Drop in Search Engine Traffic & Referrals?

Date Published: March 02, 2005

Often with websites and search engines, what may seem to be a minor change to a website owner could have drastic affects to the traffic that is coming to their site from the search engines.

What To Do, Checking Your Site & Stats

If you have logs/stats with your hosting provider, you will want to check and see exactly what pages were getting traffic, from what search engines, the keyword phrases and so on. Was there anything changed on your site? It could be a text change, title tags, or even you moved/renamed the page. Its always good to keep a backup or track what you are changing on your site so you can have something to refer to. This is helpful to spot a problem and be able to revert back to what was working before.

You should also look to see your top referrers. Many times you are getting a lot of quality traffic from sites that link to you that might of taken down the link, the link was moved, etc. Checking back over the months you should be able to see if there were any drops.

With a bit of research, you can start to find out exactly where the drop in traffic has occurred, and if you also run ranking reports on a regular basis, or just check your logs to see what search term suddenly dropped in traffic to see where a possible problem is.

Search engine index the content on your site, changing this will affect your rankings, either positively or negatively. Renaming a page will cause a sudden drop in traffic referrals if you are not properly redirecting traffic, or just simply restore the old name.

Gerard Manning
Canadian Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning Search Marketing