I have been hearing many stories recently of sudden drops in traffic by all kinds of blogs and websites. These drops in traffic have been extremely difficult to understand as the owner: why has traffic dropped so steep and quick?  I have had the same problem myself. I created a website myself a few months ago that started to get around 22,000-25,000 views/month called Review Cosmos. Then, all of a sudden, all the traffic was lost and has stayed consistently at 30 views maximum a day. Pathetic. Well, like everything, there is a cause to this drop in traffic. In this case, it a joint fault between the website owner and Google’s new update.
 
Google has numerous amounts of updates to it’s pagerank and search engine throughout the year which ppc.org has predicted.  From the predictions, one update has gone (30th Jan – 6th Feb) which can probably explain why my website lost it’s traffic on the 30th January even though our content was all original and high quality. I guess Google just didn’t like us…
However, for the other hundred if not thousands of bloggers who lost traffic before that, they have no reason until now why they have lost traffic. There is a reason though. It appears Google released a Google Page Layout Algorithm Update on 20th January. This update meant that Google will rank you less if you have more adverts above the fold. If you have less content showing above the fold than adverts, don’t be surprised to have decreases in organic traffic. It’s not so much where the adverts are positioned above the fold, it’s about how much space they take up above the fold.
 

What Can YOU Do?

 
There is one obvious solution to this update by Google. If your website’s traffic is decreasing because of too many adverts above the fold, remove them! Although it’s too early to say whether this is a permanent or temporary fix or even a fix at all, it’s worth trying as there is not much you can do to change this. You will just have to hope Google’s next Page Layout Algorithm Update will correct your ranking to bring you the organic traffic to your website again like it previous once did.
 

What Does This Mean For PPC Advertisers?

 
Fortunately, this set back won’t hinder you as a PPC advertiser too much. The update affects the blogger’s (publishers) websites which should not affect you much at all. Saying this, you may find is either two things occur in your campaign.
 
1. Competition Increases
If websites are getting less traffic from this traffic dropping update, then there is less traffic for your adverts to appear on. This will increase demand for the ad spots with traffic. As the old saying goes, ‘supply and demand’…
 
2. Higher CPC
If bloggers decide to take my advice or have any sense, they will remove the adverts above the fold to gain Google’s confidence in the next update to restore traffic. Temporarily though, this means there are less ad spaces to bid for which will increase demand. Increased demand will increase the CPC of the ad spaces advertisers are bidding for. You will just have to hope that the websites that are most affected by this traffic drop are not the websites you usually advertise on!