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I was thinking my own blog, but I certainly would be honored to write for Moz. I will look at the link.

Right now, after the stress of today and proof my site is not, in fact destroyed, I am going to go to bed

Really, thanks, everyone.  A lot of you provided little bits of information that helped me figure it out. This is a great site.

Yup.  My traffic is starting to spike already.  This might be a good idea for a blog post...

No, you cannot edit Avvo answers.   I suppose you can ask the folks at Avvo to just remove all of client's answers. No idea whether they will do it for you. I have had them remove an answer or three for me, so it can't hurt to ask.  Not sure how your client will feel about you doing that, of course.

You better believe it! My traffic is already showing an upward spike.

Avvo provides only one follow link, and that is in the person's profile.  Links in answers are nofollow. As a result, answering questions on Avvo should not harm a site.

I answer a lot of questions on Avvo and it hasn't hurt my firm's site. I often put relevant links in the link section of my answers. For example, if I am answering a question about medical malpractice, I might put a link to a page I wrote on the basic requirements for a medical malpractice case.  However, I do not put links to my firm in every answer. I only use links when I think the person might be a potential client for my firm and I would like to guide him/her to my firm's site.

I agree with irvingw that your client may well be doing this sort of thing all over the web, which might be the source of the problem. In addition, if your client is adding a general non-useful link back to his website, he might be violating Avvo's terms of service.

I see a lot of disavowing in your future.

Now I feel a bit less foolish, thank you.  My biggest mistake (since I wasn't the one who changed the code after all) is that I insisted on focusing on the deletion of the pages. I didn't remember the change in the tracking code, so for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what had happened.  I knew that we hadn't been hit by a penalty, actually, hummingbird helped us quite a bit.  The whole thing made no sense to me. It made no sense to anyone else either

Good idea. I noted what happened on my calendar, but you are right, I should put a note in GA as well.  Thanks for the suggestion.

I thought you would like to know, I figured out the problem. My traffic had not dropped at all.  The problem was actually with the tracking code.  When my programmer went to add in the new, more advanced Google tracking code, it didn't work properly. I was actually waiting for Yoast to update its plugin to work with the new code, so I put it out of my mind for the moment.

Well, the initial effort to put in the new code caused a problem, resulting in (a) an artificially low bounce rate and (b) artificially low traffic reporting.

The page deletion had nothing to do with it.

Phew.

Thank you, everyone, for your input.

Hi, thanks for your answer.  It does seem that there was a compilation of traffic from the pages. I am not sure if the data as far as how much visitation was going on was incorrect and so that is why the impact was so drastic. I submitted a new sitemap when I removed the pages, so perhaps that accounts for the fast result? I cannot say.  But your point is a very good one.

I will take a look at the cached version for some of the pages. Good idea.

No errors in webmaster tools.  No drop in authority that I noticed. The authority wasn't huge to begin with. The site had about 300-400 sessions per day before the drop.

We definitely have a lot of long tail traffic. But not on those particular pages, at least, not according to Google when I looked at how much traffic each page was getting.  I would think, if there was traffic going to those pages, restoring them would restore the traffic. But it hasn't.

I am as confused as anyone.

We used 301 redirects. I made sure to delete all links and confirmed it with brokenlink checker. Now the pages are back, so there is no redirection going on.

Hi folks:

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on a problem I am having with organic traffic. One of our sites has about 500 pages/blog posts.  We had about 200 pages that no one was visiting, or only one to ten people had visited in an entire year.  As a result, we decided to experiment, and delete any page which had fewer than 5 visits in a year.  This resulted in a deletion of about 90 pages.We did this on April 6 or 7 of this year.

Two days later, we had a substantial drop in visits to the site.  We had been getting about 300 sessions a day. Now, we are lucky to get that in a month.

I know there was an algorithm update in late March, but our traffic dropped about two weeks after that, and a day or so after the deletion of the pages. There is a clear demarcation on analytics.

I gave it a month, the traffic did not recover, so we decided to restore the pages.  Traffic has not recovered and it has been about 3 months now.

Does anyone have any thoughts on why we might have experienced such a drastic drop as well as what we might do to recover from it?

Thanks very much

I am a lawyer, but I am not going to provide you with legal advice. What I am going to provide you with is PR advice. It is always best to get permission. You don't want a client to contact you and ask you to remove it, or even worse write a review on Google+ or somewhere else stating how badly you treated it (even if you didn't treat it badly.)

You also can avoid any potential legal problems by getting permission first.

I am in a hard market for links as well. I find that studies and reports on data work quite well. So what I do is identify a topic that is interesting, gather the governmental data and put it together in a way that I have not otherwise seen.

My firm uses several websites. When I first came in house there were a lot of sites, but I took them down because of the content quality at the time. I am slowly building them back up.  I find that specific area websites can be very useful for pointing ads or specific campaigns, since many people want to know just about X concept I am very careful not to reproduce content and not to try to hide that the sites are owned by the same company.

I hesitated to bring the sites back up until I got some confirmation from Matt Cutts that having more than one site is fine, as long as you follow good content and other SEO standards. http://www.brafton.com/news/cutts-on-similar-website-content-multiple-domains-duplicate-or-safe

I link between the sites, but in an organic way. I.e. if I have an article on one site that naturally links to another site, I link it.  I also don't have a huge number of sites and don't expect to do so.