A senior writer at Forbes, shared some data on Twitter showing that Forbes.com has seen a huge and very concerning drop in traffic from Google organic search. He said traffic his "down circa 10x" starting January 27th at 11pm ET. He posted this on Twitter saying "Seeing huge hits to Forbes ranking and traffic (down circa 10x) since the new Google search algorithm was applied. Any idea if there's a problem? Some (usually popular) articles not reaching 100 views in 24h."
He then shared this internal traffic chart by hour, showing how the dip happened at 11pm ET:
Note: I was asked to remove the traffic chart and the name of who shared this. So I removed it but it was a huge drop in traffic that might show up in third party data tomorrow or over the next week.
The weird part is that this happened on January 27th, which was well after the official January 2020 Google core update and also after the featured snippet deduplication change. So I am not sure what is going on.
Maybe Google penalized Forbes.com for something, again or maybe there was an other algorithmic update done by Google impacting Forbes and other sites. It is hard to know with all the changes happening with Google between the core update on the 14th or so, featured snippet change on the 22nd and favicon testing on the 27th and earlier.
This is based on his own traffic reports for his own stories at Forbes, but he said other writers are complaining as well. He said the data he shared was "From my own - I can't share site as a whole - but it corresponds with reports I'm getting from multiple writers. Investigation ongoing." "My traffic that is down circa 10x and that's being corroborated by fellow writers I know well," he told me.
Forum discussion at Link Removed...
