Website Not Showing Up on Google? Here’s
11 Reasons Why You’ve Seen a Sudden Drop in Website Traffic
If your site is not showing up on Google, it is most likely for one of the following reasons
- No link from Google to your website has been recorded. This is most common with brand new websites, where the high traffic is not sustainable and often consists of bots, spiders and other automated visitors.
- Google does not deem your site worthy of showing it to its users as ‘reliable’ or ‘relevant’ for the keywords you want to target.
- As for the coded structure of the robots, you have disallowed the googlebot crawler. txt.
- You have meta tag noindex placed in the page or the whole site, the checkbox ‘Prevent search engines from indexing this site’ is checked in wordpress or you have set another page as a canonical version.
- You are penalized and Google has removed your site from its index.
- Google is not being able to access your site due to a technical glitch that hinders it from crawling and indexing your site.
In this post, I will attempt to guide you through some steps to identify and maybe even solve the problem of why your site is no longer appearing in Google search.
- If you need some recommendations as to how to diagnose and treat your current SEO problems, you may wish to refer to our search engine optimization services page.
- The most frequent reason why traffic has suddenly declined is new search algorithms have been introduced recently. Penalties, redirects, incorrect robots. Other genuine causes for ranking losses or other rules and texts include other factors that could make you note a decrease in traffic on your website. Luckily, if you are on the receiving end of a sudden traffic cut, there are a couple of other things you can look at besides what I have listed above. If you’ve made it this far hopefully you’ll be able to identify why things might have changed.
- The causes of a sudden and substantial decline in Google traffic can be anything ranging from a single digit to a multihandled digit number. This could range from a humble analytics code being deleted by your developer during a site update, all the way to your site being penalized by Google.
Sudden Drop in Organic Traffic? Things to Check and What to Do Next
Do you have an account on any website and have you observed that you are receiving few visitors to your website nowadays? This is especially frustrating for any CEO, CMO or any other marketer out there if you have a clear picture of how organic traffic looks like and how the search rankings have fallen to the ground. Of course, there is another option to maintain the overview of things by creating an account with a tracking code for your website. No problem; that is why I am here to help you out. Here in this checklist, I will be telling you some of the strategies that you can incorporate in order to give your rankings a boost and get your site back on track.
Starting from the root cause of the problem to the backlink audit, I will describe all the factors that can potentially influence the traffic. For example, we will discuss how the concept of mobile friendliness and social media integration is now part of mainline SEO considerations. Well, this calls for a cup of coffee or a diet soda pop, let’s explore the subject of declining web traffic! It is unadvisable to write off a sudden drop in the traffic levels to chance, as this can be the root of the issue. However, to begin with, one must obviously be aware that such a situation is occurring. Usually, CMOs and business owners are aware of a decrease in leads which translates to visitors’ inquires through their websites before they realize that they are receiving less traffic. This is Google’s signal that something is wrong and that there’s a need to make changes.
Indeed, there are many approaches to investigating traffic drops, and the most common method is using Google Search Console. There is another very nice but costly tool called Cora, which focuses not on the actual SERPs and perform several searches to see how the site might rank higher or lower per search result. This graph from Google Search Central is a nice way to get some quick heuristics as to what might be going on: It makes it easier to deduce what may have occurred on your site by using these ‘shapes’ to compare to your traffic drop.
Here are a few examples of each major issue:
- Technical glitches: Some missteps that prevent the Googlebot’s from either crawling, indexing, or presenting your webpages to the searchers. For instance, site down time, robots. broken links, 404 errors, etc., With SEO issues, could be the entire site (your website not accessible) or only specific pages such as misplaced no index tags which depend on crawling so traffic would reduce gradually.
- Security risks: Google may display warning messages for users advising them that the site has a security problem or may display interstitial pages before allowing users to access the site, thus reducing Search traffic.
- Manual punishments: Google’s guidelines must be adhered to, failure to which, one or more pages of your site could be demoted or delisted through a Manual Action.
- Algorithm updates: Google is constantly fine-tuning the manner in which it assesses and ranks content and the algorithm; core updates and minor updates may affect how certain pages perform. To find out about any future updates, one can become a subscriber to the Google Search News YouTube series, or follow on Twitter.
