn't drop as drastically as it has.
The only big change in Google lately has been the mobile update, where they're ranking all pages on mobile speed instead of desktop. But you have a premium theme so I'm sure your mobile speeds ok.
Targeting high comp keywords will slow your traffic increase a little but shouldn't affect existing posts that were ranking well, so I'm stumped lol
Just as RDullo says, best to keep writing and hopefully, the numbers will pick up. :)
Sorry to hear that. I've been having the same problem.
Don't know what's happening but I'm seeing a really bad drop in traffic too, although I published 24 posts in January and 26 in February. Mid-january was looking like a nice growth to 3.1K visitors per month and by the end of February, it's down to 2.4K. :(
I checked on Google Console and my average position is still the same. The click-through rate is also the same. So I really don't know what's doing it.
The only thing that we can do at this point is to keep publishing, no matter what happens.
Interesting that you are seeing a similar trend. Yes I think you are correct, keep on publishing.
Yea, it's really weird. I've been struggling with my traffic ever since the update in Aug 2018. But I was picking up alright until December but a drop in december is expected.
Then, I was happy that it was picking back up in January and it's now back down in February.
I have no idea what's going on.
I always see faster rankings on Bing. I've always assumed it's because Bing is less competitive and just doesn't have as many businesses trying to rank as there are on Google.
You are going to see a lot of that Google Dance. The only smart thing to do is keep posting. You might get your position again.
Don't feel demotivated by this, just plan new keywords and see in 3 months if you see an improvement. If there is nothing wrong with the site, then you should see an improvement.
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This happened to me. In the past week I went from 100 organic sessions a day to just 30 and still dropping. I checked my posts rankings and they've all dropped. What was on page 1,2,3, now on page 8,9,10+.
Definitely not normal fluctuations. I didn't change any themes or did anything unusual so this is confusing. There was no manual action penalty, and I couldn't find any algorithm changes from Google.
I've been asking around and still dont have an answer.
My traffic took a hit for a few months there, but an update in March seems to have been good for me.
I am averaging over 40 organic sessions per day for May which is my all time high.
I have heard various theories on what Google does so who knows. Someone told me at about the 12 to 14 month mark Google will decrease your traffic (maybe this is a test of our will LOL).
For me apparently it was at the 16 month mark.
I also agree with the comments below about my drastic change in publishing frequency.
If you can't pinpoint an update or other change, I guess you just have to wait it out.