Unusual drop in traffic/earnings

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Unusual drop in traffic/earnings

Both down about 60%

shallow

4:31 pm on Feb 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Yesterday my traffic and earnings dropped about 60%.

Traffic to my site has increased slowly but steadily through the years but this has never happened before (other than if the site had a major redesign).

I checked five years of stats and while there have been slight variations from day to day, there has never been this type of dramatic drop in traffic. Seems like it's going to be down the same today.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

There have been no major changes to my site. The only change that was made four days ago was that my web developer replaced Zoom Indexer Search with Google Custom Search.

Thank you.

castor_t

4:36 pm on Feb 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Check [webmasterworld.com...] and [webmasterworld.com...]

shallow

4:48 pm on Feb 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Yikes, does this mean the Google considers my site one of low quality, low-value for users, copies content from other websites?

If so, I don't understand why. I don't copy content from other sites.

tristanperry

5:17 pm on Feb 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Nope, it doesn't (necessarily) mean that.

The algorithm update was meant to solely target low quality sites and remove or downrank them in the SERPs.

But it seems there's a LOT of false positives, with many good quality sites slipping down the SERPs.

shallow

5:57 pm on Feb 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thank you.

Do you think Google will sort out the false positives in time, or should individual site owners contact Google if things don't settle down in a few weeks?

netmeg

9:14 pm on Feb 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

If it were me, I'd read up everything I could find about the algo change and its effects on various types of sites, and then look at those sites, and (trying to keep objective) see if I could figure out what could cause Google to profile my site the same way. (And I might ask a friend or relative or colleague or expert to look too, depending on how much of a hit I was taking financially)

It's an algo, so it's not human, and there's a profile out there, made up of hundreds or a thousand little factors. And some number of factors is likely what trips the switch between business as usual, and death in the SERPS. And some could be huge and some could be tiny, and maybe you're just skirting on the edge, so if you could find a few little similarities that you could change, that would send you back.

That's what I'd probably do first anyway. I have not seen anything (as yet) that would lead me to believe that a reconsideration request would do any good for an algo change drop.