Why the blog traffic is going down gradually or dramatically

Losing traffic is a common problem and one of the biggest challenges faced by many bloggers. This happens to new blogs as well as authentic blogs which have been existing for several years. Let us analyze the reason behind losing traffic suddenly or gradually. I have also proposed some solutions to avoid such scenario and recover from search engine penalties.

There are few different scenarios:

1. New blog gets a lot of traffic initially but gradually loses traffic.

This is a very common problem experienced by the new blogs. Whether you are new blogger or an experienced blogger who just started a new blog, it can happen to it. Typically, Google gives some weightage for all new blogs and it fetches some "extra traffic" during the first few weeks.

So, even if nothing changes in your website, you could lose a lot of advantage your website was enjoying the first few weeks. That is the time your blog will start losing the traffic.

How to recover: This scenario does not always mean your blog is penalised. It just means your blog was receiving more traffic than it deserved and now Google has just adjusted the traffic according to the merit. There is no action required from your side other than keep adding more and more fresh and valuable content.

Read how guest posting affects SEO

2. New blog gets a lot of traffic initially but suddenly reduces the traffic and becomes almost no traffic eventually.

As per the current algorithms used by Google, new blogs are ranked primarily based on 2 factors:

a. The keywords used in the blog posts
b. The links pointing to the blog

So, if you just fill your articles with keywords and build a lot of links to your blog, it has high chances of getting good traffic from Google. However, stuffing keywords and building links will not work for long. Google has several other levels of ranking and within a few weeks, it will discover various aspects of your website. That includes checking for non-organic links, keyword stuffing, uniqueness of the content, reputation of your incoming links, relevance of your outgoing links etc. Once it recognizes all those aspects, if it finds any non-recommended practices in your website, Google could penalize your blog.

In such cases, the reduction in traffic will start on a day and it will keep going down for next few days. It will take about a week to settle down with a much lower traffic. Don't be surprised if a penalised blog loses 90% of the traffic and no longer appear in top of the search results.

How to recover: This scenario indicates penalty for over-optimization and non-recommended SEO practices. Once penalized, it is very hard to recover and may take several months to come out of it. The best way is to be pro active and avoid search engine penalties. Do not stuff keywords in your blog and don't over do search engine optimization. I have seen people building hundreds of links to new blogs, which will initially boost the traffic but will kill the blog within a few weeks. If you are into link building, do not build more than one link per week, that too focus on quality links through guest posts in authentic websites.

Read disadvantages of accepting guest posts in your blog

3. Authentic and well established blogs suddenly lose traffic on a fine day and within a few days, the traffic significantly reduces and becomes steady at a much lower traffic.

This is very similar to scenario 2. Your blog may be very authentic and have been enjoying a lot of traffic from search engines. If your authentic blog loses traffic from Google on a fine day, that means either Google has applied a new algorithm or it has refreshed its data for an existing algorithm that makes your blog penalised.

How to recover: Typically, when an algorithm change or data refresh happens at Google, that would affect several websites at the same time. So, if your blog lost traffic suddenly, check out the popular search engine forums like www.SearchEngineLand.com and see if there are any news about Google algorithm changes. Usually, Google makes some official announcements about what causes the penalty. Once you learn what caused the penalty, you can start working on your site and cleanup anything that causes the penalty. For example, if the algorithm update include penalties for keyword stuffing, you will have to go through all existing articles and remove excessive use of keywords. If you have a reputed blog with thousands of articles, it may require several weeks of efforts to review all of the existing articles and tune them according to the latest guidelines from Google. I have deleted or tuned several thousand articles in some of my websites to escape from the Google penalties.

Read how to rank your blog high in Google search results.