How to recover from search engine penalty and regain traffic to website

Step 1 Identify the cause of sudden traffic drop

Firstly you need to identify what’s causing the traffic drop. This can be identified using Google analytics. You can zoom in to the period where traffic dropped and check the same period on previous year. If you see drop then you can conclude that this is a seasonal drop. If not use Google webmaster tool now search console. If your site is penalized then you may have notification about it on webmaster tool. You can proceed according to it. If you still can’t find any answer, move forward with the assumption that site penalized. This will help you with the extreme measures to take.

Step 2 Clean the site first

It’s like cleaning the house. Remove the unwanted low quality articles and links from site (like 300-400 articles). I mean move them temporary to somewhere else to clean them. Also get rid of unwanted gadgets and plugins that lower pagespeed.

Step 3 Fix the internal and external broken links

As time moves, the internal links and external links may be broken. You won’t know it’s broke until you search it by yourself. The broken links testing tools may report its working correctly but you’ve to check it manually to verify it.

Step 4: close the comment box

Did I already tell you that before the sudden drop in traffic my blog was getting too many spams. This could be a sign. So close the comment box of your site if traffic is dropped. You don’t want anymore damage from spam comments to your site.

Step 5 Regrow

Rewrite the remaining articles with more in-depth research and make it useful for your visitors. If you are on wordpress, optimize the title buy editing link structure. If you are on blogger like me, then rewrite the article with more useful content and. This may be time consuming but worth it. You have to make those articles to supporting articles with 1000 words longs at least.

Step 6 Plant new seeds and start a new life

And finally it’s time to plant new seeds to your site. Write well researched (keyword), nicely structured 2000-2500 words long pillar articles. These articles are the new backbones of your site or blog. To see the results you have to wait 8 months or 1 year. This new seed articles will help you in the long run. Your website will now get cured from sudden traffic drop for sure.

Step 7: Enjoy!

If your website traffic is increased or suddenly decreased there must a factor playing role in it. If you can find that factor and identify it then you have a winning strategy. Then you know what to do next.