Startled! Why has my Google traffic suddenly decreased, this is the cause?

Why has my Google traffic suddenly decreased? 

This is something that is common among business owners. If one day, while you are at work, you check your analytics as you usually do, and you get a surprise you have never experienced before. Instead of seeing a gradual increase in website traffic, you see a line that looks like a cliff. Overnight, your website traffic has dropped by 10% from before. 

Maybe you feel like you've made a mistake. Or maybe you don't believe what you're seeing and assume it's a miscalculation in the analytics and wait until the next day to see if things return to normal. And if it turns out that things don't return to normal, then you have a big problem that you have to face. What caused this sudden drop in traffic? 

• Check site accessibility

Make sure that your site is online. This is a basic step you should take if your traffic suddenly decreases. It is possible that your hosting server is down for some time, causing your traffic to decrease, because analytics cannot provide data reports if your site cannot be accessed. 

• Check industry seasonality

This could be one of the reasons why traffic to your blog or website suddenly decreases. It's a bit difficult to explain why this happens, but there's no harm in checking again to see if your industry niche really has a seasonal impact. Because there are several industries that are vulnerable to this seasonal variable, there are even websites that go down (don't get any visitors at all) during the holiday season. 

You can check this by opening analytics for a certain period of time, and seeing whether at almost the same time in the past, your traffic also experienced a decline, if so, it means that your industry niche was indeed affected by seasonality. Wait until this seasonal impact passes, and you will see your blog or website traffic return to normal. 

• Check your analytics code

Another cause that can cause your blog or website traffic to suddenly decrease is your analytical code. Check again whether you have placed the analytical code correctly? Because, analytics cannot provide reports if you don't put the code. It is possible that this happens when you update your code regularly or when carrying out site maintenance, causing your analytics code to become damaged or lost. 

If this is the case, what you have to do is fix the broken code. But unfortunately, you still cannot receive traffic reports for your website or blog during vulnerable times when the code is damaged or missing. Luckily, this broken code is a minor issue and can be fixed in a matter of minutes. Therefore, make sure that your analytics code is in the right place and not damaged. 

• Check your site design

Did your traffic drop drastically when you launched your new website design? It's very possible that when you launch your new website design, your analytics code breaks or the new website design doesn't map as well as your old website design. 

For example, on your old site, let's say you had several pieces of information all linked together in an FAQ page. To avoid errors in your new website design, you must collect all the pages on one page, with a new URL. 

Every time a page changes its URL, even if it looks like a small change, you still have to redirect from the old URL to the new URL. Otherwise, you will lose all traffic to that page. 

• Check for signs of hacking

If your site is hacked, you will experience a drastic decrease in traffic due to the automatic warning “This site has been hacked” or “This site may be compromised” issued by the Google search engine when users open your site. 

One way to detect this is to use the Google analytics tool "Fetch as Googlebot" to see what Google sees. 

If your website is hacked, it will take time to return to normal. You should remove signs of hacking and update your security software, change all passwords and remove suspicious items from your accounts. You may also end up in the Google sandbox for a while, while they make sure that your website was not built with the aim of spamming. 

• Check Google Penalty

One of the things that might suddenly reduce your traffic is a penalty imposed by Google. There are several things that can cause this, and they are listed when you visit the actions manual page in Google Analytics. The following are things that might cause this:

1. Unnatural incoming links
2. Unnatural outgoing links
3. Hacked site (already discussed above)
4. Too little content
5. Pages that are considered spam
6. Comments filled with spam (user generated spam)
7. Hidden text
8. Redirect to dangerous sites
9. Excessive keywords

Google will tell you what penalties apply to your website and what URL caused the penalty. If you have a large site with thousands of pages, then not all of those pages will be listed, just a few examples that indicate the problem exists. You have to fix the problem first, before your page returns to its previous ranking position. 

• Check your profile backlinks

This usually happens to new websites and small businesses. Negative SEO is a threat to sites that haven't had time to build trust with Google. A small, new site is very vulnerable to malicious code attacks as a spam target, so the website can be penalized by Google. 

If you have never built links with any websites, you can check your link profile to find out which links could have a bad impact on your website, and use the Google Disavow Links tool to remove their associations with your website pages. 

• Check Google algorithm updates

This is one of the reasons why your website traffic decreases suddenly, the decrease in traffic caused by algorithm updates on Google can reach 20 – 40%. 

To diagnose this problem, you must continue to monitor several SEO blogs to find out when this algorithm update occurs. From there, you can see which pages or your website's SEO are negatively impacted by the algorithm change, and fix the problem.