Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Why Is My Seo Traffic Dropping Suddenly?

Posted by chrisseo49 on 11/18/2025 at 3:43 AM ET 250 Points
Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing a sudden and noticeable drop in organic traffic across several of my pages, and I’m trying to diagnose what’s actually causing it. I haven’t made major changes to my site structure, URLs, or content during this period, so the decline feels unexpected.

Here’s what I’ve checked so far:

No manual penalties showing in Search Console

No crawling or indexing errors

Core Web Vitals are stable

No major content removals or on-page changes

Backlink profile looks mostly unchanged

Because this happened quite suddenly, I’m wondering if it could be:

A Google algorithm update

Competitors outranking me with new content

Decline in keyword search volume

Technical issues I may have missed (canonical tags, robots.txt, redirects, etc.)

Duplicate content concerns

Lower-quality or toxic backlinks affecting the domain

If you were troubleshooting this situation, what would you check first, and what are the most common causes of sudden SEO traffic drops in your experience?

I’d appreciate guidance from experts who’ve handled similar declines and know what signs to look for beyond the basics.

Thanks in advance for any insights!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 11/25/2025 at 11:20 AM Member
    I suspect it is Google algorithm update. Unfortunately, if true, this wont help you fix it as their algorithm is a black box that we don't know how it works and how to optimize for.

    I did wonder about overall traffic volume, and the few sites I found did say that overall SEO volume is still increasing. Possible that the data is a year or more old and there has been drops with zero-click searches (where the user gets their answer right on the search page and doesn't need to click a result - most AI now does this).
  • Posted by kartiksharma7153 on 11/28/2025 at 12:20 AM Member
    Changes like this can be very irritating, particularly when there are no obvious explanations. If I eliminated penalties and indexing issues, I would compare the exact days that a low drop happened with recent Google updates and tested for which keywords/pages lost more visibility in Search Console. Quick changes can also be prompted by competitor activity or small technical issues, such as canonicals or caching conflicts. Some awesome agencies like SEO Discovery report noticing the same patterns in their audits - so maybe they can lend a hand. If you're sharing the affected pages, it's much easier to identify the culprit.
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