Cause and Remedies to Fix Sudden Drop in Search Engine Traffic

There are lot of talk going on blogosphere from few days about losing sudden drop in search engine traffic to blogs. All these started since Google’s latest Panda update. Even TechInfo Blog facing around drop of 25% search engine traffic and I’m working on it .

Also the coincidence is; I moved my blog from my previous host to new host Site5 due to some issued I faced. I started moving my site from October 13th and final DNS propagation was done on October 27th. It took almost 14 days to completely move my site, by that time Google released it’s another instalment of Panda which looks major and I was stumped and still struggling to get my search engine ranking and traffic back. Since Google started its Panda updates I never had traffic drops, instead my traffic was increased. This time I guess this because my site was offline for few days due to my previous host’s web server was down.

Well, that’s off topic lets go for the topic now. Since I’m trying to get back my traffic and search engine ranking back I found few good Videos and tips online and thought of sharing those with my readers. One of the best video I found was from Google Webmaster Central’s YouTube channel by Matt Cuts. Most of the tips I included and following is inspired by that video.

Ok, below are few steps you can take to analyse the root of problem and improve from the fall.

Step 1 : Basic Site Search Using Google

The first step you must do when you see your blogs search engine ranking is losing is; doing a simple site:mydomain.com search. Go to Google search and type your domain name next site: and hit search.

Once you receive results check these; Does your site homepage appears in search results?, check is it just a site name or you have URL snippets included? And check for any warning messages?

Step 2 : Check Weather Your Home Page Is Indexed Or Not

This method is similar to above step, but use info: instead of site:. This will show you information about your site cached in Google’s index. There will be a single result which is your sites description. If you cannot see the results then your Robots.txt file is blocking Google bots to index your sites’ home page. You can check including www and without www prefix if you don’t see the result at first.

Step 3 : Check Search Engine Ranks for your Domain Name

Search for your domain (www.yourdomain.com) using Google search. See the results and compare it to your previous results. If you see number of results less than previous results, then your site must be hit by Google’s panda update, because Google dropped few of your poor contents from its search Index.

Step 4 : Take Help of Google Webmaster Tools

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tool’s dashboard and look is there any crawl errors? If you find crawl errors like not found or restricted by Robots.txt click on the links and check why the error occurred?.
2. Go to this page (Fetch As Google Bot) on webmaster tools and try to fetch some page s of your site. If you see Success under fetch status there is nothing to worry because there are still chance Google index your pages.
3. Check for any malware errors on this page.
4. Now go t HTML Suggestions and find any errors or suggestion Google has for you. If you find any fix them asap.

Step 5 : Leave Your Site and Look Around

Now time to check others. The ranking lose effect is might not just for you, other too facing this problem. Search online and research is there any latest Google algorithm change?, Do other sites also suffering too? If so then the problem is maybe due to Google’s algorithm change.

Have you installed new theme or a design revamp recently? Or changed or switched web hosting (my case) recently? All these results drop in Search Engine traffic.

Watch This Video By Matt Cutts on what steps can I take to diagnose a drop in ranking?

How Can I fix It?

1. Fix the problems you found above. Once you fixed them wait calm till you get your rank and traffic back.
2. Check you site’s internal linking. Make sure you don’t have any broken links. You can check broken links using (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) or if you are using WordPress you can use this (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/) Plugin.
3. Google Hates too many Ads (Yes!): Having too many ads also another reason to lose site rank and search rank. Make sure to have 1-2 ad slots per page. Don’t use too many text ads. Don’t use too many affiliate programs that may look your site a business directory.
4. Some times that could be malware. If you see malware error in Webmaster Tools, remove it asap. This could be some URL linked to your site, a comment or a scripts in the Plugin.
5. If you think your rank dropping is due to Google’s penalized your blog because you violate Google quality guidelines (cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text etc.), then the first thing you have to do is fix them. Remove any hidden text, extra links; remove unwanted keywords from article, remove poor contents. Then submit a reconsideration request.

Watch This Video by DaniWeb on Recovering from Google Panda