Why is my traffic and ranking dropping since Oct 2018?

[Geoffrey Ashok]

Hi guys,

My traffic and ranking are dropping continuously for my website - <snip>

The drop started on October 15th 2018 and has been steadily dropping ever since.

In fact my traffic has fallen by 70% and the graph moves steadily down.

I don't know what I did but I added some semantic keywords 20 days prior to the fall.

<snip>

Would love to take advice!

Thanks.

[edited by: goodroi at 4:28 pm (utc) on Jan 3, 2019]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, now please go read the forum rules :) [/edit]

[Madaboutdm1719]

Have you seen the Webmaster Tool? Do you see any Manual Action for your website. I possibly feel a Warning by Google. Mostly over spamming, poor links etc.

[Broaster]

when you say 70 percent give us an example of how many visitors you were getting before

like 10,000 a day or 3,000 a day? and then it dropped to what number?

[robzilla]

There's no way for us to know, it's too broad a question.

I don't know if there's an updated version, but the Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com] from 2004 still covers the basics.

[Robert Charlton]

I don't know what I did but I added some semantic keywords 20 days prior to the fall.

The "semantic keywords" could well have had something to do with it.

Way back, before they were called "semantic keywords", various broad match and related keywords suggested by the AdWords suggestion tool of the time were often added to pages by optimizers who thought these might help. While a few such words, discreetly incorporated into page text in a way that made sense and slightly broadened the context of a page, might have been of help, this often got overdone, and it was often noted that they caused the page to tank.

It's very possible that a similar list of "semantic keywords", synonyms, etc added to a page now, might have the same effect and be a spam signal. Definitely, if published as a list on the page, they will be seen as spam.

Question now would be what to do with these. Adding and then removing them when they don't work could well trip the spam trap described in this patent....

Google's Rank Modifying Patent for Spam Detection
Aug 18, 2012
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4486158.htm [webmasterworld.com]

On the other hand, leaving the semantic words in place could cause the excess verbiage to hurt the pages. I wouldn't fiddle with these. If you decide to remove them, I'd remove them all at once.