What to do when losing Google traffic?

A regular reader came to me asking for help a few days ago. Apparently, she lost a lot of traffic from Google. I checked the site and it’s not banned. All pages are still being indexed and it’s an old domain with a fair amount of backlinks.

I got some stats and dug a bit deeper on the exact date the traffic went down. It wasn’t gradual but a sudden drop. Here’s a screen shot during that week:

There are still residual referrals from Google but are few and far apart. It’s as if it lost all its juice and fell down the SERPs. It’s just Google though — traffic from other search engines are still coming in but you can see from the graph how much damage was done. PageRank is still intact.

The question is how did that happen?

Here’s the checklist that I gave and I thought I’d share it with everyone here too:

• Is your site functioning well, as in no page errors?
• Did you check your htaccess or robots.txt for any codes that might block being indexed by Google?
• Are you or have you been selling links?
• Are you or have you been buying links?
• Did you change web host or IP recently?
• Did you change your domain WHOIS info recently?
• Do you have Sitemaps installed?
• Summary feeds or full rss feeds?
• Did you check your error_log for relevant data that would suggest access errors?

Did I miss anything?

So, what to do now?

• Don’t panic. If you have a lot of regular readers, then it won’t hurt that much.
• Check for duplicate content. You could be delivering multiple instances of the same content on your domain (something like http://blog.domain.com and http://domain.com/blog and http://www.domain.com/blog).
• Check for backlinks. You might have lost a lot of really juicy links recently.
• Try and get some more nice links. When you’re used to get them for free before, this time be a little proactive.
• Continue building great, original content.

Hopefully, it will come back.