Finding Cause of Google Demotion (second time around!)

[KristieWahlquist]

Our website, christnotes.org has historically ranked very well in it's space. We have always been in top 3 positions for daily bible verse related searches. There have been no fluctuations in rankings until it took a hit around September 4th through October 14th with approximately 35% drop in PVs and over 60% drop in traffic from Google. The site fully recovered google traffic mid-Oct. On November 24th the site was once again hit, this time with a 50% drop in pageviews and over 75% drop in traffic from google. Google Analytics Image depicting the two drops attached.

When the first drop hit, we checked everything - bad links, broken URLs, page speed, etc. There was a slight increase in page speed so we did a little tweaking and made some improvements (8.36 second page load to 5.5)

This time around, I can find no cause and no areas that need fixed to recover our rankings and traffic. Very confused on Google dropping rank then recovering after what looks like a page speed fix and then dropping again a month later.

Any suggestions????

KGOgzEm

[LynnPatchett]

Hi David,

That looks like a tricky issue you have there. Your dates don't immediately look like matching with well known updates, but to be honest a lot of stuff was going on in the last 3-4 months of 2013 so it is easy to get confused!

You say that you traditionally ranked well for 'daily bible verse' related searches. I am not familiar with what phrases these might be, but have your rankings actually dropped on your 'main' keywords or have they remained pretty steady but you still see the traffic drop?

I would look into trying to identify better where the traffic was lost and that might help identify why. So you could look at things like landing pages and compare between the month of lost traffic with the month before. Once you have your list of landing pages that lost significant traffic you could look at any keyword data still available for those pages to try to get an idea of what kind of queries (and intent) were bring traffic to those pages and then go and have a look at what kind of serps those type of queries return now. Have some big sites (wikipedia or similar) moved into top positions? Are knowledge graph boxes answering the question without the user needing to click through to your site?

Understanding what content lost traffic (and/or tracked keywords lost rankings) should give you a better idea of what happened and be able to guide you in planning your next steps.

Hope that helps!