- Disrupted search demand: At other times, the changes made in the user behavior patterns will affect the demand of some of the queries in terms of new trend, or variations that may be present throughout the year. So in your traffic may decrease just due to externality.
You can check How to get 100 in Google PageSpeed Insights.
1. Google Core Algorithm Change
The most plausible explanation for the sudden one day drop in traffic is usually the effect of a Google algorithm update. It is known that Google refines the list of parameters and releases algorithm changes several times a year. Every such provided significant alteration of the algorithm leads to a massive change of the search engine results. You can for example be occupying the first page of Google for your most profitable key phrase on Monday and be at number 5 on Tuesday.
How to Check: Well, basically, and to determine if you have been affected by an algorithm change in particular, you should analyze your organic traffic . This category of the drop will always be swift and can happen at any one time a person is least prepared. They do not die a death of a thousand cuts as some diseases may manifest, especially in advanced stages. If you want to be certain where the decline occurred, begin by looking at whether the event occurred at a specific date or time period and whether there was an algorithm update at that point in time. If so, then come on you were affected by it.
How to Fix: This is the area where employing the services of a professional SEO company can be very useful. If your website has been affected by an algorithm, then uncover what it was that the algorithm targeting or was seeking to reduce. Was it poor-quality links? Poor-quality content? There lies the answer, so ensure that your website is updated to reflect the necessary changes.
2. Check for Technical Issues
Website Maintenance
It is crucial to acknowledge that such problems can be avoided if you constantly update the software and plugins of your website. The regular backup may also assist you in the restoration of your website in the event of any technical challenges. However, it is crucial to pay attention to the metric data of the web-site and identify when the traffic was reduced by some technical problems. If your site experiences a significant change in the volume of traffic, it might be related with the servers. Irregular or long loading times, down time, and such messages like ‘500’ or ‘404’ are all bad news for the ratings you get on search engines. At times, problems with this or that advert or redirect can also contribute to a drop in traffic.
Server Issues
In this case, you might want to check whether your website’s code needs to be streamlined or whether your hosting package should be upgraded. Another piece of advice is to check server characteristics of your website from the technical side to identify possible issues in time. Doing this will ensure your server is well maintained and optimized so that it can prevent sharp traffic dips as well as maintain good rankings in any search engines. In essence, slow site speed is one factor that could lead to sudden dips in absolute unique visitors. Even a few seconds of lag can cause user frustration of the site and the probability of bounce increases as a result of which people will start using other sites that load faster. OTOH, if the site has experienced a sharp traffic drop, then the probability is that, if speed is an issue, your site might be very slow.
Site Speed
You have, however, already covered this, is not that correct? One of the things that amaze me is that the majority of business owners who own websites seldom glance in that direction. Do it; you should enjoy it (on this one at least, most of the time we hope). However, slow site speed is also capable of indirectly worsening ranking on major search engines, further highlighting the importance of site speed optimization. For example, some web pages may heavily rely on large image files or numerous plugins that slow down the page loading time; you can consult sites like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to check for such issues and need to consider either optimizing the code or upgrading the hosting plan to tackle such problems.
When utilizing SEO, one of the key goals is to ensure the website’s site speed as this also affects the users’ experience as well as coming up in the search results. Seriously though, I have wasted a lot of efforts in optimizing sites and getting them from somewhat poor (In the 60 and 70s range) on Google PageSpeed Insights to hitting 90s steadily on mobile. It has arguably never made me an extra single dime in traffic, and yet it is absolutely instrumental. My point here is that if the problem of ranking drop relates to the issue of speed, it will be quite obvious, and you will not have to use any tools. In my opinion, the most frequent issue that when your total search traffic decreases dramatically is that your site has been indexed as no index.
A Case of Non-Payment to the Web Designer (Indexing)
In my experience, someone did not pay the web designer or paid them peanuts to get a moron who messed up their traffic and had their site set to noindex, basically telling Google that they’re not worthwhile to visit nor worth linking to. Though this will be a good thing if it is the case because it is very easy to fix just visit google search console and it should pick up pretty quickly after a resubmit that you’re back in After ensuring a site is working correctly, it is time to look at your website traffic data to determine the cause of sudden a decrease.
