Google Search Traffic Down? Try Reconsideration Request!

Google search traffic down? Confused about the cause/solution? I guess you opened the right blog post now. For most of us, Google is the most popular traffic source, and we honestly get more conversions and targeted audience through this. But unlike Social Media, Google (SEO) has their rules to play, if we violate them, then your Google organic search traffic will be affected – which means Google will degrade your website.

Note: I’m going to use my client’s website for this article, so I need to blur it. We had to revamp our client’s website, so we saw what’s causing this traffic drop and how it can be fixed/improved further.

I’m assuming you already have a Google Search Console (Previously Webmaster Tools) account, and you have verified your website.

Google Search Traffic Down? Try This!

Go to Google Search Console, open Reconsideration Request page. Select the website for which you want to check and click the button “Check Manual Actions”.

Now, if your site violates Google’s guidelines, then you’ll be taken to a page where you can find Google’s message to you stating the reason for the action. If not, Google will come up with a message saying – “No manual webspam actions found.”

As you can see (in the below screenshot), we were indeed affected badly due to “Unnatural links”, which generally means my client has been writing plenty of unwanted reviews (or sidebar links) which have links (with keyword anchor texts) pointing to irrelevant websites, probably something to do with casino or gambling (as far as we found).

I’m pretty sure this is something Google terribly hates because we are giving link juice to unrelated websites or even spammy websites. Now before clicking the button “Request A Review”, you need to understand that Google is like a human, and you can’t escape from it. So you can’t just send a message to them and say that you have fixed your website please revert your old rankings. It doesn’t work like that. You need to clean properly your site, manually search for all the blog posts (even comments) which have paid/irrelevant links. If you are accepting guest posts on your blog, then you need to check the author bio of the guest bloggers as well.

Reconsideration Request

Clean your website thoroughly and remove all such ‘unnatural links’. If you are 100% sure that you have removed all the links and fixed your site, then go ahead, click the button “Request A Review”.

This is going to be a ‘more or less’ difficult task now, because it’s like an interview for some, you need to comfort Google that you have realised your mistake, that you will not repeat it again in future and tell them what changes you have made on your website. So be detail and honest. You can refer the video below to get an exact idea of how you should enter your ‘answer’.

After requesting the review, you’ll get a similar message on your Search Console:

You should understand that Google gets plenty of ‘Reconsideration Requests’ per day, it’s like a teacher correcting students’ papers, you have to wait for some time to get proper results. You can refer the video below to understand how it works.

If you have successfully cleaned your website, followed all the guidelines mentioned by Google, then hopefully you’ll get a positive response. But even if you have skipped one or two links, then you’ll be getting a message like this below:

You can’t escape from Google; they even pointed out a sample spammy link that was still present on our website, in a corner that we didn’t notice.

If you have impressed Google and revamped your website without any ‘unnatural links’ or any other spam activities, then you’ll be getting a message like this:

As you can see, Google is your friend, and they don’t want to harm you in any way unless you harm them of course. So do follow their guidelines correctly, even if you are writing a paid/sponsored review, make sure the anchor texts and links you keep are relevant and not spammy. Update your website or blog with quality information and avoid black hat or spammy SEO, that’s it.

So if your Google organic search traffic dropped, then you should understand what actually happened to your website first. If you are still facing any issues with this, then kindly let us know in the comments below, we’ll help you out.