HUGE Drop In Traffic Last Week

Does Google have multiple personality disorder?

[Sevin]

Maybe someone will know what's going on here.A few months ago I started this site: <snip>. It's a basic Clickbank affiliate site, but I make the content as unique as possible by describing and reviewing the products in my own words.

I'm pretty sure my on-page optimization is good, though I definitely need to work on getting more backlinks. I've been adding 4 or 5 reviews a week and have about 100 so far.

Anyway, in mid-April I started getting more traffic, and for the first couple weeks of May I was getting 50 visitors a day from Google. In fact, I was ranking 4th for the keyword, "digital product reviews." Then all of the sudden, on May 17, my traffic started dropping and now it's almost nothing. And my site is nowhere to be found for the keyword, "digital product reviews." I've checked the site: operator results and all my pages are still indexed.

I just don't understand why my site would start doing better then abruptly drop like that. Is this the infamous "sandbox"? Did they change their algorithm on the 16th? Should I just be patient and keep at it?

Thanks!

[edited by: incrediBILL at 1:35 pm (utc) on May 29, 2012]

[edited by: tedster at 3:56 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2012]
[edit reason] URL removed, no site reviews TOS #21 [/edit]

[not2easy]

I can't tell you why your ranking and traffic tanked, but there are a few things you need to work on: Read up on FTC and review sites requirements. There is supposed to be a large and obvious disclosure of your affiliate relationship with the advertiser any time you review a product. You might want to do some proofreading too. There are incomplete sentences in your reviews (such as "product used to $20"). Clickbank should have all the details regarding Disclosures since so many of their products are sold via reviews and testimonials. This is not an in depth site review, just a few obvious things I spotted in a quick visit. Search engines notice these things too, so it couldn't hurt to have a more complete site to compete with.

[Sevin]

In the footer I have a link to an "Affiliate Info" page which explains my relationship with Clickbank. Should I put that link higher up on the page?

I'll definitely triple check my writing from now on. I didn't realize there were any incomplete sentences.

[alexwood]

its due to the Google penguin algorithm

[Sevin]

But I thought the penguin update was in April. This happened in mid May.

[novemh]

actually there was an update on Google's algorithm last May 16, 2012. They rolled- out the "Knowledge Graph", however I can't see any relation to it with the sudden change in your traffic. But there are other factors you need to consider why your traffic decreased. Try checking out the quality of your inbound links. Are they of quality and relevant to your website? Do you have duplicate content pages?

[iquince]

The same thing happen to one my website <snip> , some times Google crawled find these reasons to lower the rank of your website:
1.Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm
2.Malware or Hacking
3.Canonicalization Problems
4.Broken links.

[edited by: engine at 12:53 pm (utc) on Nov 6, 2012]
[edit reason] See WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]