3. Analyze Your Website Traffic
It is a useful platform to enable a user track and potentially manage their website traffic . The disadvantage of SEO is that despite successful ranking, some areas may require deeper analysis to identify problems and improve results; however, this disadvantage may also be viewed as an advantage if you consider analyzing keywords, referral traffic, and users’ behaviors on the website. On occasion, ads or redirects may be the contributing factor to slowing down your traffic. Monitor changes to the search engine algorithms and make use of SEO help and tips from other professionals. Proper analysis of website traffic defeats the odds of losing rankings and serves as a pathway towards regaining success.
Monitoring Website traffic after specific intervals using google analytics is very important so that you realize that there are some fluctuations that you don’t want to happen. It helps you to discover which of the pages that lack a boost in traffic or even a decline in traffic, your website currently has by providing you with comprehensive reports and visitor figures. This information may be valuable in search engine optimization and can offer a rational foundation to your decisions regarding the improvement of your web site’s content, layout, and advertising campaigns. With the help of the tools that Google Analytics offers, you will be able to retain your visitors and keep track of your website’s traffic, which means that you will make it impossible to experience a sudden decline in hits, and therefore you will achieve sustainable results for your website.
Google Analytics Report
While Internet has become an inseparable part of our lives, it became important to constantly watch your keywords. It is critical to maintain current with keyword trends and any changes since search engines are still ahead in development and enhancement of their algorithms. By checking through popular search engines, you can determine which keywords are being used by the visitors that visit your site frequently and which are the keywords that unsatisfactory represent your site. Second, it is also important to monitor the trends in order to notice whether the number of searches or the competition for your keywords has increased. Also ensure that you incorporate some numbers and data in your post that is keyword relevant to provide the reader with as much value as possible.
Monitor Keywords
When you monitor the keyword occasionally you will be in a position to determine why the website is lagging behind in the results and why it experiences a drop in the traffic that it used to attract. Thus, be attentive to the keyword strategy and ensure your site is constantly improving its ranking and awareness. Referral traffic essentially means the people who came to your site through the link on another site, and it is one of the primary reasons people look for ways on how to generate traffic and achieve long-term success. However, sharp decrease or fluctuating trends in the referral traffic actually falls back on factors like broken backlinks, removal of those links or attainment of low quality back links. This activity implies the necessity of tracking referral traffic regularly in order to level it and avoid situations that caused failures of website traffic.
Check Referral Traffic
In order to monitor the referral traffic accurately, it is recommended to read referral traffic through tools present in Google analytics to know that which website is driving traffic towards the site. If this is sudden, the best thing to do us to contact the webmaster which may have issues that required fixing to prevent such loss of traffic referer. Monitoring of the referral traffic and minimize its damaging effects allow the web site to stay active and to attract the visitors. It is as important as an everyday chore to get updated with the changes in the relevant search engine algorithms. Conduct inventory with the content of the website and upgrade the website’s content to the current market standard.
4. Check for Google Algorithm Updates
Remember to make corresponding changes to the SEO and key terms that you are going to use in your content, in order to conform to the latest standards and the current concepts about how users access the information. I found out that my website has a lot of problems, so while I try to solve them, you should use social networks and any other marketing platforms to bring traffic to the site. There are certain factors that help to know the latest updates of the specific algorithm that can be helpful to know about the position of our website on the search engine and number of visitors. The first step to take when you are having a problem with your website traffic is to diagnose what led to such a problem.
Identify the Issue
It is important to know if an algorithm change has affected your site Algo updates can substantially impact rankings and traffic. Read messages or notifications from your search console, the algorithm’s updates, compare your website content to current algorithms, the keywords you use and back links. If you are still in doubt about how to determine or resolve this particular problem, it would be beneficial for you to seek the assistance of an SEO professional who has a primary focus on SEO.
