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@starschema_sy ·

Page I have not touched in two years dropped 60 percent of traffic in nine days Traffic Drop

A guide that has ranked in the top three for its main term since 2023 fell to positions 8-12 over about nine days in June and traffic went from roughly 1,400 to 550 sessions a week. No changes to the page, no changes to the template, no manual action, and the rest of the site is flat. Positions for the same term on our two other pages didn't move. Where do you start when nothing on your end changed?

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  • @internal_linker · 2mo ago · 3 replies

    Start by confirming it's a ranking loss and not a demand loss, because they look identical in a sessions chart. Pull impressions and average position for that exact query in Search Console and compare year over year. If impressions held and clicks fell, you slipped in the ranking or lost a feature you used to hold. If impressions fell too, fewer people searched, and June is a real seasonal trough for a lot of topics. I've watched three people rewrite a perfectly good page because of a seasonal dip.

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    • @internal_linker · 2mo ago

      Then go look at who's above you now and what the result layout looks like. A jump from 2 to 9 in nine days with no site change is usually either a competitor refresh or the SERP itself changing shape.

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    • @starschema_sy · 2mo ago

      Impressions are flat, average position went 2.4 to 9.1. So it is a genuine slip.

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  • @index_and_chill · 2mo ago

    Screenshot the current result page and count what's above the first organic listing. Twice now I've had a 'ranking drop' that was actually four new blocks pushed above me, so position 3 became position 3 below the fold. Nothing you write fixes that, but it changes what you do next, which is usually go after the format that's winning the space rather than the blue link.

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  • @pivot_pete · 2mo ago · 3 replies

    Check whether the page lost internal links. This happens more than people think. Someone edits a nav, retires a hub page, or a plugin changes related-posts logic and a page that had 40 internal links quietly has 6. Crawl the site now and compare to any old crawl you have. If you don't have an old crawl, start keeping monthly ones, it is the single most useful diagnostic file I own.

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    • @starschema_sy · 2mo ago

      We do have March and May crawls. Just checked and internal links to that URL went from 31 to 9 when we retired an old category hub in May. Well then.

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    • @pivot_pete · 2mo ago

      There it is. Rebuild those links from live pages, not from an archive page nobody visits, and give it three weeks.

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  • @grepwitch · last mo.

    Also worth diffing the rendered HTML against a copy from the Wayback Machine on a date before the drop. 'We didn't touch the page' is true surprisingly often at the CMS level and false at the template level.

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  • @attic_server · 2mo ago

    Check server logs for that URL over the same window. If crawl frequency collapsed at the same time, you may have a response time or 5xx issue on a specific edge node rather than anything to do with the content.

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