Reasons for drop in organic traffic

[Myntra]

Hi,

We are seeing a 20% drop in organic traffic since 1st May. We did not see any discussions about algorithm update from Google around this date on Moz, so this post.

For us several activities happened around this date because of which we are unable to understand the % drop we should attribute to these related factors. We will appreciate if you could let us know how much % you would attribute to each of these factors.

1. Site had some issues and was down for 3-4 hours.   
2. To reduce the load site was blocked for all IP's other than our country for three days
3. Google sent us an alert - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site. (Most of these pages are no indexed or have a canonical)
4. Banner advertisements on publisher websites that linked to our site via affiliate URL reduced by 60%

It will also help if you could provide suggestions to avoid such a drop.

Thanks

Kaushal

[indigoextra]

Hi,

Here's my view on the %'s:

1. Site had some issues and was down for 3-4 hours.   0.25% - Google discounts downtime if it's occasional
2. To reduce the load site was blocked for all IP's other than our country for three days - It depends how much traffic is from other countries.  If all your traffic was from other countries, then it would be 10%.  If it's half your traffic from other countries, 5%, etc..
3. Google sent us an alert - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site. (Most of these pages are no indexed or have a canonical) 0 - 5% - This doesn't sound like a particularly serious alert
4. Banner advertisements on publisher websites that linked to our site via affiliate URL reduced by 60% Again you need to monitor what % of your traffic comes from these affiliate sites.  If 20% of your traffic is from these affiliate schemes, then this would account for a 12% drop in traffic.

The MyBlogGuest network got penalised at the start of May, if you have any articles out there that you placed via MyBlogGuest, that's a potential problem.  Also you need to delete any links that are automated.There are a lot of factors that effect SEO, it could be a competitor has overtaken you for some of your main keywords, in which case you need to do some more high quality link building.  Is your content up-to-date, etc?Hope that helps!

[Kingof5]

MyBlogGuest was penalized towards the end of March, that's probably not his issue.

[Myntra]

Thank You Martin, This helps.

A point that needs clarification is that I am just referring to organic - Search traffic post the occurrence of all these events. So even after the site was unblocked for the other geographies we continued to see that the organic traffic was down. For affiliate traffic, we have an hypothesis that people see the banner ads on publisher website but may not click on these ads at that time. However later they do a search on Google and arrive on the site.

Thank you for the other pointers specified in your response, I will have a check on these.

Thanks

Kaushal

[Myntra]

Thank you David. This information helps.