With the problem established, make sure that proper solutions are sought and implemented to correct the problem immediately to bring back the traffic flow to your website. Make the most out of the features and the additional functionalities that are offered by the various tools available to make your site successful. You have to find what could be the reason for such a sharp decrease in website traffic to eventually fix it. ” It is recommended to involve the services of a competent firm that mainly deals in matters relating to website optimization in order to gain some insight on how to tackle such problems.
Try and Fix the Issue
First, start by looking at whether any of the search engines such as Google or Bing have launched a new algorithm lately. I really meant to discuss Bing yesterday evening but was caught up with my speech and time ran out. However, if the problem was initiated by an algorithm update, one needs to examine website content, keywords and back links to determine whether or not they meet present day algorithms. If you’re not sure of how to diagnose or where to look for the solution, you may consult a local SEO specialist within a ‘reputed firm’. When you have defined the particular compliant area of concern for instance a broken link complaint, a duplicate content complaint or a complaint on slow site speed, then you correct the fault. It remains crucial to continue assessing your website’s statistics for the need to make changes that could enhance your ranking. A reduction in traffic is something no website owner or blogger is happy to face or even contemplate as it is an incredibly frustrating and bewildering experience.
5. Conduct a Backlink Audit
This is a hypothetical reason for decline and it can be associated with getting toxic or low-quality backlinks that negatively impact your site. Think about it: it is like Google, one day, gets up, looks at you and says, “That link that was getting you all the SEO love to your website? Yeah, we do not consider it a thing anymore, so we won’t boost your rankings because of it. ” While it may not be a penalty, per se, it‘s simply useless in helping your rank any further, which feels like being penalised. In order to discover some such links, it is advisable to examine the results of the backlink audit analysis. As for useful SEO tools, it is still worth mentioning both Majestic and on-page.
Among the ai, which consist in the following: topical backlink analysis in order to establish if the backlinks which you obtain are semantically related to the main reason for the existence of your website. Let me tell you What your business Does. The quality of the backlink is vital to your website because the SEO value and traffic depend on your backlink profile. Nevertheless, it is extremely important to note that the low quality back links or link with unnatural related sites may have adverse effect in decreasing its traffic. This is why the concept of backlink audit is applicable here contains a set of guidelines that need to be followed.
Unnatural or Low-Quality Links
From a close scrutiny and elimination of any dislike links that may be toxic or irreleantant your website may perform better and even have a better link rating. Thus, only the relevant link will show up on your Google Search Console and through the ‘disavow’ tool, you can actually tell Google not to consider these links as being associated with your site.
6. Disavow Bad Links
As for me, I thought that it is quite baseless to say that links do not weigh in; rather, it is said that they do weight in or indeed they do not. Such links are those that originate from sites of low quality or those that are outright link spam and scams, those coming from sites that utilized black hattery such as link exchanges and purchased links. Meta nofollow does this by informing search engines not to include specific links in its rankings of your site. This might serve useful in avoiding a reduction in website usage and enhancing the overall search engine results. Or it may not. Nevertheless, eliminating the bad links shall assist in creating a cleaner back linking profile (your tools shall display more greens) and this, in turn, shall provide happiness to your boss or client. But, this is only part of the story; there is more to link profile management; it is here that constant vigil and more link nurturing is necessary.
Quantity of Content Writing a greater number of content is crucial to sustain the visitors for the website. Therefore, it is possible to concentrate on specific aspects, or distinctive selling proposition, making it possible to develop content that will suit the audiences’ interests and needs. Content creation is crucial to ensure that it keeps on attracting traffic to your websites. It is also important to note that even if your card designs are well optimized the rest of your website may be riddled with technical problems that can put-off visitors. Furthermore, tracking changes in the algorithms and cleaning old low-quality or spam backlinks page has also a benefit in an overall site ranking.
However, I have found that while flashy designs, sophisticated programming, and high interactivity are important and contribute to the success of websites, at the core there lies always high quality, relevant and unique content. Getting useful content in order to make visitors interested in your website is the key to further progress. Make sure that your website is responsive and very optimized for user interfaces while using it; also ensure you keep checking the traffic of the sites to align with the right strategy.
