Google Organic Traffic Gone Thru Floor. Any Ideas?

[pinman]

Hmm, I'm answering my own posts now - how sad

Anyway, *things* seem to be returning to normal on the Google front now (at least in my neck of the woods) thankfully

[PitBoss]

It's amazing the power Google has over affiliates. Some affiliates go out of business when they change their algorithms.

[stu-art]

I'm just seeing a return to normality now for one of my sites first affected around the end April (same time as the PR update if I recall). Pages are returning to the top of the index for more and more terms every couple of days and the irrelevant rubbish that replaced them is slowly slipping away.

Thats nearly two months of rankings out the window for god knows whatever reason. At least the order of things is returning (for now).

Resisted the urge to change anything major and it's worked out ok.

[KirstyM]

Hmm... well my site is still a bit "off colour", but the SERPS are still all stuffed up so I'm not too worried.

I've been out about 5 weeks now, so maybe in 3 weeks time things will be better!

[befuddle]

Originally Posted by KirstyM I've been out about 5 weeks now

I believe you should have seen an improvement by now Kirsty. I know our sites are very different but SC's traffic crashed just a few days after yours on May 19th and didn't start climbing again until May 31st, resulting in a 66% drop in sales and some impatient merchants reps getting in touch asking why I wasn't performing for them. [Seeya!]

... then a further week June 9th before it was back to previous high levels.

As I said earlier in this thread, when I dip I usually have to wait 2 weeks max to start to recover, which is consistent with my most recent decline.

[KirstyM]

Very interesting Ray.

I did actually see an improvement within 2 weeks. About 30% of traffic came back (just different traffic than before!).

Nothing further has improved, I've been racking my brains over it and doing all sorts of tests to see if some kind of penalty may have been applied, but can't find a thing obviously wrong.

*confused*

** edit. I'm still seeing "messed up" results in the SERPS I monitor, so I guess until I see those normalise and I'm not in there I won't really know if I have a penalty or something!

[Alfie]

Our positions have started to come back just this week - which sounds in line with a few others here.

To be honest, all we did in the meantime was continually add some content - we laid off gaining any more links in case we had incurred some kind of penalty for attracting too many links too quickly.

Its a good exercise in making you realise you really shouldn't rely JUST on Google for your business!!

All the best,

Alf

[pinman]

So much for me saying that things were "back to normal", they've plummeted again now and have been for the last 3 days

Testing times for this newbie

[KirstyM]

Stick at it, my traffic has started to come back in the last 4 or 5 days... although in my case I did have to make some site adjustments before that happened.

V. interesting actually and I'm going to do a detailed blog / post about it once I have more data about the recovery process.

Welcome to the Google roller coaster

[pinman]

Thanks Kirsty

It's re-assuring to know it's not just me and that it happens to non-newbies too!

You begin to get paranoid after a while and think that the little tweaks you've just implemented have had the opposite affect to what was intended