A slight downward graph in Google Analytics is enough to furrowed brows of most veteran online marketer. But as accident occurs in the most well regulated family, you might have to face a steady decline in the number of visitors that can throw you into tizzy. Do not lose your cool if you are clueless as to what went wrong with the website or if you are unable to find a quick fix. Being an internet marketer for the past 5 years, I have come across similar situations and now, I am going to share my personal experience and hope, you may find them useful.
No Index Meta Tags: When visitors dropped suddenly, do not start blaming Google for being partial or jump to the gun that your website has wrongly been penalized by Google. Try to figure out which pages of your website are worse affected. If you find any page whose traffic has come down from 1000 to 0, make sure that you are not using noindex meta tag in the source code. This can happen if the website is being managed by many people, this may occur once in a while and there is no element of surprise that you are being squarely blamed for this mismanagement. So be sure that there is no such code exist unless you really want to block a page.
Your Hosting Company is blocking Google: This is another scenario that can literarily drive you to the brink of insanity. I can vividly remember the day when I get a mail from my client that the website is not appearing in Google search even when searching with the URL itself. I went berserk with the analytics and Google webmaster tools but could not find any particular reason why Google has deindexed the website from its database. Then I tried Fetch as Google Bot in Google webmaster tools and lol, it failed to work. It shows, Robots.txt file is missing. I check the robots.txt file and it is ok and then it struck my mind that probably it is something to do with blockage and checked the crawl error and found that almost all the pages are showing blocked. So, problem was pinpointed and a mail was sent to hosting company to stop the blockage and the next morning I found the same website ranking top in the good old keywords.
Robots.txt: This is another common issue that could lead to drastic fall in the number of visitors. I remembered the day when I saw the number of visitors of my blog came crumbling down to 10 (thanks to direct visitors) from 1000 and lol the reason, I found out later was the goof-up in the robots.txt file. I had mistakenly added this line in the robots.txt file:
Disallow: /html$
And it had blocked all the html files by default and my blog pages were in html whereas main pages where in PHP.
Redirection Loop: Are you using redirection loop? All of you probably say No in chorus. Yes, we do not use double redirection but sometimes, it just happened. I had a similar fate when I was handling a site hosted on IIS. I have done 301 permanent redirection for all non www URLs to with WWW URLs but again I set smartly redirection for all Upper case URLs to lower case URLs ( as you all know IIS is case insensitive). So, this simple and harmless URL –
http://example.com/Post.html is using a double redirection. Guess how! First it is getting redirected to http://www.example.com/Post.html and then it is getting redirected to http://www.example.com/post.html .
This kind of redirection is certainly not good for the health of the website and if I am not wholly wrong, a sudden fall in ranking is not wholly unexpected.
Bulk Links: Never ever, buy links in bulk. However, I am whispering in your ears to get links in small number, I really respect Google’s policy against paid links. Not joking, I am really serious. Now, get to the point. I acknowledge that I had committed the crime of buying links but thankfully I am exonerated from it. So, my humble suggestion. Do not buy links. Say goodbye to this old SEO hats and keep your focus on producing great staffs. What about producing some nifty little software that kids will love to play with or what about developing a simple wordpress theme that will not take up much of your productive time.
Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics: Google webmaster Tools is now have an option named site-health. If your website is having some issues like loads of soft 404 errors or the security of your website has been compromised, you will get automatic notification in it. Analytics too has an option known as alert. You can set alert for example of sudden drop or spike in the number of visitors. It will help you get an insight into the problem.
Author Bio
Michael Evans is a writer who enjoys writing in the tech niche and he also promotes Flash templates with the integrated Flash CMS.