You and also use Disavow tool here
Relevance
Regular updates with specific and interesting topics are necessary to always have visits to maintain the website. Giving the target audience useful information is also good for the overall image of the website as users tend to trust information provided by familiar websites. Most of the people visit website either for the contents which are new or for the contents which attracts them on regular basis. It is worth mentioning that there should be employed certain resources, for instance Google Analytics, for monitoring the given content’s effectiveness and making alterations, if necessary. Two more crucial aspects are not to have two versions of the same page and not to copy from other sites since it also affects the ranking. Don’t forget to update the content over and over to ensure it is ever exciting to the targeted audiences.
Check out for duplicate content
Another cause of a sudden spike in site visits could be the presence of duplicated content on the website. Duplicate content may mean content present on many web pages or content that is present in several different domains. This is not very beneficial to your website, and as a result, you may end up having low traffic as your ranking reduces. To avoid this problem, then it is advisable to perform consistent duplication check on the website using tools such as the Copyscape, Siteliner etc. If you notice such breaches, ensure to use the canonical link tags to point to the original URLs and consider removing the copied content or links from your website. It is also important to strive to ensure that the content you are coming up with is excellent and of value to ensure that it firms up in the rankings and to attract traffic.
7. On-Page Optimization Analysis
It is important to perform on-page optimization and the analysis on websites for that purpose that happen regularly to maintain your website’s ranking. This is the optimization factors that are found on the web page, including contents, loading speeds, mobile responsiveness, meta tags, titles and images among others. On examining the examples below, you would be able to analyse these points to the core and see whether there are any problems that should be solved on your part. The layout of the site should be good to make it easy for the users to locate the different sections of the website as this enhance the user experience. Firstly, while using the keyword several times in the context, you should not overdo it but use the keyword where it naturally fits so that it helps enhance the ranking of the website’s keyword on search engine results.
Meta tags are the components of your Web pages that are specifically involved in optimizing your page, and therefore they are helpful in ranking your Website. It comes with tags representing its title and description, as well as the specific keywords the website is optimized with. These meta tags must be very accurate as well as relevant when it comes to the indexing of your site by the search engines. It is therefore important that while developing your meta tags, you make sure that the tags you set for your website is a true representation of the website’s content and also contain your keywords.
However, it is necessary to refrain from keyword stuffing to your meta tags, as this is highly discouraged by search engine companies. Meta tags should therefore be checked and modified from time to time as this will help a site owner to counter any new trends that the search engines set by ensuring that their sites does appear in the SERP. It is important to learn about proper meta tags and how to update them to ensure your website performs the best it can.
One of them is to use heading tags appropriately since it is beneficial for the forthcoming changes and for enhancing the overall search engine optimization of the website. Apart from informing search engines about what a page’s topic is, these tags also assist in a page’s categorization as well as arrangement for easier comprehension. The strategic placement of the H1 tag should be done with the aim of having one tag per page with proper title tag that has an appropriate keyword descriptive of the page’s content although not optimally keyworded.
Even when an article is short, it is helpful to incorporate subheadings (Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. ) to make it simpler for a reader to rapidly skim over the piece. Heading tags, if appropriately employed, will go a long way in enhancing the experience of the end user in addition to boosting the probability of achieving the premier slot in search engine results.
Image Optimization
As part of the recommendations for web design, it is crucial to optimize images on a site since they help make the page load faster and rank high on a particular search. The images that are not optimized are very likely to cause slow page loading, which deprives the web visitors of the possibility to explore the website further, thus having a high bounce rate. On-page image optimization involves resizing images to small sizes, but still, pixel-rich, including significant Meta tags such as ALT, and giving relevant file names.
Image optimization can mean a better position in search results and a faster page loading time, which is beneficial for any website. When choosing or creating an image, it should be done with consideration to the size of the image to keep the loading time of the website down while still having eye-popping images that the users of the website will enjoy. Should these best practices be implemented, you will be capable of optimising your website with respect to search engines while at the same time guaranteeing an efficient experience for the user.
8. Mobile-friendly Website
With the trends showing that people are shifting more of their browsing to be done from mobile devices, optimizing your website for mobile use is more important today than it has ever been. If the website is not making any response, then it is a sure way of negatively affecting the reactions of the users and cause a sudden decrease in the traffic. So, it is highly important to make remarkable optimizations your website for mobile devices.
