Organic Search dropped 50% Wednesday and has not recovered

[openspan]

I've included two charts below. 1. Our organic search results for the last year and, 2. Results for the last 6 weeks.

We were up to about 350 visits per day in June 2011. In late june we added affiliate links to our site and took a hit down to about 120 a day.

At the end of august we moved the affiliate links behind a login. Only registered users saw them. And we started moving back up.

Last week January 8-14 we were averaging about 550 per day.

Then this Wednesday we dropped to 287. Thursday 268. And today is under 100.

We have not updated our website at all. No changes.

Does anyone have any idea what might have caused this plunge. Has anyone else seen their traffic drop in half.

Thanks for your help.

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[CaseyKluver]

Hi James,

Couple of questions which might help us..

What does your backlink profile look like?

You mentioned you havent updated your website. When was the last website update? And how often do you add new content?

[DPASeo]

Do you have a lot of ads above the fold? Google released a new update yesterday and you may be in the 1%.

[kdaly100]

Hi James

A big drop in a few days indeed but it might just be a temporary thing.  I would give it a few more days and see if ti continues then send on a link and maybe we can help you dig.  have your rankings dropped as significantly?

[loopyal]

I agree with Kieran. Don't panic over one day change, but do check your bandwidth usage, in case there was a problem at your ISP you are not aware of. Also, check your analytics or logs. There may be a deadspot due to connectivity. Did you update any software? add or change a plugin? Do you have ads or other external javascript from other sites that may have hung your pages and stopped visitors coming?

[Prestige-SEO]

I bet its becuase you have ads above the fold.

Quite a few websites got hit becuase of this, and I setup two websites a few months back one with ads below content and one with above. the one above the fold got stuck down!

[firstconversion]

Looks a bit like panda too, that sharp drop. How is your content? thin, duplicated, templated, non-unique?

edit: you didnt do anything but you did move affiliate links behind logins? Better go double check you didnt screw something else up unintentionally when doing that

What does you IIS/Xenu crawl say?

S