Large traffic loss, how to resolve?

[thewebpreneur]

So I have a few questions. A site which has dropped quite dramatically over the last month. There could be a few factors (less regular updates) been one. However, plenty of links spam has happened which some of which appears to be been pointed at an article. That article has been removed.  We also disavowed 800+ links all of which had a spam score of between 100 and 40+  - they all looked ugly and irreverent such as forum spams, wallpapers spams, and junk. Is this the right move to make?

What should the site do next? The current score is 4,000 SEMR. It was around 15,000 before. It's an aged site. Less effort is put into it now as the next site is here.

Await your replys thanks.

3BCQNi3

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hi there! I'm assuming that you're seeing the traffic loss in your on-site analytics as well as in tools like SEMRush (because if not my first port-of-call would be to check your GA/similar to make sure this isn't just SEMRush seeing only part of the picture).

The spam could be a factor but I think you've already addressed that. It could be worth bearing in mind that there was a core algorithm update in May so that could be a factor in the traffic change. However, a couple things interest me here.

One is that you mention you've been investing less into this site - this could simply be a matter of the site being out of date and no longer a good result.

The other interesting point is you mention "the next site is here". If you have been building another site targeting the same keywords and using roughly the same content, it could just be a matter of the new site taking the old site's rankings, particularly if the new site has had more recent investment.

If the new site is targeting the same things as the old site, it'd probably be a good idea to redirect the old site to the new site to make sure that you have one site that's ranking on page 1 rather than two sites that are ranking page 2 and below.

If the new site is something very different then I think it comes down to how willing you're willing to invest in the old one. If it's worth the time, the next thing I'd do is look at:

• GA to see if any pages were particularly badly hit
• Search console to see if there were any topics which were particularly badly hit
• Recent dev changes to make sure it's not a tech issue
• The specifics of that core ranking update (article linked above) to see if any themes jump out to you.

If it seems to be sitewide then it's possible it's a dev/algorithm update issue and I'd focus on improving overall site quality. If it's localised on specific topics/pages then I'd start by focusing on how I can update that content specifically.

For more specifics, this blog post by Dom Woodman is a pretty good resource.

Hope that helps!