However, the website design that includes friendly mobile features will ultimately enhance the overall SEO ranking. Another implication of website responsive design is that the websites rank high in the search engines due to the fact that the search engines tend to index responsive websites for mobile first. The students and the client understand the importance of having a website that is responsive and therefore any business deserves to have it.
Advantages of having a website that is friendly to mobile users
Today, more consumers are accessing the web from their mobile gadgets and as a result, having a website that is optimized for mobile users has become mandatory to every business. Although the audience is increasingly accessing the internet through their smartphones, it is crucial to possess a reliable website with an emphasis on mobile compatibility. In addition to the enhanced user satisfaction, there are many important steps in mobile-friendliness, which can influence the ranking of the search engines. Google has sent out a warning in the respect that they prefer sites that are mobile friendly and businesses which do not have one will definitely be at the bottom of the list.
A website that is specifically designed for mobile use should, therefore, be one that is adaptable to all the different screen sizes, easy to navigate and quickly accessible in terms of loading times. It should also be easy to navigate or to use for every user, whether if they are using the desktop version or the mobile app version of the website. The organizations that make their website mobile friendly will see the advantages of increased number of visitors and better engagement as well as the option to have better conversion rates. As smartphones continue to dominate consumer purchases, mobile optimization can be seen as a key strategic differentiator that companies can use to foresee and satisfy the growing demand for mobile services and applications.
Turning Your Web Site into a Web-Site for Mobile Devices
It is important to make your website responsive and render it friendly to Tablet and Smartphone users to enhance the general performance and to gain good rankings in the search results. The increasing usage of portable devices like cell phones and tablets is leading to more traffic generated through these devices, and thus a website that is built to support these gadgets is quite advantageous. Let’s look at the possible steps that you can take in order to make website more mobile friendly. Firstly, utilize the responsive design to make them adapt to the views of any available devices on the web. This means that your website will be designed to fit the screen of the device used for its viewing and perhaps the cable used in the connection.
Secondly, one should resize images that display on websites so that they are compatible for the use on the mobile devices by minimizing the size of the pictures. Preferred image format is WEBP instead of the JPG image files for it provides a better compression ratio and minimized file size. There are also advantages of having images with tinier files size on your website will help in faster page loading, and it will also ensure right image sizes for the small screens. Last but not the least, make use of a drop-down menu and in-depth links as the number of links involved has to be minimized to achieve the above-mentioned effects. Here, we sum up how you can make your website easily reachable and navigable no matter what kind of device a user comes across in:
Social media accounts are the initial key any business needs when it comes to working on higher website visits. Businesses can reach its audience using social media to advertise or market their services, products, among other things. This is because when creating a profile in these social media sites like twitter, face book and Instagram among others the business organization is likely to develop a following that will be able to be rerouted to the business organization website and thus improving on the brand recognition.
Regarding the issue of audience involvement, it is significant to state that communicating with the audience is essential for trust. Some of the tactics include question and answer sessions, blogs, forums, and other such means through which one can interact with the audience to clarify their issues or doubts. Email marketing is also useful for traffic directing to your website and also keeping the target group informed about new products and offers. In the current competitive market, businesses can leverage the use of social media and other tactics to ensure they dominate the markets successfully.
In a bid of enhancing the amount of traffic that visits your site, it can be a wise move to advertise your website across different social media platforms. Multiple users daily use social media sites such as Face book Twitter and Instagram, so the park should ensure it has social media accounts that attract visitors to the website. Sharing good content usually; content that pertains to the category or the general field of your brand or business increases the chance that people in your page will share and engage.
Still, hashtags and all related keywords help many users easily find your content. It also can give a boost to working paid media campaigns and attract even more visitors to your site. In this respect, Lynne Bowes conveys that it is possible to generate a huge amount of traffic to your website if you use social media properly.
