Sudden drop from 4k daily vistors to less than 2k vistors

[pci.rahul]

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[pci.rahul]

Will if be better to add rel=nofollow instead of rel=canonical to paginated category pages (page_no > 1)

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Rahul,

When you look in your Google Analytics account, have you looked to the different sources to see just what source is dropping? Before we speculate on if it's a canonical tag that Google doesn't like, I'd suggest to take a step back and see if suddenly a referral site stopped sending traffic, or if your referrals from all of the search engines dropped.

For content, is there a particular part of your site that has fewer visitors? Are there particular keywords that are no longer bringing in traffic?

Also, have you looked into Google Webmaster Tools to see if you have any notices there?

[pci.rahul]

Keri,

Thanks for replying, I had checked the analytics account, and complete drop is due to google SERP results, also position of my site for most pages had dropped by few positions, but all this happened as a sudden and steep change.

Also till now I had not added 'canonical' tag to the paginated pages, and hence I am suspecting it may be that google has penalized me due for duplicacy. But even after fixing these errors still my traffic is dropping.