Google took 67% of search traffic away. PR is still the same | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Since Wednesday April 25th the Google organic search traffic that is coming to one of my sites is 67% lower than on similar days during the last few months.

There was no message in Webmaster Tools from Google and the PR is still 3. The site is active and gets a number of new posts per week.

Have you seen something like this before? What could be the reasons? Can someone please confirm that this happens more often and is just a temporary thing? 

There was a G update called Penguin related to over-optimization.  Do a google search on Penguin Update.

Yeah, Penguin launched on the 24th, so that definitely the issue. For others that may have seen changes earlier, there was also a Panda update on the 19th.

I'll need to monitor this but the last 2 days have been much slower for SE traffic @ SPF

Glad to hear that I'm not the only one. I've gone from about 100-120 Google searches a day down to 20-40. Hopefully it goes back to normal but this was definitely an eye-opener. I've never been affected by any of the other changes, so this was a first.

If my traffic stays down permanently I really have NO CLUE as to what I did wrong. I'm pretty sure I haven't done anything to deserve the Penguin smackdown…

This update is horrible.  There doesn't seem to be any logic behind what gets hit and what gets improved.   There's a lot of garbage ranking high and a lot of good sites got buried.

Sustainable PF said:

Our site is getting hammered.  Over the past 4 days we have gone from 281->234->154->100

This is purely an anecdotal observation of my own, but it appears Google went after every single high-adspend niche from pharmacy to webmaster sites to finance and others. And, yeah, I had a site get absolutely decimated in this latest update, despite having very good traffic/time on site figures that would, in my view, be indicative of quality. 

I keep telling myself it won't last, but who knows? 

For what it's worth, I've noticed very serious deterioration in the quality of sites that appear for any given keyword. It's beyond awful for some phrases.

Got hit last April and literally took me almost 9 months to recover.  Very frustrating. 

I'm probably being optimistic, but I know that my traffic dropped over the spring and summer months the past year.  It has been a super warm spring most places plus it is starting to be graduation time – which takes up visitor's normal web searching time.

Could the drop just be seasonally related instead of Google algorithm related?

FamilyMoneyValues said:

Could the drop just be seasonally related instead of Google algorithm related?

I agree with you that there is a seasonable influence during the year. This drop exactly on April 25th is too steep to be seasonable and caused by something else.