10. Link-Based Penalty
Some Google changes can, in fact, get you into very serious trouble Indeed, some recent additions to Google have made the search giant worse rather than better. Google’s link update is a few times a year that addresses the disproportionate and often manipulative linking patterns. Furthermore, it has exposed that Google may hire human auditors who examine the sites to establish whether they contain spammy links or if they violate any Google rules. If you have been affected by a link-based algorithm update on or manual spam action, your site will suffer a penalty. Your rankings will drop and in extreme cases will be de-indexed from the GOOGLE’s search engine results page.
Go to the Google Search Console and navigate on the tab – manual actions. That’s where you can see the details of any penalties that an officer has manually applied in addition to information regarding the process of correcting the violation.
These are actions caused by the poor quality links, namely the links of low-quality (or, in the worst case, spam links). In case you feel that your site has been regrettably penalized, you can seek the review of the action by filling a reconsideration report in Search Console. All you have to do is click on the Request Review link provided and then state why you think your penalty should not have been applied. However, if you do linked to such websites that are not suitable, then you would need to get them deleted or else you would have to disown any such link by informing Google by uploading a dis-allow list along with the ‘bad’ URLs.
11. Loss of a Powerful Backlink
In the same statistic, for SEO strategies in 2024, backlinks are critical elements that no website can avoid. While it was previously possible to ‘game’ SEO by accumulate large numbers of links pointing to your website, now search engines pay more attention to the quality of links. High authoritative sites, can get more value as a single link instead of hundreds of links pointing to your website from other low-authoritative sites. Everyone remembers how after you failed to protect a valuable backlink, your rankings, and the right traffic, drop immediately. Their usefulness is even higher if that link was also bringing referral traffic.
If the link, you have made generated some referral traffic, you could try to figure out which referring URL has ceased to do so (which is explained in this article further below). However, if it is just the kind of link that people depend on as an authority to a particular website and does not click the link, you will have to go further than Analytics. Moreover, Ahrefs is indeed useful because it allows the user to view a report on your whole backlink profile, including the lost links that occurred prior to the user’s subscription to Ahrefs.
It is, in fact, possible to times to access the page authority of each link so that you know which link loss affected you most. This method is not without its fair share of weaknesses The big disadvantage of this method is that it does not offer a perfect solution. But even Ahrefs sometimes could not find some links. And that is why it is of great value having a professional SEO company, backing up its work with the best enterprise tools.
The fix will also depend on the type of link and whether or not it is meant to be permanent. If the original page that linked to you no longer exists, then in the extreme you can try to reach out to the webmaster to help or recommend that a different page be linked to your website as their current page’s link may indeed be beneficial for those who visit them. Anytime you design a website and there is a certain page which is not there anymore, you can email the web master and forward to him or her an address that he or she can add on the site. If you cannot pursue to restore the link, you have to consider improving your backlink database as much as possible. Create various types of links from high-ranking sites within its particular specialized area.
Less Referral Traffic From Other Sites
If your site used to derive a significant amount of traffic from referrals in particular, maybe it is worthwhile to review those sources. It can vanish without any explanation, leveling your sales while your web traffic plummets even if you retain your search engine rankings. . This is usually a problem with sites that sell through affiliate traffic or product reviews/endorsements (if the biggest affiliate stops recommending the site, for example, you can lose significant traffic/), but really any type of site can suffer.
Now open the Analytics and under traffic sources select your Referral traffic. Check the list of being referred by top sources, and notice if any of them is missing. If you can identify one or more that are receiving lower than expected referral traffic go and visit the site.
The treatment will depend on what has caused the situation. If it is a broken or an archived link, it is possible for you to get in touch with the proprietor and ask for a new link to be provided to you. If you are seeing that you are getting less referral traffic and that is the concerns various sites from your page, check to see if the information is old or the codes devoid of value, then contact the webmasters to make the necessary adjustments. In case you are going to lose the referral traffic, shift your strategies towards increasing the organic traffic.
Dramatic reduction in visitor traffic.
If you’ve gone through the list of problems mentioned above, you should be able to comprehend more why your traffic is decreasing and what actions you can take regarding to it. In most of them, there is a need for SEO help and improvements. So while you need to weigh all possibilities, your best course of action will usually be to focus on your key organic factors: The balance or distribution of links, content, website layout, etc. , must be good, and an excellent SEO partner is necessary for this job.
