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Find the cause of a traffic drop in a fixed order

When search clicks fall by more than 20% against the same weeks a year earlier, check five causes in order. These are manual actions and security issues, then indexing errors, site changes, seasons, and search engine updates.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Google's guide to traffic drops names technical, security and spam issues as causes. Seasons and changing interest, site moves and ranking updates are the others. First open the Manual actions and Security issues reports. Then read the page indexing report for new errors. Next, compare the drop with your own release log and redirect map, as Watch for broken old links says. Then compare the same period a year earlier, and the topic in Google Trends. Last, compare the dates with announced search updates. After an update there may be nothing wrong with your pages, so improve them for readers rather than rush changes.

How to check

Each drop of more than 20% has an incident note that records the result of all five checks, in order, with the date of each.

Sources

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/seo/measuring-results/traffic-drops">Agent Wranglers SEO playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.