How to regain my lost search traffic?

If you have experienced a big decrease in your search traffic, you are not alone. Major companies are (frequently) suffering traffic lost as well. AssociatedContent.com recently lost 91.6% of its traffic, ArticleBase.com has lost 91.5%, and EzineArticles.com has lost 86.2% with the Google Panda update of Feb 2011. 

Imagine a day you wake up and 80% of your business is gone...

So why has this happened and how can you avoid it?

1. Your site lacks quality content & real value to users

Search engines constantly improve their search algorithms. In the year 2010, Google has made 500 changes to its search algorithm. In that process, more and more low quality websites have lost their rankings and traffic to quality websites that have better content & provide more value to their users.

If your site belongs to this category, you will need to rethink the value that your site delivers to users, and improve the site quality before applying new SEO tactics to increase search traffic.

2. Your site uses black-hat SEO tricks

If you have used black-hat SEO tricks, now is the time to confess. Remove all those tricks and use tools like Google Webmaster Tools to send a message to Google "I have cleaned my site. Please verify". If you are lucky enough, Google will forgive you  and reinstate your good rankings and traffic. If your site is considered a big spammer and is punished hard, then it may be worthwhile to buy a new domain and start over. It will save both time and money. Some people say it may take them 2-4 years for Google to index their site again.

3. Your site uses SEO tactics thatare no longer compatible with today's search algorithms

There was a time when Page Rank (PR) had a big influence on search ranking. So the SEO specialists usually found high-PR websites and create the back-links to their websites and saw the rankings go up. That was a valid SEO strategy then, but today it has little effects. Header meta tags like "keyword" tag, "description" tag used to be important for search engines to evaluate a site. It is not the case any longer.

Thus if your site delivers good value to users, and you do not abuse black-hat SEO tricks, then it is time to review the SEO tactics you are applying, and make relevant changes. It is usual for a SEO specialist to frequently update SEO tactics for a site to maintain its ranking.

What changes should be made depend on each situation. Do what Google or Yahoo/Bing like. Search engines want the right answers for the right questions. Make sure your site is valuable to users, and make sure search engines to understand your values, then search engines will be happy to raise your rankings.


SEO Problems

SEO Services