Though anytime your traffic is decreasing it is very troublesome, there are always solutions to the problem no matter the cause. Yes, it could be challenging and, at times, require redirecting your efforts in territories that that have become less sensitive or haven pioneered solutions, but there is always a way out. Well then, do not let your traffic vanish into thin air!
12. Crawl errors
Launch the Index Coverage Report in the new Search Console and look for the URLs marked as Error. The URLs that contain any errors listed in the coverage report also will not be indexed.
Typical errors that are found in this report include:
- Server errors
- Redirect errors
- Temporary URLs that are inaccessible by web indexes and bots. txt
- The eight links are part of web pages that is labeled with noindex tag
- Soft 404 errors
- The unauthorized request URLs are the ones with links that direct users to the webpage with the stated 403 error.
- Broken links – This is the kind of links that leads the user to the website URL which cannot be found (404s).
- Crawling errors
13. Ranking losses
There’s another prevalent cause that leads to a decrease in website traffic, which is the drop in organic rankings. If you monitor your progress through a rank tracker tool, resolving this issue will become less complicated. However, if you don’t use one, relying on information from Search Console would be more effective for troubleshooting. To evaluate any changes in ranking levels effectively; I follow the subsequent method:
- Identify the time when traffic began to decrease by using either your preferred rank tracking tool, Google Analytics or Search Console.
- Export the ranking keywords before and after experiencing a drop.
- Create a table using Excel or G Sheets and paste the data next to each other.
- Compare the variation in positions.
- Perform keyword research and mapping to refocus on previously discarded terms.
14. XML Sitemap changes
As an SEO, it is crucial to remember that only indexable URLs returning a 200 response should be included in your sitemaps. Redirected URLs may also be added intentionally for faster detection by search engines. A possible explanation for reduced traffic could arise from modifications made to the XML sitemap. As such, make sure all of them are crawl-able and return a 200 OK response before submitting any new landing pages or articles, as well as ensure inclusion in the updated map if needed.For instance, regenerating and resubmitting your Search Console with all 200 site URL’s when there were initially just about half would help address this issue efficiently.
15. Manual actions and penalties
If any content on your site is found to violate Google’s guidelines by one of their vigilant human reviewers, a manual action will be imposed. Details about the webmaster guidelines can be accessed here. The Search Console provides a manual actions report which allows you to check if your site has been impacted.
16. URLs being de-indexed
A ‘de-indexing’ bug has been causing important pages to disappear from search indexes which was noted by Google in a recent tweet. However, this problem is not new and the sudden disappearance of crucial URLs can greatly impact investigations into website traffic loss.
- You can review the index coverage report in Search Console to identify any possible errors.
- Verify that crucial pages are still indexed by utilizing the URL inspection tool.
- If that’s not the case, utilize the ‘REQUEST INDEXING’ choice in Search Console.
17. Keyword cannibalisation
Have you recently created a large amount of content on one topic without considering keyword targeting? If so, you may have accidentally encountered an issue called “keyword cannibalization.” This happens when a website appears for the same keyword with multiple URLs. For instance, Ahrefs.com has several articles discussing broken link building. This problem can cause organic traffic to be spread across different pages or posts and result in lost opportunities. The easiest way I’ve discovered to identify these errors is through BigMetrics.io’s cannibalization report by creating and connecting your account (trial or paid) to Search Console property before exporting it.
18. SERP layout changes
The latest alteration in how Google and other search engines present organic results could influence the amount of traffic your website receives. Therefore, being flexible and open to making modifications will prove beneficial. Specifically, Google has implemented several adjustments to display methods such as showcasing Featured Snippets and Knowledge Graphs while augmenting ad prominence – all causing strife for SEO experts and companies.
Summary
Seeing website traffic drop can be very disheartening, but there is always a reason why, and if there’s a reason, it can usually be fixed. If you take one thing away from this post, it’s that a sudden decline could be due to a number of reasons combined, or even just one key traffic-rich page that has fallen from the index. Make sure that you investigate every possible avenue, and you’ll quickly discover the cause and get a recovery plan in place.