How to React When Traffic From Google Drops

When the time comes to write my professional memoirs, the first chapter will be called “My Formal Career Started With a Panda.” On February 23, 2011, Google rolled out its Panda algorithm update, which targeted low-quality websites. As a result, I got my first full-time job as an SEO associate working on a platform negatively impacted by Panda.

In the lead-up to this, content farms had popped up trying to rank #1 for any keyword you can think of. If you Google “How to Boil Water,” there are dozens of articles explaining how to do it. Demand Media was one of the most notorious, publishing hundreds of thousands of articles every month.

But when Google rolled out the algorithm update, it had a significant impact on rankings. According to Google, up to 12 percent of English language search results were affected.

Fast forward to April 24, 2012, Google rolled out the Penguin algorithm update, which targeted low-quality links and keyword stuffing. I was still working in SEO. Again, this impacted the company I worked for.

In hindsight, these two algorithm updates fundamentally changed SEO. It had always been a game of cat and mouse between Google and people who worked in SEO where we’d come up with new tactics and Google would try to stop it. But once this happened, things really did change. It became much more difficult to play games.

That said, Google remains the largest driver of eyeballs to publishers’ websites. So, when there are sudden changes and traffic drops significantly, publishers react. A few days ago, a member in the AMO Slack channel posted asking about “a weird search traffic drop off” over the last few days.

I did some digging into whether there were any major changes. According to Search Engine Roundtable:

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread had some chatter pick up a few days ago, around February 14th (which was Valentines Day) and then continue through today. But the chatter is not massive, it is not signaling a massive ongoing Google update.

Then yesterday, there was a bit of a blip in the chatter – so a spike on February 16th.

…

Many of the tools pick up on a change in the Google rankings yesterday, February 16th or so. Here are screenshots from those tools:

The conclusion of the piece suggests that we might be seeing a Google update being rolled out and sites being impacted accordingly. There’s little advice I can provide on algorithm updates, especially without a better understanding of what Google’s intention is. However, it does provide an opportunity to discuss our reaction to these sorts of events.

What do you do if you wake up in the morning, look at your Google Analytics, and see a significant drop in traffic to your site? Here are the steps that I would take.

First and foremost, you want to look at Google Search Console. If you don’t have this setup, you should. It gives you information on keywords that are driving clicks, how you’re indexing, and it also has a section called “Security & Manual Actions.” In the event you see a drop in traffic, this is where you want to look first.

When we think about Google, we imagine this automatic algorithm constantly ranking pages based on a variety of factors. But Google actually has a team of human reviewers who spend all their time looking at websites. If they find one that breaks its pre-defined quality guidelines, that reviewer can penalize the website.

This is actually an ideal scenario because if there is a warning, the reviewer provides instructions on how to fix the problem. If you make those necessary changes, you can alert the reviewer and they’ll come back and check again.

The other part of this section is “Security Issues,” which is where Google will alert you to your site being hacked and/or if it’s been infected with malware. This is obviously a bigger issue than just your traffic, but Google won’t index a site that is at risk of harming its users’ computers.

In both of these cases, you need to move quickly. The longer an issue stays open, the harder it might be to reclaim your rankings.

Second, you’ll want to make sure your site is crawlable and indexable. If we think about how Google works, its “crawler” bot visits different sites, following links from one site to the next. If, however, your pages have been labeled as “noindex” or “nofollow,” it could explain why you saw a drop. “Noindex” literally tells Google not to index that page whereas “nofollow” tells it not to follow any of the links on said page.

You find these labels in the header of an HTML page. Simply look at the source code, do a command/control+F and search for “noindex” or “nofollow.” If they come up, you have your fix. How could they get there if they weren’t always present? When developers work in test environments, they set those pages to noindex, nofollow so that development environments don’t rank. When transitioning pages from test to production, sometimes the wrong flag is carried over. It’s an easy fix.

You’re not done yet, though. Another way to tell Google how to crawl and index your site is through the robots.txt file. This page tells Google what sections to ignore (such as the login page to WordPress). Sometimes other pages can get added for a multitude of reasons. To fix it, go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and do a search for “Disallow.” If any user-facing pages are included that you want to be indexed, ask your developer to remove them.

Once you’re done with this, you’ll want to go back into Google Search Console and request a recrawl. This will alert its software to revisit your site and then you’ll start ranking again wherever the algorithm deems fit. This could take a few days, though, so be patient.

Third, your links and pages have become screwed up in some way. There are a couple of things that I am thinking about here. I’d start with any redirects you’ve set up. If you’ve recently changed domains or simply updated the URL structure of your pages, if you didn’t do proper 301 redirects, Google won’t know about the new page. A 301 redirect tells Google that the page has permanently changed places. Without it, Google will treat the new page (even if it’s identical) as brand new.

I find this happens often when journalists and editors have the ability to change the URL structure of a story. They’ll publish the story with one headline, which generates the original URL. They’ll then go back into the story hours later with updates, change the headline, and then manually change the URL to match the new headline. This is a problem. You either should ignore the URL and just update the headline or you have to set up a 301 from the old URL to the new one.

If it’s not 301s, then it’s possible that someone else stopped linking to you. This isn’t as common, but if an organically strong site that linked to you changed owners and the new individual removed the links, there’s nothing you can really do. Links are the currency of SEO.

Now one or two links might not do anything. But remember above where I said you had to fix things as soon as you found them? Google penalizes sites for linking to bad sites. So, if you get a lot of manual actions or security warnings, sites that are linking to might also get a warning for linking to a dangerous site. Your site. Therefore, they may remove the links to protect themselves. The faster you fix your errors, the less likely this will happen.

So, we’ve covered Search Console warnings, indexing, and your links/redirects. If none of those things is a problem, it becomes quite a bit more complicated. Perhaps your site is too slow. Maybe the user experience is bad. And maybe, Google has decided that a competitor’s page is simply better.

Oftentimes, though, if it’s not a full-blown algorithm update like Panda or Penguin, then it’s probably a problem that you can fix. Rankings are constantly changing. Sometimes you can be 1, the next day 2, another day 5, and then back to 1. But if you suddenly see a massive, site-wide drop in traffic, you’ve got to investigate. Start with these things first.

Thanks for reading today’s AMO. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack channel. And as always, have a great weekend!