What To Do When Traffic From Google Dramatically Drops

Recently, I’ve read a great post about what to do when your search rankings drop on Problogger.net. In that post, Darren shared his three advices to do when your traffic from search engine (he only mentioned Google) drop dramatically. His advices are completely useful and every blogger should know. Here, I just include some useful links and information that may help you out this situation.

Google Penalty or Google Dance?

There are two things that may cause your traffic dramatically drop: Google Penalty and Google Dance. Google Dance is a term used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. The traffic may drop a few weeks but it comes back soon even greater in quantity. While Google Penalty is such a punishment for your violations such as black hat techniques. This is a flowchart to check whether your site got Google Penalty or not:

Image credit to Seomoz.org

And this post on seomoz.com tells you how to handle a Google Penalty.

Have you done anything black hat? Tools to figure out.

Google has created its market for you to take place in so you have to play fair and follow its rule. Mostly, everyone doesn’t know about Google Webmaster Guideline until his site is banned or got penalty. And these things usually appear on a banned site: linking to bad sites, spamming keyword. Here are tools to figure these issues out:

• Google Webmaster Guideline: read it, read it or even learn it by heart.
• Bad Neighborhood Tool: since many webmasters believe the sites we link to may impact, so you should use this online to check out.
• Search engine SPAM detector: this tool will check for hidden text or hidden links, cloaking keyword etc. that Google thinks they are spamming stuff.
• 6 Effective Tools To Check Your Site For Broken Links: these tools may help you check for broken links on your site.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Traffic from Google is definitely high quality and I’m sure that every blogger love it especially who uses contextual ad like Adsense. But is it safe and stable when you build your blogging dream only on Google? Meanwhile, there are various potential sources/mediums such as social media/referral, forum/referral, RSS subscriber/direct etc. and if you ignore them, you are missing out tons of traffic. Here are links may help you out:

• How to Target the Right Social Media Sites: there are so many social media sites out there these days and being on all is an unpractical thought. This post tells you ways to choose the most social media sites that suite your blog.
• The Ins and Outs of Forum Marketing: Some bloggers think forum is only for getting more backlinks since several forums allow you to include dofollow links within your signature. In fact, you can make more out of forum if you do the right thing.
• 15 Ways To Get Your Blog Comments Noticed: Commenting on other blogs is not only a great way to build relationship with bloggers, it can also drive you traffic.
• 35 Guaranteed Ways To Increase Your RSS Subscribers: Increasing subscribers is an essential task that every blogger should do. This post tell you many effective ways to do this.