Authorship and 50% Drop in Search Traffic

[ben1000]

Hi.

I had some problems with my content being copied by other sites, and was suggested to claim my pages. Immediately after Google started listing the posts with my photo next to them my traffic picked up slightly but since, over the past few weeks, it has dropped by about 50%!

It seems that the average position has declined (as has the CTR)

At the same time as claiming authorship I added the post date to my articles which I have now removed.

Does anyone have any ideas for me?

Thanks!

[wissamdandan]

Hmmm pretty interesting.

can you go over here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change and at the same time go to your Google Analytics and Match the day that your traffic dropped with the dates of these algo changes and see if anything matches.

awaiting your reply

[ben1000]

Thanks. No, no change at all matches - I implemented authorship at the start of the month and saw no real change until about 10 days ago when it started to drop. Now I just had the worst day I've had for 6 months (there was a great boost in search position coinciding with Panda particularly the February 17 pack

Thanks

[Debdulal]

What I feel is that when you are adding authorship markup against the website, there is a possibility that the ranking of your website is going to get reevaluated based on the Author Rank of the profile. So, if you have set up authorship mark-up against the website, you need to make the author profile look active. Promote it with Guest posting, keep it fresh with regular updates and all. Hopefully the ranking will recover, unless the website has been affected by any other algo change otherwise.