So recently, Google has rolled out a lot of shake-ups and shake-downs. Web owners have to be extremely smart to stay ahead of the new changes in algorithms. Many of us bloggers are noticing a sharp drop in our blog traffic and are wondering what in the world is going on. Traffic can seriously affect your PR rating, your self-confidence and your blog’s earnings. This article will show you what to do, and what to check if you see your traffic falling drastically. If you know what to look for, you’ll know what to fix.

Check your Webmaster tools

If you have a blog, you should have Webmaster tools. Simply sign into your account and look at your site in detail. Do you have any warnings? Have you got too many 404s (pages not found)? You may have broken links on your website. You may have linked to blogs or pages which no longer exist. Your site may be flagged up as spam for a reason you have no knowledge about. This has happened to me. Google was warning everyone who tried to access my blog that they were entering an unsafe site. The message went on, ‘enter at your own risk. This is a phishing website’.

The problem was that I’d innocently linked to a ‘site in a bad neighbourhood’. As soon as I removed this link and told Google I’d done so, my site returned to normal business. Your Webmaster tool will also show you malware notices or any ‘unusual practices’ going on, which you’re not aware of. It’s a necessary tool for all blog owners.

Is your domain name still listed on Google

The fact that you once received traffic from Google (I’m assuming you did. If you have never gotten traffic from search engines, you need to check that your ‘privacy’ setting is set to ‘allow search engines to find this site’.)

A slump in traffic could be due to the fact that your site is no longer ranking for your domain name. If it doesn’t, Google could’ve flagged it up for violations. Type this: ‘www.yourdomain.com’ into the search engine and check to see if your site appears in the results. If it does, all is well. If it doesn’t, you need to go to your Webmasters Tools and check. A visit to any Google help forum will also prove helpful. This has always helped me.

Search for your site in your search engine

Another way to search for your site is to type in: site:mydomain.com into your search engine. If robots are blocking crawlers from crawling your site, your blog titles may show up without snippets. This is obviously not good for traffic. As long as you’ve diagnosed the problem, you can then go to Google or blog forums and ask for help. The trick is first to identify what’s wrong.

If there are no faults with your site, and you’re just experiencing a temporary slump, chances are you’ve been hit by one of Google’s many ‘monochrome animal’ roll-outs. The next best thing to do now is to get yourself traffic from other places. It’s not safe to depend on Google for most of your traffic, because when they choose to hit you (which is often and hard), you’ll be dead.

———————————————————————————————————————————————-
This is a guest post contribution by James Jorner who writes for www.speedyloan.com an online site that shows you how to get link to quick loans.