The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER NINE

Panda, Penguin, and Penalties

Search engines use many techniques for measuring search quality, including manual penalties, algorithmic penalties, and ranking algorithms. Sometimes these algorithms and penalties can have a major impact on your organic traffic. Significant decreases in the search engine traffic to your website can be devastating to a business. As shown in Figure 9-1, sometimes these drops in traffic can be quite large.

Figure 9-1. Major loss in traffic

If the business shown in Figure 9-1 generates all of its revenue from organic search traffic, this would represent a devastating blow. This type of loss of revenue can mean laying off employees, or even closing the business.

For that reason, you need to have a working understanding of the potential causes of these traffic losses, and if you have already suffered such a loss, know how you can figure out what the cause is and what you need to do to recover.

Diagnosing the Cause of a Traffic Loss

The first step to identifying the cause of a traffic loss is to check your analytics data to see if the drop is in fact a loss of organic search engine traffic. If you have Google Analytics on your site, make sure you check your traffic sources, and then isolate just the Google traffic.

If you confirm that it is a drop in Google organic search traffic, then the next step is to check if you have received a message ...