How to Diagnose Organic Penalties and Traffic Drops

[Linda Buquet]

I do ranking analysis troubleshooting consultations for Local SEO consultants on tough cases all the time, BUT I'm primarily researching penalties and problems on the local side and obvious on-site SEO issues.

When it comes to organic ranking penalties, an expert I'm not.

Often I see consultants coming here saying help I think my client was hit with Panda, but I feel that often they are just jumping to that conclusion without doing research to find out for sure if that's what it really was. I'm also starting to see folks say I was hit by Hummingbird, just because they had a drop around that time. (Correlation is not causation.)

So today I want to share what looks to me to be just a really excellent detailed guide about how to narrow down and isolate exactly where the problem is, so you can work on fixing it.

How to diagnose your traffic drop

So your traffic fell off a cliff…but what cliff? Before you flip the bird at Hummingbird or Penguin, let’s have a look at the all of the common causes for a drop in site traffic, and how to use the information from various tools to figure out what went wrong...

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...Final Warning

If you KNOW you have a very risky backlink profile, be aware that Google may update its Penguin backlink data and calculations without any particular announcement; it happens all the time. Google could decide to no longer count links from www.shady-backlinks-r-us.biz and that could suddenly affect your rankings overall.

As well, if you’ve got some article marketing in your checkered past, be aware that Google is hunting these networks down and slaying them on a regular basis.

What say ye?
Tons of great info???

 

[Travis Van Slooten]

Holy cow. This is a gold mine of information. Thanks so much for digging this up. If you find more stuff like this, please add it to this thread.

I have a client site and a personal site of my own that experienced a significant traffic drop and for the life of me I've been trying to figure out what's the cause. This one source alone should help me identify what the issue is. Thanks so much!!

Travis