Lost like 90% of Traffic in 2 days - Google Algorithm Update or WP Theme Change?

Hey guys!

I am kind of confused as to what happened to my site rankings.

My niche site is roughly 4 years old and has around 40 articles. Quality content, well written, on-page SEO is on point. For linkbuilding I have mainly used some Web 2.0 foundation + 15 PBN links (TF 20+, CF 20+ from my own network).

I didn’t really work on the site after I created it, I let it age and over time traffic has increased steadily. From 30 uniques a day the site has organically grown to 200 uniques/day and over the last several weeks traffic spiked again and I hit 250-350 uniques/day. I didn’t add any new content and haven’t built links in years (maybe that caused an Google Algorithm penalty?)






Two, three days ago I decided to change the Wordpress theme. I did and everything went smooth. No 404’s, no indexation issues/correct meta robots tags, no redirects, everything is fine.

Now out of a sudden, all my rankings tanked hard. My rank tracker says some URLs aren’t even indexed anymore? But Google Search Console / Webmaster tools says all URLs are indexed. But my site doesn’t rank anymore…

I checked for manual review / penalty in Google Search Console but there is no manual penalty.

What do you think what caused the crash?

- Wordpress Theme Change
- Manual Review
- Google Algorithm Update


Thanks for advice guys!

SaulGoodman

if there was google update, specially a big update.

I am sure someone here would have reported it.

bookmarc said:

if there was google update, specially a big update.

I am sure someone here would have reported it.

Click to expand...

Yeah I don't really think it was an algo update, but who knows...
I started off checking my backlink profile and found a competitors PBN linking to my site...
Might be that that caused it but the links appeared over a month ago. I have disavowed all those spammy links now and will see if my site recovers.

I also kind of expected a little drop in rankings after changing the theme of my website. But I didn't expect to lose a lot of rankings completely
Seems my website got penalized on a keyword level, all URLs are still indexed, they just don't rank anymore.

I'll keep you guys in the loop

SaulGoodman said:

Yeah I don't really think it was an algo update, but who knows...
I started off checking my backlink profile and found a competitors PBN linking to my site...
Might be that that caused it but the links appeared over a month ago. I have disavowed all those spammy links now and will see if my site recovers.

I also kind of expected a little drop in rankings after changing the theme of my website. But I didn't expect to lose a lot of rankings completely
Seems my website got penalized on a keyword level, all URLs are still indexed, they just don't rank anymore.

I'll keep you guys in the loop

Click to expand...

For your links, did you use exact keyword(s) as anchor text or generic?
Also, try to update a couple of your posts, change the headlines and few sentences, after that go to GSC, url inspection, enter the url that you updated and hit the option request indexing next to page has changed. If the ranking comes back in a day or two and then disappears it means that you have some kind of algorithmic penalty on keyword level.

bahus said:

For your links, did you use exact keyword(s) as anchor text or generic?
Also, try to update a couple of your posts, change the headlines and few sentences, after that go to GSC, url inspection, enter the url that you updated and hit the option request indexing next to page has changed. If the ranking comes back in a day or two and then disappears it means that you have some kind of algorithmic penalty on keyword level.

Click to expand...

Mixed anchor texts, a lot of anchors are naked URL (http://www.domain.com; domain.com; domain.com/post-name, etc) but the powerful PBN links also have money keywords. A few exact match money keywords and variations like "find more about product here". But I only use every anchor text once.

The thing is, I have one landing page that has a lot of PBN links, then the homepage has a good number of links, but the remaining articles have usually 3-5 links only and not very strong links. So it could be that the backlink distribution was a red flag. Not sure yet.

But it definitely looks like a penalty on keyword level, I agree!

I have re-submitted my sitemap in Google WMT, let's see what happens!

But what would you do in case it is a keyword-level penalty? Just add more links with generic / brand anchors?

SaulGoodman said:

Mixed anchor texts, a lot of anchors are naked URL (http://www.domain.com; domain.com; domain.com/post-name, etc) but the powerful PBN links also have money keywords. A few exact match money keywords and variations like "find more about product here". But I only use every anchor text once.

The thing is, I have one landing page that has a lot of PBN links, then the homepage has a good number of links, but the remaining articles have usually 3-5 links only and not very strong links. So it could be that the backlink distribution was a red flag. Not sure yet.

But it definitely looks like a penalty on keyword level, I agree!

I have re-submitted my sitemap in Google WMT, let's see what happens!

But what would you do in case it is a keyword-level penalty? Just add more links with generic / brand anchors?

Click to expand...

I was asking because one of my posts lost ranking back in september, but I was aggressive with anchor text, I had like15 variations targeting one product. I did change the page a bit in April, it came back 24 hours later and lost ranking 2 days later. I will change it again and lower the keyword density and see what will happen. If that won't work I'll move it to a new post with no backlinks and start building links to it from scratch. I did submit disavow file with the links but from what I've read it takes forever.

P.S I'm assuming that the new theme did not affect your sitemap and url structure.

Forgot to mentions, all my links were PBN, no web 2.0, no comments or profile links.

Same here for Google.de. Seems like something is going on. Google algorithm penalty might cause it, but who knows? Wait a few more days and see what is going to happen. These days Google is unpredictable.

bahus said:

I was asking because one of my posts lost ranking back in september, but I was aggressive with anchor text, I had like15 variations targeting one product. I did change the page a bit in April, it came back 24 hours later and lost ranking 2 days later. I will change it again and lower the keyword density and see what will happen. If that won't work I'll move it to a new post with no backlinks and start building links to it from scratch. I did submit disavow file with the links but from what I've read it takes forever.

