SEO Best eBook 2018 By Shahid Mahmum

There are many reasons a website loses traffic from Google. Server changes, website
problems, content changes, downtimes, redesigns, migrations… the list is extensive.
Sometimes, Google turns up the dial on demands on ‗quality‘, and if your site falls short,
a website traffic crunch is assured. Some sites invite problems ignoring Google‘s ‗rules‘
and some sites inadvertently introduce technical problems to their site after the date of a
major algorithm update and are then impacted negatively by later refreshes of the
algorithm.
Comparing your Google Analytics data side by side with the dates of
official algorithm updates is useful in diagnosing a site health issue or
traffic drop. In the above example, a new client thought it was a switch to HTTPS and
server downtime that caused the drop when it was actually the May 6, 2015, Google
Quality Algorithm (originally called Phantom 2 in some circles) that caused the sudden
drop in organic traffic – and the problem was probably compounded by unnatural linking
practices. (This client did eventually receive a penalty for unnatural links when they
ignored our advice to clean up).
Thin Content
A quick check of how the site was laid out soon uncovered a lot of
unnecessary pages, or what Google calls thin, overlapping content. This
observation would go a long way to confirming that the traffic drop was indeed caused by
the May algorithm change.
Another obvious way to gauge the health of a site is to see which pages on the site get
zero traffic from Google over a certain period of time. I do this by merging analytics data
with crawl data – as analytics doesn‘t give you data on pages it sends no traffic to.
Often, this process can highlight low-quality pages on a site.
Google calls a lot of pages ‗thin‘ or ‗overlapping‘ content these days. I go into some of
that in my duplicate content penalty post.
Algorithm Changes
Algorithm changes in 2018 seem to centre on reducing the effectiveness of
old-school SEO techniques, with the May 2015 Google ‗Quality‘ algorithm
updatebruisingly familiar. An algorithm change is usually akin to ‗community service‘
for the business impacted negatively.