Hey guys. I used to get a decent amount of traffic from Google. Since a few months or so my Google serps previews went down a lot and so did my organic visitors. The odd thing is: almost all my vistors from search engines now are from Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Only very little from Google, while I used to get the most from Google (obviously, since its the biggest by far). Do you think Google could have ‘shadow banned’ my site or something? And if so, what could be possible comon reasons? Like keyword spamming? Too much affiliate links? Etc. etc. etc.?
Thanks!!!
All of the above can lead to a decrease in rankings or a manual action. Are you looking at Search Console at all?
This doesn’t sound like a shadowban. This sounds like you lost ground in some core rankings and dropped off the SERPs.
They’d tell you if there’s a manual action against your site there. Also, there’s been a significant number of core algorithm changes this year, which can undoubtedly affect rankings.
When that happens your site is likely throttled. Check your link profile and ensure that you are following the rules. They will ding you and never tell you, that’s part of their punishment. Yes, there are manual actions but those are the ones they want you to fix. The algorithm penalties go unnoticed sometimes for years.
I love how people automatically assume a shadow ban than look at their own site, efforts by page, by country, by time on site, by kw and then look at the competition. All things being equal, your traffic will go down unless you stay relevant and optimizing 24/7. Too much competition to ignore.