I was lucky to April Fool lot of people and that too for the first time but its not only me who did all the April Fool Stuff and Google also did gave me an April Fool punch Google Traffic down by 20% and overall traffic down by 5% in the first week of April. I started to search for things and see if this is case for others and if there is any serious discussions about anything related. Google did implement site speed in that time as well but we had no idea about that as well and the news came out just few days back. I also could not find anything related to any tips on what we should do when the Google traffic is going down. So here I am with few tips. Things to do 1. Don't Panic One of the most important thing when you see your Google traffic down is "Don't Panic". This happens to everyone in the web business and this has happen to me quite often as well. There has been always something in Google (Google Dance as we term it) which reduces the traffic from Google dramatically. If the traffic doesn’t come back after an long period you might want to get some expert SEO advice and make a plan for changes you may need but that has never been the case for me. Remember that you can learn more from your failures than from your success and so take this as an opportunity to learn. 2. Guidelines Go through the Google guidelines for webmasters and see if you are doing anything not liked by Google. I know you know about the guidelines but its good to be going through them all over again to make sure you are not doing anything that is not liked by the big G. If you are not on the wrong side check out the people who are ranking well for your key terms and see if they have done anything not liked by Google or is it just that they have outranked you. Act accordingly. 3. Webmaster Tools Google Webmaster Tools is one of the place to be in when you have Google Traffic going down the barrel. See if you have some issues with your hosting / server or anything which is is making Google to go off or unable to crawl your website. Also check for errors and not found issues and see if there are some errors which you may need to work on. You may have accidentally done something to your robots.txt file or may have some unwanted meta tag in some pages of your site. 4. Traffic Alternatives You should not rely too much on something which you cannot control and so its always better to have more than one major traffic sources. I have seen a dip of close to 20% traffic from Google for last week but my overall traffic has hardly hit by 5%. 5. Ad Networks Yes I have seen this as one of the factors for effective traffic from search engines. You may be using too an ad-network on your page and all ad-network are not safe. Check out the report on TechCrunch about ad networks with malware-infected advertisements and see if you are not using those type of ad-networks which can harm your search rankings. 6. Google's Cache I always prefer to go to Google's cache and see cached version of pages that rank well for me. This is just to check that they still exist in Google's Cache and the content of the pages is what it should be. What I did in the crunch time? This is the time when you want to be doing the right things more aggressively. For Go4Expert I focused more on adding more good quality content and also few more back-links. I knew I have not done anything stupid for my traffic to go down and suddenly a PR update news from CoderZone (which I was not tracking anyway) really made me feel good. Remember that toolbar PR is not even the last thing you should be looking at if your Google traffic is going down. So now what could be reasons for the down in traffic. The only reason I could sense is the holiday season around the fisrt week of April.
Thanks shabbir, for your useful article about Google traffic is going down. I think, the points you mentioned here would be effective. I am concentrate on webmaster tools and Google cache but will focus on other points as well.
Thanks for sharing useful information I have very less traffic for my site, I will try it out the points.
Thank u very much Sir, I am regular reader of articles related to SEO, also I got various things from them. I hope you will continue to write such a good articles Thanks once again..
Great tips Shabir. Thanks for sharing tips like tat with us. You said about other source of traffic apart from the big G. Would you tell me please what are the "other sources" you are talking about ? Are you indicating social media sites ? Or anything else. Eager to have your say on that.
Very true and I am getting lot of such emails on my blog where users complain that they are loosing on Google traffic which they had for years now for no reason and when I visit their site I see that it takes very long to load. Cannot say for sure but yes if they actually mean what they have written in emails than it could be effect of loading time only.
Hi.................It is nice article post. You have to put the Google Analytics code in footer section of index file. It will show the visitors traffic after 2 months and do the effective Offpage optimization work for generating backlinks. Keep it up.
Hi, Very nice content written here about SEO and Google. SEO is all depends on what search engine likes specially Google. Thanks