I have spent much time trying to do "what Google wants". I have written weekly blog posts in my WordPress blog since 2006. I have tried to write useful articles for others in my niche and I have been rewarded with loyal followers.
Off-site I have only got natural in-bound links from people who like my stuff and I've only ever done maybe 10 guest posts. I also get natural social shares. I have never indulged in any paid links as far as I'm aware.
Ever since 2006 my organic Google rankings and organic traffic has been increasing, as you'd expect as I constantly add quality articles.
However, since at least the beginning of the year my organic traffic has started to fall to a point I now have the same traffic as two years ago!
This is quite an extreme drop of at least 50% of organic traffic.
It looks like I've suffering some Google penalty but, for what, I don't know.
As I look over your backlinks, I can see that you are quite the blog commenter, and participate on sites where they are talking about building traffic and links and spinning articles, etc. Within those links I found there to be a lot of optimized anchor text as well. I think your site can somewhat be profiled as being active in SEO, building links, and being associated with others that do the same (ex. other blog commenters). I would just suggest that you slow down a little on this practice. Work with the traffic you are getting now to make them more interested in participating and returning to your site (newsletter?), and a little less on seeking link placements.
Hello dvduval, thank you for looking at this. I'm really surprised by your findings. Yes, I have found SEO and building links interesting in the past but I'm really surprised that this was evident in the link profile. I comment on lots of blogs about a variety of subjects around graphic and web design mostly, but also some really successful blogs like SmartPassiveIncome, ViperChill, CopyBlogger, etc., and moreover, my interest in SEO and link-building really took a nose dive after Penguin and, don't forget, the decrease in traffic has come in the last few months.
All my organic traffic comes from hundreds of thousands of long-tail search terms that gave me 1000 visitors a day from Google a few months ago and less than 500 now.
So, I will be slowing down on this practice, in fact, I'll not be commenting on these types of blogs in the future and, yes, concentrating on my list and social media.
In some ways this lack of Google traffic has been strangely liberating as I'm left with a core audience who are really interested in what I do. However, I would like to get to the bottom of this.
If what you say is true it seems a very savage over-reaction from Google to me but I'm not an expert in these matters.
Again, I'm really grateful for the input, thank you.
Maybe you need to rethink what your doing with your site, are you still writing in the same way you did in 2006? or have you caught up with recent trends. Is what you're writing about to the same quality which you used to do. I tend to find that with blog sites and news sites in general, visitors can flucuate all the time, up one minute down the other. Also i agree with what smanaher said.
When you search google, you see few pages into front page. Many visitors click the first pages title. So keyword is very important to stay into google first page and increase visitor into your website.
I'd like to say my writing has improved and I've caught up with trends. I've also added video and audio and I write a lot more (not more regularly but longer articles). Anyway, rankings have dropped so I'm not doing as well in the search engines as I used to.
In my personal opinion, you have to pay much more attention for hith quality contents rather than quantity and enhance your link visibility on social media.
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