50% Organic Traffic Drop In the last 48 Hours

[chuck-layton]

Hello,

My site had a 50% decrease in the last 48 hours (9/26/18) and I looking for ideas/reasons what would cause such a dramatic drop. Year to year organic traffic has been up 40% and September was up 30%. The site has a domain authority of 39 according to Moz and keywords positions have been flat for a few months.

I made a change to the code and robots.txt file on Monday, pre-drop. The category pagination pages had a "NoIndex" with a rel =canonical and I removed the "NoIdnex" per: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html. I also removed "Disallow" in the robots.txt for stuff like "/?dir" because the pages have the rel =canonical. Could this be the reason for drop??

Other possible reasons:
1. Google Update: I dont think this is it, but ti looks like the last one was August 1st: "Medic" Core Update  —  August 1, 2018
2. Site was hacked
3. All of keyword positions dropped overnight: I dont think this is it because Bing has also dropped at the same percentage.

Any help, thoughts or suggestions would be awesome.

[DonnaDuncan]

Search Engine Roundtable is reporting they're seeing indications of a possible update on 9/27.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-26437.html

I'd don't think the changes you made to robots.txt are the reason for the drop.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Chuck

As Donna also mentioned, there was a small update which was finally just confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-small-search-ranking-algorithm-update-this-past-week-306103#.W7AVMNe0y5g.twitter

So that is the most likely reason for the drop you saw.

As with any traffic change, I would recommend segmenting your traffic data by both queries and landing pages (this can both be done in search console) - to isolate which/if specific pages and keywords saw drops. If so, you can then determine if it was a site-wide drop, or specific to a set of pages and keywords. If site-wide, perhaps it is more technical related, but if keyword/page specific it could be more closely tied to the algo changes.