Ranking stable - Traffic down by 30%

mirrorer said:

I have 2 food blogs.

The blog that has 30% drop is still ranking the same, jumping 1 position up and down as always.

However, since yesterday, search traffic is down 30% on this blog.

The other blog is stable. Both blogs share similar keywords and are in the same niche so it can't be "seassonal".

What is going on?

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moneymemoneynow said:

Is it showing same search impressions and lower CTR, or lower impressions and same CTR? What does google search console say?

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tylero said:

SGE is probably to be blamed.

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moneymemoneynow said:

It may just be some volatility that will correct itself.

Look more in depth at your individual keywords from the daily view. See if you can see any that have dropped in impressions more relative to other other keywords, or any short term CTR changes for specific keywords. Also, use the custom date range to check day by day the individual day stats the past few days, see the total number of search terms you were shown for each day, if that's dropped see if it's general or specific topics. Try to see if you can narrow down any specific keywords that have dropped in clicks, if there isn't a proportional drop for across all keywords you maybe able to identify specific ones responsible for most of the change. Can take a look at the pages that show for those keywords and see whats going on with the competitors and maybe see if new titles help CTR any. If a general drop in clicks for all keywords, hard to say.

Otherwise, the chart looks good for the past few months, you had some growth there, hopefully if you keep doing what you're doing and try to keep content and site updates going it'll correct itself. With good average rank like that clearly your site has come good authority, keep covering more topics and growing your keyword base to grow your search traffic security. Will be better able see the next few days and week if that was an anomaly or not. If there's been no recent major changes to your site, may be hard to pinpoint anything specific you need to do.

Hard to say from such a quick change in a short time. Best case it's just some temporary volatility that you recover form quickly without having to do something different and not a persistent trend.

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AliceInSEOLand said:

This.

And it is 5th May now... The update should start anytime... But some people have been speculating that it may have started a few days ago... Every one of us are reporting traffic drops.

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xpesos said:

Same with me among my 2 Non-English news blog one has traffic dropped to about 40% and one is growing, i have analyzed, and there was some bad content on my blog on which traffic is dropping, plus there is new Google dance, index and de-index, but when you give social signals twitter+facebook+reddit they seem to get indexed and remain there for a while.

AI content is still working, content has to be to the point, no useless stuff, tables and other htmls if you can add any are great for rankings.
And you need constant increase in backlinks + social signals

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mirrorer said:

Thank you for the insightful input. That will require a few more days to collect enough data on GSC. This is an early symptom or anomaly.

Do you mind to share what kind of update are you talking about?

The site may be hit but I doubt it is SEG (yet) because both blogs are in the same niche for similar keywords. Only one (with ads) is effected.

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Site reputation abuse​

AliceInSEOLand said:

Here you go:
https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-update-march-2024/

Site reputation abuse​

Sometimes, websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting site's strong reputation. For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly on Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.

We’ll now consider very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam. We're publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5, to give site owners time to make any needed changes.

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There's rumours it will double down on expired domains... So if you're using expired domains, this may be the cause of it.

Again, there's no official announcement as of yet. But I'm seeing SEOs reporting traffic changes now.

For now, I advise to just wait a couple of days and see how.

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