Diagnosing the drop in PageRank and Traffic from Google

Is your blog showing up some abnormal and statistical changes since few days? Do you think the latest algorithm update from Google affected your site? What might be cause for the sudden drop in the page rank and traffic? Do you know how to properly diagnose the issue? If you answer is ‘No’, read further and follow my guidelines in diagnosing. If ‘Yes’ check if your are practicing the same diagnosing methods I prefer.

Check Google Webmaster Tools

Log into your Google Webmaster tools account and check if you can see any penalization notice in the messages. Google notifies the webmaster of the blog about penalization activity with the cause for penalization being stated in the message.

Check if any algorithm update strike your website/blog in the Google Index status. Google marks the algorithm update in the indexing status of the website with a straight vertical line. The update might be a cause for the dropping of page rank and traffic.

Check your Robots.txt

If the algorithm update is not a cause for the drop in the page rank and traffic, it might be your robots.txt file blocking webpages and directories of the website from being crawled. If you have made changes to the robots.txt file in your site, it might have been wrongly configured and caused the drop of rank and traffic for your blog from Google.

Re-check your robots.txt file and make sure it is not blocking the best performing pages and other crucial factors of your site that brings tons of traffic to your site.

Check for speed killing code

Page speed is one of the crucial factors that is considered in ranking a website or blog. If you installed a new piece of code to enhance the visitor interaction on the site recently since when your traffic started dropping, optimize it or remove it at all.

Make sure you have your site optimized with the 9 important elements. If you forgot any, I recommend you to consider doing those without failure.

Check your website’s uptime

You might not able to expect of what’s happening with your site when everything is good and fine. In such a case, it might be the server your site or domain is hosted on. A good hosting provider maintains 99.99% uptime. Server which don’t maintain higher uptime affects the sites that are hosted in. Though you maintain a perfect site with perfect content, a bad hosting server might earn you an imperfect to Google. Website availability is another factor considered in ranking a website and the traffic would drop off automatically when the site is not available.

Do not opt for cheap domains or hosting plans. Buy a plan by looking at the service provider’s reputation.

Have you moved your website to a new platform?

So may bloggers suffer the rank and traffic loss by wrongly moving their site to a new platform. Moving your site to better platforms that offer much flexible features & opportunities is good. But when you move a site without knowing how to transfer the PR and traffic to it.

Google have recently come up with official SEO guide that helps in moving your site to a newer platform. I recommend you to go through the guidelines and stop loosing traffic for your high performing pages.

Have you revamped your site with a new design?

Change is necessary! Change is growth! but you should watch out for its adverse effects too. Check if the new template or revamped design of your existing template is making it all.

If a good template design could change the metrics and so can a bad template design. Check for the factors that caused the drop of page rank and traffic. Optimize them, or remove them if necessary. you can use the Google’s PageSpeed Insights and webmaster tools for the optimization.

Algorithm update is not a only specific reason for page rank and traffic droppings. Hope I gave a brief idea of how to diagnose the problem in various perspectives. If I miss any, please share it it comments, I’ll add them up immediately! Thank you!