Traffic decreases on a website

Being an SEO programmer, we commonly find ourselves being asked many questions regarding rankings, site traffic and design and development, but a question I was recently asked has led me to do a bit of research and investigation.

The question asked was regarding traffic drops to a site and what may cause this. I have now come up with some information which may help answer this.

Duplicate content

Many feel that you will be automatically penalised if your site is found to have duplicate content but as stated in Google’s guidelines, action may only be taken if the content is intended to manipulate Google and/or users. There are fixes to this including the use of the canonical tag.

Malicious attacks

These include things such as hidden text and links which may result in your site being removed from Google’s search results.

If your site has been hacked, a hacker can often upload thousands of links or hidden content to your site which may not be noticeable to yourself but could lead to your site falling from the listings and a decrease in traffic.

Site design and architecture issues

As well as malicious attacks on the site affecting traffic, design and architecture issues may also cause problems – as you would want to guarantee that your site is able to be both effectively crawled and indexed, which is a requirement to being shown in Google’s search results.

Things to remember:

• Ensure your robots.txt file has the correct status code and is not returning an error

• Keep in mind some best practices; if moving to a new site use the new “change of address” feature recently added in Google Webmaster Tools

• Make good use of the rel=”canonical” attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain.

Natural SEO Programmer
Kenneth Berkley