P.S I'm assuming that the new theme did not affect your sitemap and url structure.

Click to expand...

If I had to guess anything, it's this.

Any time you do a site revamp, you should expect to lose traffic. Typically the amount is 30%, but if you lost 90% (!) then there has to be something wrong here.

I would advise you to revert to your old site and see if anything happened here. It won't necessarily give you the right answer, but it will save you any money you used to be making. Hopefully.

bahus said:

I was asking because one of my posts lost ranking back in september, but I was aggressive with anchor text, I had like15 variations targeting one product. I did change the page a bit in April, it came back 24 hours later and lost ranking 2 days later. I will change it again and lower the keyword density and see what will happen. If that won't work I'll move it to a new post with no backlinks and start building links to it from scratch. I did submit disavow file with the links but from what I've read it takes forever.

P.S I'm assuming that the new theme did not affect your sitemap and url structure.

Click to expand...

Yes, I think I got hit by a similar penalty..
No, sitemap is the same, and URLs and everything else too.
My usability metrics even went up (pagespeed, CTR, bounce rate) after the theme change.

nakamura said:

Same here for Google.de. Seems like something is going on. Google algorithm penalty might cause it, but who knows? Wait a few more days and see what is going to happen. These days Google is unpredictable.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that info! Seems like a algo update is getting more likely then. Will report back in a couple of days with a ranking update. Not really confident it will recover though.

AdvertisingGuy said:

If I had to guess anything, it's this.

Any time you do a site revamp, you should expect to lose traffic. Typically the amount is 30%, but if you lost 90% (!) then there has to be something wrong here.

I would advise you to revert to your old site and see if anything happened here. It won't necessarily give you the right answer, but it will save you any money you used to be making. Hopefully.

Click to expand...

I know. I expected some drop but not that much. Sitemap is fine, Theme is fine. Site is still indexed but just not ranking for my money keywords anymore. Seems like a kw-based penalty. Or algo update. Will update soon.

SaulGoodman said:

Yes, I think I got hit by a similar penalty..
No, sitemap is the same, and URLs and everything else too.
My usability metrics even went up (pagespeed, CTR, bounce rate) after the theme change.

Click to expand...

In the past, the algo related to links/anchor text over optimization was refreshed every 2-3 years or so, if you were hit with this just a few days ago it can mean that now they scan websites for any overoptimization continuously. I publish new posts on regular bases, I guess I'll have to play with some of them to see what works now and what doesn't. Probably changing the theme and resubmitting site map caused the algo to recrawl your website and it caught up with 'bad behavior'. That's my best guess, I could be wrong. The game is always changing. But don't give up, 5 years ago my website was hammered big time, had to start from scratch, which turned out for the better, instead focusing on a niche or macro niche I target a broad niche, if I make an (SEO) mistake a post or two suffer, and the rest are just fine. All the best!

bahus said:

In the past, the algo related to links/anchor text over optimization was refreshed every 2-3 years or so, if you were hit with this just a few days ago it can mean that now they scan websites for any overoptimization continuously. I publish new posts on regular bases, I guess I'll have to play with some of them to see what works now and what doesn't. Probably changing the theme and resubmitting site map caused the algo to recrawl your website and it caught up with 'bad behavior'. That's my best guess, I could be wrong. The game is always changing. But don't give up, 5 years ago my website was hammered big time, had to start from scratch, which turned out for the better, instead focusing on a niche or macro niche I target a broad niche, if I make an (SEO) mistake a post or two suffer, and the rest are just fine. All the best!

Click to expand...

This also makes some sense.

This is probably not new information, but I can confirm that even small sites are crawled daily by the major search indexes. I have some sites that I haven't updated in years, and they still get crawled by Google. Some days, they're the only visitor to the site.

Whatever it was. It seems like my site's rankings are recovering!
I disavowed a few spam links and re-submitted the sitemap and now my pages are indexed again.
The keyword level penalty is gone too, so I am ranking for my money keywords in the TOP 10 again.

There was a Google update sometime on Tuesday-Wednesday so maybe that's the cause of your rankings slipping.

SaulGoodman said:

Whatever it was. It seems like my site's rankings are recovering!
I disavowed a few spam links and re-submitted the sitemap and now my pages are indexed again.
The keyword level penalty is gone too, so I am ranking for my money keywords in the TOP 10 again.

Click to expand...

That's great news! It's so weird that a theme switch could cause such a swing in ranking ...

Some addons totally screw with your backend. I would check over those.

Whenever you make a change on on-page your rankings will affect but if after some time it will come back to the original position, check whether which theme is previous one or new, check whether new theme changes the position of h titles of the post. if nothing changed then you will probably gonna get your ranking within 2-4 weeks, don't worry this happened to me also.

Since 6 months, 92% unique visitors to my website come under "30 seconds".

Many people and even my friend in UK got virus alert fo my website. Is this the reason 60% visitors get scared away from my website ??

My website is 100% safe. Hostgator scanned the servers for me.

last week till now , today wrost, organic search drop back , I thought " normal " coming to weekend traffic tend to slow down etc

seem like not me other also noticed