35% Drop In Traffic Since March 23 2012

[LiquidTech]

Hi,

I am aware ofth e penguin and panda updates and have been monitoring my traffic for the last few months.

I did notice that for some reason, from about 22nd / 23rd March we had a drop in traffic by about 50%, it stabilised in a few days but since then from april to present has been hovering around 35% drop in traffic.

what perplexes me is hat I also monitored our rankings and that was fine, pretty much the same, yet traffic is down. I have noticed our longer tail keywords have lost  traffic by as much as 60-900%

I would really appreciate some input, do you think this could be down to panda pulling pages out.

how can i find track pages indexesd for my site over time to see if this is where he problem is.

I havea lso noticed that in webamster tools, a domain  preferance is not set, it is set to default "do not set a preferred domain", would this not cause a  dup content issue, what should it be set to, post panda?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is really hurting our business.

thanks you in advance

[rayvensoft]

I had noticed the same thing on a number of my pages.  Like you we got an initial fluctuation for our main keywords after penguin, but after time they stabilized, and many of them returned to the #1 position (even though I still notice jumps of 3-5 positions daily).

But where we really seem to have lost the most traffic were the long-tail keywords.  Now, these were not necessarily keywords I had optimized for specifically, but they were ones we had ranked for in the top 5.  For example if I optimized for "nice big blue widget" I was also showing up at or near the top for "nice big widget blue".  Now I am nowhere to be found.

It seems like google stopped giving credit for related words.  They are only ranking for the specific words you optimize for and not for anything else.  Not sure if it is only me, but I have noticed this on a number of our sites.

Not sure if it helps, but just to let you know you are not the only one seeing this.

[JarnoNijzing]

Dear Tahire,

one of my own websites uses mainly long-tail keywords up to 4 words. What we noticed over time is that in some cases people all of the sudden stop searching for that term.

1. have you tried editing your location in Google? This influences that ranking tremendously here in the Netherlands so it should also do that in the States. This could give you false positions in the SERP's

We had a term, "boerencamping nederland" that we rank good for but 2 years ago the term wasn't searched. Last year we got about 50,000 visitors via that term in one year. This year, 0 visitors. All of the suddon people started searching on boerencamping drenthe, boerencamping flevoland and other terms. Strangely enough. How can you explain authentic search behavior of humans? Good question. I can't answer it. I tried to imagine it but couldn't come to the conclusion. I just adapted on the new search terms.

For the domain preference setting, you could use a .htaccess rerouting the non-www to www or the other way around. Google can still say that you did not define a favorite one (we still didn't and this causes no problems).

Hope this helps a bit

kind regards

Jarno