We’ve experienced sudden drop in traffic by the end of December. It continued by January last month, and got worst at the beginning of this month. The only thing I did, as I remember, was to update the robots file. I added another sitemap, making it 2 in our robots file. And then weeks after, I deleted the added sitemap as unique traffic seemed to drop. It significantly increased for a day, and then dropped back again. Not sure what’s happening or if there is a new update.
Before the drop, our unique traffic was increasing significantly from September 2013 until mid-december of the same year.
I couldn’t say for sure, for one of my sites I always take a hit in December and it recovers in January etc. Except, this year it stayed low in the same period you’re talking about. I checked the rankings for two of my major keywords which bring in huge amounts of my traffic and my ranking has slipped about 5 spots on both of those.
Have you done a keyword ranking report recently? I’m assuming their was a minor Google update that hit some of us in that period?
I actually haven’t recovered yet. But yes, I was just told that things slow down by December to January. So, I’ll see how feb goes. It’s been 2 days this month, so I shall probably wait and see.
Nope. I haven’t done key report. Yes, people have been chatting about a probable update last month.
One thing I forgot to mention. I was also updating our Title tags and adding one h1 tag per page and post (which we didn’t have previously). Do you think it has any effect as well?
I don’t think adding appropriate H1 tags would have had any negative effect on your rankings…
I would start checking your main keywords in Google… it’s true that traffic drops, but your SE rankings wont change between now and February (that much anyway).
I have noticed also a decreased in traffic in my website in December 2013 and in January 2014 it’s till dropping but minimal but I think it’s not the update and it only show how your website perform in the competition and the best thing to do is to increase the best user experience in product and services.