Organic traffic fell off a cliff around April 21st - 22nd

[CRWilson]

Hi all,

I recently noticed a large drop in traffic on 3 of our websites. With one of them going from 1.6k users to 500 a day (eventually growing to 800+) but the organic search specifically has dropped massively from 200+ users a day to just hitting 20 with no growth.

Our sites are very large and we never ranking highly for generic keywords due to the size of our competitors but saw a lot of a traffic come from very specific search terms relating to our products.

Has anyone else noticed this dramatic drop? I've seen there's been an algorithm update recent according to other websites that happened over the same period our drop started.

Any advice?

[not2easy]

Hello CRWilson and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

You can check the observations of others in the monthly thread where day to day rise and/or fall is noted: [webmasterworld.com...]

That is the monthly thread for April where folks share their own experiences. You can see posts by date to compare what you've seen. I do see others reporting distinct drops around the same time frame. I do not see ideas for reversing it though.

[not2easy]

I suggest you try to look for any actionable causes in your GSC account, it should show any strong indicators. If not, it is one of many affected.

[explorador]

Interesting, my sites also show decrease in traffic, everything is purely organic, original content, these 2 have been online for decades. One thing in particular is in recent years lots of websites have taken my content as reference (with credit links, but via shortening the urls).

I have no idea if this is related, but there is people reporting the same on a forum in spanish.

I don't know if the following details may or not be useful to anyone: I just began posting frequently again, also made some optimizations to my CMS improving the format of the html output, and that's all. At this moment I'm not loosing sleep about this traffic loss, yes I care, but I have too much work right now, can't dig into this ATM, besides I'm soon to migrate my sites to another host, so... research will have to wait.

[Brett_Tabke]

>Has anyone else noticed this dramatic drop?

Do you know what you were ranking for? I know it is harder than ever to find your keyword referrals, but a good rank tracker will ultimately pay for itself.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You can use GSC as well. From the pages tab look at the impressions over a long period of time. If you see a large impressions drop for a page you can toggle to the queries tab for that page and look at individual keywords to see which dropped in the same way(and which didn't). Sort by most impressions(not clicks) first and go down the list for each affected page.