I had a massive ogranic traffic drop in the past 72 hours (80%). What should I do? I

[madsuh]

I am very very worried as my organic traffic suddenly came to pretty much a halt last Friday. We have been working very hard on content in the last 2 years and have 0 duplicated content with many  thousand travel guides, tips and other travel related info. We are also publishing a successful travel blog which used to get quite a bit off traffic. Everything stalled last Friday and since we are operating in the travel industry which is very competitive, this will be very hard on us. In fact, I fear that we will not survive this drop for more than 2-3 months.

How do we find out about what happened and what can we do to get our SERPs back?

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the reply Peter. By reviewing your site I can share the following:

• your site is still indexed by Google.

• you could open a Reconsideration Request with Google to determine if your site has received a manual penalty: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration

• you need to analyze your traffic using Google Analytics. EXACTLY where is the traffic drop? You need to analyze specific sources such as Google organic search traffic for specific keywords.

• I tried a longtail keyword search for your site based on the first blog article I located "top 5 reasons to visit honduras". You ranked #7 for the phrase. It's not surprising as the page has a PR of 1.

• have you noticed any ranking drop for a specific keyword or page?

The only way to troubleshoot this issue is to dig into your analytics data.

[madsuh]

Thank you so much for all the questions.

I am trying to keep it short, so here are the clarifications:

• we have not done anything specific in the past 6 weeks or 3 months that could have caused this
• no Malware is found via Webmastertools
• We use Analytics
• The drop is broad and sudden, we lost some 90% of our organic traffic
• The site is this one http://bit.ly/8CsakX
• No special inbound or oubtbound links were found that would have caused this
• the drop is broad across all pages and all keywords

Attached is an image... our SEO was ok... slowly increasing, interestingly our blog which fresh content that we write ourselves every day also got the hit and dropped 80% as well.

please help. Thanks

Zypua.png

[Francisco_Meza]

All the previous responses are great. I would look into Google Webmasters and check to see who's linking to you. Once you figure it out and 'if' you are being penalized, contact google through Google Webmasters and ask for a reconsideration.

[EGOL]

The owner of the website is the person who is best able to diagnose  a traffic decline.  Anyone else is guessing.

The thing that you need to do is to check the analytics and determine.....

--- did you lose traffic for specific keywords?

--- did you lose traffic to specific pages?

--- did you lose traffic from specific sources?

Information like the above is the only way to diagnose a traffic loss.

Get into your analytics and see what happened.  Then an action plan can be developed.

[RyanKent]

Hi Peter.

Itrogers asked some good questions. A few additional questions I would ask:

• What tool are you using to measure your traffic?

• What is your site's web address?

• Which pages of your site normally receive the highest amount of traffic?

• Is there any search term for which you had the #1 or 2 rankings in Google?

• Are there any ad campaigns or other traffic sources which recently began? I realize you are asking about organic traffic but your ads may compete with the organic traffic.

• What changes to your site have been made in the past 6 weeks? Any chance pages could have been blocked with robots.txt or noindexed?

Basically we need to understand exactly what traffic it was you previously received that is no longer present. Then we can begin to diagnose why that traffic is missing.

[itrogers]

Have you purchased or obtained any spammy links to your content?

Have you checked Google webmaster tools for any malware warnings?

Did the traffic just stop completely? Make sure that you didn't remove your analytics code from your header. This will make it obviously look like you have 0 traffic when you actually might be. Sometimes technical changes (especially with a CMS) can cause some parts of the site to stop working together.

What did you do recently that might be of question to Google?