Losing visitors, month by month: what to do?

[karkadan]

I've trying for 3 years to get back into gaining visitors. My rankings seems to be lowering month by month. 3 years ago I had over 120.000 visitors per day. Now I'm getting 60.000. And the trend is getting worse day by day.

I've lost PR. I've lost position on Google Images to sites leeching my images. I've lost #1 position against Wikipedia entries. And now I'm losing against other sites.

I've tried improving site speed, adding new content, and so on.

So, what should I do? Should I hire a specialist? Sincerely, it has been 3 years, doing a lot of stuff, and nothing is working. h1, links back, on an on and on...

Please advice.

[tedster]

There are so many possibilities that it's hard to advise you. This entire forum is mostly a consideration of what it takes to get and maintain rankings and traffic.

Three years is a long time to be sliding down - it must hurt. Rather than doing more general fixes of various types, have you pinned the losses down to specific types of issues? For example, is it certain important keywords that have slid down, or is it more general? If it is specific rankings, have you studied the pages that passed you?

If the losses are across the entire website, was the previous traffic coming from long queries (over three words) or shorter phrases? Are only certain pages getting less traffic? Are some pages now getting no traffic that used to get some? What I'm trying to point to is the need to get very detailed in your analysis.

[milosevic]

Compare your backlinks count with your search competitors using one or several of the various competitor backlink comparison tools. Search for paragraphs of text from your site to see if it is being used on other sites.

[aristotle]

Google and other searc engines have made some changes during the last three years that could partly explain your traffic losses. Here are some examples:

1. Google's introduction of "Universal Search" could have shifted some of your potential traffic to sites like Youtube.

2. Google's changed its algo to give an extra rankings boost to sites of major brand names.

3. Google added page loading speed as a ranking factor.

4. Google's recent introduction of a new SERPs page layout could have affected your traffic.

[karkadan]

Thanks tedster, milosevic, aristotle.

For example, is it certain important keywords that have slid down, or is it more general?

Mainly specific keywords. One word keywords. // No new pages are getting more traffic.
Pages that has passed me by: some are wikipedia, others have keyword on domain, others have fast loading. With exception of wikipedia, the other pages have 50% of backlinks compared to my page.

Search for paragraphs of text from your site to see if it is being used on other sites.

Well yes, people use my content since they are articles. And since my site is in Spanish, lots of sites may copy my content cause there are so many laws or no laws in Latin America or Spain... Anyways, I don't think that is the issue here.

Google's changed its algo to give an extra rankings boost to sites of major brand names.

Yes, like wikipedia.

I might investigate further the speed factor. Also, my site is huge, when Google benefited huge sites. That also hurted my site in the past. Inner pages lost relevance. But right now, I have lost (and talking about the loss) of visitors on the main pages.