sorry to spoil the fun, but metafilter's SEO / search performance was broken way before the 40% drop. http://replycam.com/i/MetaFilter_layoffs__Why_has_Google_

sorry to spoil the fun, but metafilter's SEO / search performance was broken way before the 40% drop. http://replycam.com/i/MetaFilter_layoffs__Why_has_Google_forsaken_the_legendary_Internet_forum%3F-20140522-093436.png http://replycam.com/i/MetaFilter_layoffs__Why_has_Google_for... where is the growth, man? and i don't mean the dropoff. the dropoff is just, you know, change. google changes, all the time, user behaviour changes, user expectation changes, the way google treats sites changes, the internet changes. so yes, 40% less traffic via google organic search happens. you don't have any "right" to google traffic, there are a lot of sites out there. but the thing that seems to be really broken is the "lack of growth" before the dropoff and after it. SEO overall has these business cases * a) if we add x% more landingpages to our site, we gain y% more traffic. * b) if we add x% more content to y% of our landingpages, we gain z% more traffic. * c) if other sites point x% more links to our landingpages, we gain y% more traffic. * d) if we make the user experience of our site better, our traffic gets more sustainable. as metafilter is a quite popular site with an active community, they should at least do a) and b) quite well, probably doesn't have an issue with c) as there is and was not growth, then there is probably something rotten going on on the platform level. some issues from a 5 min check i have outlined here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770414 additionally they seem to completely disregard mobile https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fask.metafilter.com%2Ftags%2Fapartment&tab=mobile https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... and missing out on the probably most important market like ever. so basically before firing their staff they should have listen to a decent SEO (and implemented some changes) and / or mobile guy. tl;dr: if your have a popular site with lots and lots of content, but you don't see (organic search) growth then your site is broken, even before google turns of some of your traffic because you know, google. p.s.: i would love a look into meta-filters google webmaster tools