There’s nothing worse than having your website traffic suddenly drop and not having a clue as to why. It is worse still if this happens after an intense period of work on your site’s SEO. Sometimes, however, the two can be connected.

Traffic can drop off for quite a few reasons, only some of which come from within your site. The problems within your site are the easiest ones to fix, and should be things that you keep a constant look out for.

Duplicate content may or may not have an affect on your site’s ranking. Google guidelines set out that only duplicate content intended to manipulate the search engine’s spiders will face a penalty. As with many of Google’s guidelines, this relies on the spiders being able to recognise your intent. This is something the algorithms often succeed in doing, but there are the odd times that they don’t. The result is, it’s a good idea not to have duplicate content floating around (and duplicate content can confuse your viewers as well).

Sites can end up with duplicate content after optimisation due to the presence of old URLs alongside updated ones. In such cases, a 301 redirect can ensure search engines (and viewers) are forwarded to the right site. There are circumstances where a 301 redirect will not work, in which case sorting out the problem does become a little more complex. An instance of this is if your content management system won’t let you use 301 redirect codes. There are ways to perform redirects in this case if you look for them, or ask for help.

It should go without saying that after any changes to a site, one of the first things a good webmaster will do is check that all links are straightforward and working properly, that the site architecture is intact and that the addresses have been updated with the search engines. Unfortunately, these basic practices are sometimes overlooked and can be a cause in traffic drop as well.

Sometimes, the loss of traffic to your site could be because of malicious code hidden somewhere on the site. Hidden links or text can often be placed on an unwary site and cause it to be kicked off a search engine’s index without the owner knowing what has happened. If you are unable to track the loss of traffic down to any other source, it’s a good idea to see if there have been any malicious attacks on your site. The experts at SEO Consult can help with this.

The presence of malicious code on your site can sometimes be something out of your control, for instance if advertisement space is assigned code that contains something nasty. If this is the case and the code has since been removed, you can contact the search engines direct to have the block on your site removed.

If you have just optimised your site, be aware that a slight drop in traffic isn’t unusual. After changing quite a few elements on your pages, it will take a while for search engines to find them, scan them and approve them as trustworthy. With Google and Yahoo! this is usually around two weeks. Remember that a slight drop for a short time isn’t going to affect you too adversely. Keep an eye on the traffic over the following weeks, and if your traffic rate is still low, reassess the situation with the help of a good consultant like those at SEO Consult.

Related posts:

1. Using your parked URLs
2. Pitfalls in the world of code
3. Make Your Site Unique
4. How to spot canonicalisation issues
5. Getting Your 302s Sorted for SEO

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 at 10:53 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.