Massive drop in Google traffic

[renegade]

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Unless you're doing something spammy I'd leave the site as it is, continue to regulary update it, keep and eye on your stats and feed whatever is bringing in traffic and wait and see what happens.
In the meantime start another project and work hard on that.
If you want an in-depth overview of what went wrong you need to read the WMW threads.

[Flightmapping]

Oh dear, so there I was initially thinking that the World Cup was bad for business, and then England exit shambolically again just as Google has knocked out 75% of our business.

Looking at the wmw thread, it does appear to have had a large impact on travel sites. Google KNOWS that a big post-world cup surge was expected - so this is just like when they knocked out all those retail sites pre xmas.

"In the meantime start another project and work hard on that."

Believe you me, this is VERY tempting, especially as we have a site just about ready to go. However, I think this is potentially even more risky.

Let's just say, for argument's sake that you have two sites - one new, earning £50 / month, and one established, previously earning £1000, now earning £250.

If all efforts were focused on the new site, you'd be needing to see 5x fold growth to match the established one. Now do you really see that happening before Google re-sorts their algo?

Personally, I'd rather take a look at link building, PR, community building and content updating over pinning my hopes on an untried and untested new project. The next few weeks will be a rocky ride, but we've always understood that "Search rankings can go down as well as up. You might not get back a decent ROI on the effort you put in. Affiliate commissions can change and bills can be left unpaid."

And the biggest irony of it all - the one country where we still have good rankings for flights searches............




Germany!

[uklejon]

Ive got a funny feeling that this will resolve itself fairly quickly (i hope).

We had 10,000+ pages in G and now its 716.....don't know why. These must come back as they are pages!!!

Also, for a lot of searches on the .co.uk the top few results are .com's in USA. Again this can't be right so i'm sure it must change.

I think all of us must not rely on Google for business as they can switch it off at any time. The screw up and we could go out of business.

[Yourslice]

Our Home and Garden site had 89,000 pages 2-3 months ago then had 489 now have 11,900 so things are on the up

We have done well on MSN recently

Finance finally back in the top 300 for credit cards

Mortgages an loans no were to be seen on Google in the top 40 in MSN

Put up some new sites 3 – 4 months ago have had some pages indexed but no PR still and there homepage has not been cached but T/G and Privacy have been.

[stormdevil]

Hi

I lost pretty well all my Google pages round about mid-May and they didn't recover until mid-June - I went down to 11 pages and most of those were classified as Supplemental and months out of date.

Suggest you read Matt Cutts postings and also the postings in the sitemaps group for suggestions.

One suggestion from me is - if you use Sitemaps - never click the Update / ReSubmit Selected button as it seems to lose your links and takes a while for them to come back. Once Google is indexing your site they are back every day anyway.

I also made sure my metatags for each page were unique - otherwise Google classes your pages as similar.

Keep plugging away - I expect your pages will come back - but be prepared to wait.

Toni
http://www.ok9.co.uk

[xmas13]

Google is really annoying. On every webmaster forum there are people complaining about the loss of thousands of pages, visitors and ranks. Its all sad, and black hat SEO masters still spam the index and make huge money

[drivetowin]

On every webmaster forum there are people complaining about the loss of thousands of pages, visitors and ranks.

So what's new - for as long as I've been in affiliate marketing (and back then I had lots of hair and it was dark ) webmasters have been moaning about Google.

If you work on the basic premise that Google owes you nothing, you won't ever be disappointed.

If your site has good genuine content it will bounce back - if it doesn't then you probably never really deserved to be there in the first place.

[Sandis]

Steerpike,

everyone is hit by google especially if you don't have good quality links;

btw, these amounts of traffic is insane for 3 months old page;

But basically from your text i have feeling you don't know if you rankings changed; but traffic is very related to your rankings - if site went down 50 positions for your main keyword(s) then no wonder about traffic change;

Anyway, without proper examination any guesses is useless;

[Sandis]

Google is really annoying. On every webmaster forum there are people complaining about the loss of thousands of pages, visitors and ranks. Its all sad, and black hat SEO masters still spam the index and make huge money

Don't moan, start generating 1000000 of pages!

[Steerpike]

Hi Sandis,

Thanks for the comments.

As you quite rightly say, I have no idea about the rank of the site as it has not yet had page rank assigned and is still in its youth, however the site carries a large number of products and the traffic was/is generally directed at specific products rather than a general term. Optimisation is strictly white-hat.

I have links to the site from several PR7 and PR6 sites (sites which I also own) so hopefully this will kick in soon for a boost.

Following the threads on webmaster world, it looks like google generally is in a phase of major transition so fingers crossed, SERPS for my 2 affected sites seem to be changing daily.

[Sandis]

Yup, Steerpike, Google is doing crazy things, big sites gets 100's of pages into supplemental index or removed and this means 'traffic goes down';

Anyway, as long you have unique pages with unique content (I don't know where you're getting these products - if from feeds then you should edit titles/descritpions) and take into account all the other good white-hat stuff.

Last and not the least important thing - lear to analyze logs. For example: if you rank #7 for keyword "mama papa cookies dookies" which is searched 300/month, with 5-10 extra links to that page you could go to some top 3 position and get a boost of some extra visitors; but this is possible only when you know where are you now and then improve them;

Peace bro and keep pushing it!